For years, retail marketing was largely built around reach. More people through the door, more people seeing the campaign and more followers entering the funnel.
But the way consumers discover, engage with and advocate for brands has changed. Increasingly, people are gathering around shared interests, identities, lifestyles and cultural moments rather than simply following the brands selling to them.
This is where Community Marketing comes in.
For retail brands, community marketing is about identifying the groups your customers already belong to, understanding what matters to them and creating meaningful reasons for your brand to participate. Done well, it can turn a transactional relationship into something much more valuable: relevance, advocacy and long-term brand affinity.
It is also becoming an increasingly important part of retail PR and consumer PR, particularly as brands look for ways to generate impact beyond traditional product launches and promotional campaigns.
What is community marketing?
Community Marketing is a strategy focused on building relationships with groups of people connected by a shared interest, passion, behaviour or identity.
The key word here is shared.
A community might form around running, fashion, food, music, gaming, outdoor culture or even a particular neighbourhood. The opportunity for retailers is not necessarily to create these communities themselves, but to understand where their customers already gather and find credible ways to contribute.
For a fashion retailer, that could mean connecting with an emerging music scene. For an outdoor brand, it could mean supporting hiking groups, sustainability initiatives or urban outdoor culture. For a homewares brand, it might involve tapping into communities built around interiors, entertaining or first-home ownership.
The strongest consumer PR strategies recognise that people are rarely defined by what they buy alone.
How is community marketing different from traditional retail marketing?
Traditional retail marketing often starts with the product: what are we selling, what is the offer and how do we get it in front of as many potential customers as possible?
Community Marketing starts somewhere different: what does our audience care about, and how can we become relevant within that world?
That changes the role of the brand.
Instead of interrupting consumers with another advertising message, brands can create experiences, partnerships, content or initiatives that give people a genuine reason to engage.
This does not mean product and sales become irrelevant. Ultimately, retail activity still needs to deliver commercial results. But effective retail PR can create a much stronger pathway to those results by building familiarity, credibility and cultural relevance first.
How can retailers build communities beyond loyalty programs and social followers?
Having 100,000 Instagram followers doesn’t necessarily mean you have a community.
Neither does having thousands of people enrolled in a loyalty program.
Those audiences are valuable, but community is built through participation, not observation. Retailers need to think about what brings their customers together beyond a transaction to really reach their audience on a personal level.
That could include in-store events, local partnerships, workshops, clubs, creator programs, cultural collaborations, pop-ups, community initiatives or experiences linked to a shared passion.
The question should shift from “How do we get more people to follow us?” to “What would make people actively want to engage with us IRL?”
For brands working with a PR Agency Sydney team, this can also create stronger earned media opportunities. A genuinely interesting community initiative gives journalists and creators something to talk about beyond a new product arriving on shelves, which just doesn’t cut through these days unless your product has an interesting story.
What does community marketing look like in practice?
One example is Agent99’s work with ASICS, where we turned a footwear launch into a community-led experience built around something that genuinely mattered to young Australian netballers: confidence.
We commissioned research on behalf of ASICS, which found that confidence issues around fitness, skills and letting teammates down could prevent people from joining or continuing in social sports, and in particular, netball. Rather than simply promoting the launch of the ASICS NETBURNER BALLISTIC FF 3, we used that insight to create the world-first ASICS Netball Festival Celebrating Confidence.
The festival brought together players, coaches and professional athletes for an experience designed to help participants build skills, make connections and feel more confident on court, while naturally allowing ASICS to showcase the product and get it on the feet of junior players.
The results demonstrated the impact that Community Marketing can have when a brand puts itself inside a customer’s world, rather than the other way around. The campaign generated 30 earned media articles and more than 71 million in reach, while 150 young athletes attended the festival. ASICS’ share of voice against competitors during the 2025 netball pre-season period also increased by more than 4,000% compared with the same period the previous year.
For retail PR and consumer PR, this is the real opportunity: moving beyond just promoting a product and creating a way for the product to become a small part of an unforgettable moment.
Do retail brands need to create their own communities?
Not necessarily. In fact, often they shouldn’t.
Some of the strongest Community Marketing opportunities come from partnering with communities that already exist.
Rather than launching a branded running club from scratch, for example, a retailer could support an existing local running community. A fashion brand could collaborate with an artist, DJ or cultural event whose audience naturally overlaps with its own. A food or drinks brand could partner with chefs, venues or neighbourhood events.
The objective isn’t to insert the brand into every relevant conversation. It is to identify the spaces where the brand can genuinely add value. That’s where the real business impact lies.
This is where a strong consumer PR strategy can help, because partnerships should be selected for more than audience size.
What role do creators play in community marketing?
Creators can be particularly powerful when they’re treated as community members rather than simply distribution channels.
Agent99’s work with Ledlenser is a good example.
For the launch of its 25-year warranty, we needed to make a relatively functional product message relevant to Australian tradies. Instead of relying on traditional product communications, the campaign turned long-term commitment into a culturally relevant idea, ‘The Torch Prenup’, supported by carefully selected trade creators who could bring it to life authentically for their audiences.
The campaign drove website traffic and social sales while contributing to broader commercial impact for the brand, and it won gold at our industry awards.
For retail PR, this distinction matters. The question is no longer “Who has the biggest following?” It’s “Who already has credibility within the community we want to reach?”
How should retail brands measure community marketing?
Community activity should never be treated as a vague brand-building exercise with no measurable outcome.
The metrics will depend on the objective, but brands can look at participation, store visitation, earned media coverage, creator engagement, website traffic, share of voice against competitors, search behaviour, new customer acquisition and, where possible, sales.
It is also worth looking at what happens after the campaign.
Did people continue engaging with the brand? Did the activity create new partnerships? Did media coverage improve brand visibility? Did consumers actively share or recommend the experience?
The strongest Community Marketing programs connect cultural relevance to measurable impact and results.
Where should a retail brand start?
Start with the audience, not the activation.
Before planning another event, influencer campaign or brand partnership, retailers should ask three questions:
What does our audience care about beyond our product?
Where are they already? Online? Offline? Both?
What can our brand genuinely contribute to that community?
The answers might lead to a local partnership, a creator collaboration, an in-store experience or something completely unexpected.
For a PR Agency Sydney like Agent99, this is increasingly where consumer PR and retail PR become most interesting. Rather than simply finding new ways to promote products, we can help brands identify the communities, conversations and cultural moments where they have a credible role to play, and ideate the most unique way for them to do just that.
Because ultimately, community marketing is about showing up to the audience that matters to your brand, and doing that in the most genuine way.
Agent Brooke
