The game your brand is playing

We've danced around one of the industry's biggest buzzwords long enough. Others use the word to describe us even though we rarely use it in our own copy, at least not often enough for it to be part of our vernacular. The word is community. Brands tend to slap it on every offline activation, round up some photo-ops with cool white kids and a handful of black and brown kids, obviously shot on an analogue camera for the Instagram recap. It makes me shudder. To me it reads as performative.

A brand is already part of an ecosystem. What makes it community-centric goes further than throwing an event with an open bar every so often. It requires a different stance. A different typology. I heard the perfect analogy in a recent podcast: having an audience is a room full of chairs facing the stage. Having a community is a room where the chairs face each other. The second one requires active listening and, more often than not, passive presence.

The whole industry is set up for the first room. The scoreboard rewards it: how many eyeballs, how long they stayed, how often they clicked. Our metrics are built for the audience economy, and that shapes what we are allowed to call success. If what you build belongs to the second room, you don't just lose the award submission. You lose the ability to prove you built anything at all.

The pharmacy that taught us this

During our tenure at Claes de Vrieselaan we observed, participated in and shaped our neighbourhood in a dozen small ways. It was our first time in a space directly accessible to the public: a pre-war pharmacy with a big street-facing window. We made a conscious decision to always keep the doors open to passers-by, often to our own detriment. But it allowed for very specific conversations with the people actually living there. Soon that became part of our practice. These were often the same people the brands we worked for were trying to reach. For us it turned almost anthropological: what makes people tick, and how do you turn that into insights that close the gap between problem and solution.

Social organisations found their way to us. So did commercial ones. They saw the parallel. What we were slowly building was a toolkit for trust, specifically trust in an exchange of value. And with that came the need for a different set of metrics. Metrics that could capture something fleeting engagement numbers cannot: trust itself.

The Gap

There are instruments that measure this for larger entities, like Edelman's Trust Barometer. Smaller and culture-first entities have to lean on academic scales, usually Likert-based questionnaires. One thing to notice: those scales are designed for comparability between companies, which flattens meaning in the process. The philosopher C. Thi Nguyen calls it The Gap: the distance between what is being measured and what actually matters.

We don't have a massive dataset for good art, but we do have a massive dataset for engagement hours. And this is no accident. Some kinds of things are systematically harder to measure because they are more variable, more personal, or more delicate.

Once you see The Gap, you see it everywhere in our industry. CTR is not persuasion. Reach is not resonance. Engagement is not loyalty. Monthly listeners is not a career. Rapsody said it clearest in an Instagram post this October, asking her own industry what any of them actually see from where they sit, now that the measurable version of a music career has eaten the thing itself. She wasn't being nostalgic. She was pointing at a wound.

Objectivity laundering

Nguyen has a sharper phrase for what happens next: objectivity laundering. The number has a decimal in it, so it feels neutral. The dashboard has a graph on it, so it feels like a conclusion. Over time, the measurable version of value stops being a proxy for the real thing and starts being treated as the real thing itself. The metric wins. The thing it was supposed to describe fades out.

The second phrase Nguyen gives us, is value monoculture: when a whole industry starts optimising for the same scoreboard, the diversity of what matters collapses. Everyone agrees to run the same race, and we lose any practice that cannot be scored by that particular stopwatch.

Marketing has lived inside both of these for a decade. Every category runs on roughly the same five metrics. Every brand books itself against roughly the same KPIs. Every strategist opens roughly the same deck. The scoreboard flattened the terrain, and now the terrain only grows what the scoreboard can see.

Reflective control

Nguyen's wedge, and the one that interests us the most, is reflective control. If you don't choose which game you are playing, the game chooses what you become. The scoreboard is not neutral. It shapes behaviour upstream of outcomes.

Think of the Nike story that unfolded over the past five years. The brand committed hard to short-term direct-to-consumer sales, dropping long-standing retail partners like Foot Locker and Macy's to boost DTC margin. The metric chose what Nike became: owned channels became the only real relationship, the brand lost the surface where it used to live in public, and by late 2024 the company's own leadership was publicly rebuilding what the same scoreboard had rewarded them for breaking. That is not a strategy error. That is the metric doing its job.

Reflective control means stepping back far enough to ask what the scoreboard is actually doing to the organisation that watches it. Is this still a game we recognise? Does the thing it rewards still match the thing we meant to be?

Most brands have not had this conversation out loud. The agency sitting across from them hasn't either, because the agency depends on the same scoreboard to prove it was useful. That is the hole where we think our work lives.

The method, in one sentence

We design the metrics of brand health. So you can show the boardroom that building community moves the bottom line, on the terms that actually matter.

That sentence is a position, not a slogan. It means we don't optimise harder against the standard scoreboard. We design a different one. We help a brand articulate what it would want to be measured for if it were building the room with the chairs facing each other, and then we build the instruments that let that measurement count.

The question for the room

What game is your brand actually playing? Whose scoreboard are you reading when you decide you did a good year? If you redesigned the measure from scratch, starting from what the brand means to want, which part of your current performance would you discover you have been undervaluing the whole time?

That last question is where our conversations with clients usually start. Everything else follows from the answer.