A question I get asked often is, “How do I become a community leader?” Or, better put: “What are the things I can do to be an effective community organizer?”

When I used to live In Montreal, as a major Diet Coke aficionado, I’d often ask for Coke. 

They’d usually say "Is Pepsi okay?"

Communities are so powerful because they’re linked to outcomes and lifestyles — so community leaders are very rituals-based. If you’re a member of a community, you are constantly interacting with the lifestyle and working towards the community’s outcome. It could be a community of people trying to lose weight, or become more religious, or get better at golf.

I drink coffee every morning. It’s a part of my routine. You can find people everywhere who wake up and make coffee. They’re on the surface level, compared to those who travel the world tasting the most expensive and exotic coffee they can find. 

The hallmark of an incredible community designer is to inspire routine interactions within the community. The best community designers understand that each interaction with the community makes them increasingly more connected to the community itself — and a supercharged community breeds subcultures within the community itself.

No successful community has ever been built by someone who didn’t understand or routinely interact with the lifestyle they’re trying to foster. If you were on a quest to become a better pickleball player, would you follow tips from someone who’s never played?

It’s vital that community leaders and organizers have a deep understanding of their culture. You can’t just come in and lead the community off a whim. Let me tell you a story to prove my point:

I used to rent space in Montreal from a big ad agency. 85% of French Canadians reside in Quebec, so one day, I asked one of the agents: “What’s an interesting example of why marketing in Quebec is different from marketing in the rest of Canada?”

There was a Pepsi can on the desk. He picked it up and asked, “You know why I’m drinking Pepsi? Why is it that in the rest of the world, Coke is so big, but Pepsi is preferred in Quebec?”

No idea.

He told me that when Coke came to Canada, they took the same television ads, the same print ads, and they applied it broadly across Canada. The ad execs (who were probably based in Toronto) probably said, “If it works here, it’ll work everywhere.”

No.

It didn’t work in Quebec because people didn’t connect with it. The cultures were vastly different. Pepsi took a different approach. They worked to understand the culture and created a marketing campaign that was focused on French Canadian culture. It was all about empowering that community.

That was 60 years ago.

To this day, Pepsi is the preferred drink in Quebec. 

My work centers on community, but community is just another word for culture. To be a great community designer, you have to understand the culture. What language do they speak? Where do they hang out? What do they talk about? What visuals resonate with them?

How can we reverse engineer the warm and fuzzy feeling people get when they experience your product, service, and community?

When you ask these questions, you get the answers that allow you to build a community that resonates.

Be well,

Greg Isenberg

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