The next decade in commerce won’t be won by the brands with the biggest ad budgets, but by those with the deepest, most authentic relationships.
For too long, “community” has been treated as a marketing channel — a soft metric to track alongside social engagement or email open rates. That mindset is outdated and increasingly costly.
Community is no longer a channel. Community is the brand.
This isn’t a passing trend. It’s a fundamental shift — from the transactional, extractive model of Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) to the next era of Community-Integrated Commerce.
It’s about moving from broadcasting at your customers to building with them.
The traditional DTC playbook once promised a revolution: cut out the middleman and own the customer relationship.
But as the digital landscape matured, those “owned” relationships were quickly mediated by gatekeepers — Facebook, Instagram, and Google.
The result? A skyrocketing customer acquisition cost (CAC) that left brands spending upwards of 40% of revenue on paid ads just to stay visible. These customers were expensive, unloyal, and short-lived.
The outcome was predictable: shallow relationships and unsustainable growth.
The brands that endure will be the ones that flip the script — from “customer acquisition” to “community activation.”
Ty Haney’s Blueprint for Community Activation
Few leaders embody this shift more than Ty Haney, founder and CEO of TYB (Try Your Best).
Her journey illustrates why community isn’t just good marketing — it’s a sustainable growth engine.
When Haney launched Outdoor Voices (OV), she wasn’t just selling apparel; she was building a movement around “Doing Things.”
The early community grew organically — through local hikes, yoga events, and authentic storytelling. The now-iconic cobalt blue “Doing Things” hat wasn’t just bought; it was earned by participating in that community.
Each item became a symbol of belonging, not just a purchase.
This “movement-first” approach created a self-propelling marketing engine. Customers became evangelists — walking, talking, and doing brand storytelling money couldn’t buy.
As OV scaled, Haney faced the classic challenge: proving the ROI of community. Without tools to measure community’s impact, boards often saw it as a “soft” investment.
That experience led to the founding of TYB, a platform built to turn the qualitative power of community into quantifiable business growth.
TYB formalizes and rewards the contributions of a brand’s most passionate fans through a “play-to-earn” framework that integrates co-creation, feedback, and rewards.
Here’s how it works:
Community becomes not just emotional capital, but economic capital.
The lesson from Ty Haney’s playbook is clear:
In a world of walled gardens and rising CAC, the only path to lasting brand equity is direct fan engagement — not rented attention from paid platforms.
The future belongs to brands that:
The most valuable growth channel isn’t paid. It’s people.
By shifting from short-term transactions to long-term relationships, brands can lower CAC, increase LTV, and unlock a sustainable growth loop powered by their most passionate fans.
At TYB, we’re seeing this transformation every day across hundreds of Gen Z–loved brands. The ones that integrate community into their core aren’t just surviving — they’re scaling faster, more profitably, and with loyalty money can’t buy.
Stop renting customers from platforms. Start building your brand — together.
It means community now functions as the operating system for modern brands. Instead of marketing, loyalty, and feedback living in silos, community becomes the central layer that powers engagement, trust, and growth across the entire business.
Campaigns are episodic and fragile. Community systems are continuous and compounding. As acquisition costs rise and attention fragments, brands need always-on infrastructure that builds relationships over time rather than short-term spikes.
Social media audiences are rented and algorithm-dependent. Community is owned. It provides a direct, durable relationship with customers that isn’t subject to platform changes or declining reach.
Community connects product feedback, content, loyalty, advocacy, and commerce into a single system. Participation generates insights, trust, and influence that inform decisions across marketing, product, and growth.
Because it’s hard to copy. Products, pricing, and channels can be replicated, but trust, relationships, and shared identity built through community compound over time and create defensibility.
Community drives revenue through higher retention, organic referrals, UGC-driven conversion, and advocacy. When customers participate, they influence others and stay engaged longer, increasing lifetime value.
Yes. Modern platforms track participation, advocacy, engagement depth, and revenue influence. Community becomes measurable when it’s treated as infrastructure rather than a soft brand initiative.
TYB provides the infrastructure to activate fans, reward participation, track engagement, and connect community behavior to measurable outcomes. It helps brands operationalize community as the system powering growth, loyalty, and commerce.
