This article by Harvard Business Review goes into the importance of community and how it works to your advantage.When Community Becomes Your Competitive AdvantageIf a company can transition from simply delivering a product to building a community, they can unlock extraordinary competitive advantages and create a superior business model. In fact, strong communities help support the ideal business model. Specifically: • Enthusiastic members help acquire new members, resulting in lower customer acquisition costs and a tight viral loop. • Members of a community are loath to abandon it, resulting in increased member retention and therefore improved lifetime value. • Members of a community support other members in that community, resulting in high gross margins due to a lower cost of service. The result of this are very real network effects: as engagement grows, the community gets smarter, faster to respond, more globally available, and generates more value.hbr.org
