For most of my career, brand growth followed a familiar playbook.
Acquire customers through paid channels.
Optimize conversion rates.
Rely on loyalty programs to drive repeat purchases.
That model no longer works.
Today, the hardest problem CMOs face isn’t creativity or tooling — it’s efficiency. Customer acquisition costs continue to rise. Paid channels are saturated. And most retention programs fail to create meaningful differentiation.
The result? Growth that’s increasingly expensive, fragile, and difficult to defend.
Obsession pays off.
Paid media is no longer a lever you pull — it’s a tax you manage.
Most DTC and omnichannel brands remain dependent on rented attention from platforms they don’t control. You can optimize spend, test creative, and rebalance budgets, but the underlying problem doesn’t change: brands don’t own a scalable, high-intent relationship with their customers.
Traditional loyalty programs were supposed to fix this. Instead, many have trained customers to wait for discounts.
Points-based systems reward transactions, not advocacy. They offer little insight into who’s actually driving growth and almost no leverage beyond the next purchase.
From a CMO lens, the issue isn’t loyalty.
It’s leverage.
At TYB, we don’t think about community as content.
We think about it as infrastructure.
The insight that led to TYB was simple but powerful: customers who actively engage with a brand — through feedback, content, referrals, and participation — are dramatically more valuable than customers acquired passively through paid channels.
When we measured it, the difference was undeniable.
Community-engaged customers delivered 4x higher value than customers acquired through Instagram or Facebook alone.
For a CMO, that changes everything.
Community stops being a “nice to have” and becomes a measurable growth channel — one that compounds over time instead of resetting every month.
Community Commerce isn’t a rebrand of loyalty.
It’s a rebuild.
The goal isn’t to incentivize purchases with points. It’s to design systems where customers earn status, identity, and belonging by contributing to a brand’s success.
From a growth standpoint, this unlocks three things:
At TYB, we often say: every brand needs a multiplayer game.
When customers feel like participants — not just buyers — engagement becomes intrinsic.
One of the most underutilized assets in modern marketing is the customer themselves.
Creators have had tools to monetize their influence for years. Customers — who are often more trusted and more aligned — haven’t.
Community Commerce closes that gap.
Through TYB, brands activate customers through structured challenges that prompt high-impact actions, including:
As customers complete challenges, they level up — unlocking early access, exclusives, and real-world experiences.
This is what we mean by customer as distribution.
It’s organic growth, engineered.
From a CMO standpoint, tooling only matters if it drives outcomes.
Here’s how we see it working in practice:
Obsessions prompts verified purchasers to create reviews and content that are shoppable and attributable. This isn’t generic UGC — it’s customer-generated content that drives conversion while building long-term trust.
TYB Shop allows brands to activate community demand instantly through early access, exclusives, and co-created products. In the past year alone, over $25M in GMV has flowed through TYB Shop, validating community as a real revenue channel — not an engagement experiment.
Obsessions Plus enables brands to pay customers cash for driving sales of products they already love. For CMOs, this introduces a performance-based, trust-led alternative to traditional affiliate and influencer programs.
Community Commerce works because it aligns incentives across marketing, product, and brand.
In the last year alone:
These aren’t vanity metrics.
They’re signals of channel maturity.
As digital channels become more crowded, the next growth advantage will feel human.
Experiential, in-real-life moments are emerging as a powerful CAC unlock. When brands create events their community genuinely wants to attend, amplification becomes organic.
Customers show up.
They capture the moment.
They share it — not because they’re paid, but because they’re proud to belong.
From a marketing efficiency standpoint, IRL experiences are among the highest-leverage investments brands can make.
The future of growth isn’t about choosing between brand and performance.
It’s about building systems where customers help drive both.
Community Commerce gives CMOs a way to reduce dependence on paid media, increase LTV, and build defensible growth rooted in trust and participation.
Obsession isn’t a soft metric.
When designed correctly, it’s the strongest growth engine brands have.
