“Even before you have a community, you need a brand. For Yelp, this foundation was a strong brand and mission: real people, real reviews. The strongest and most enduring communities are always built on top of a strong foundation. “To build a community is to think about humans and how they interact,” Nish explains. What Exactly is Branding and How Does it Relate to Community?
#YELP ELITE HOW TO#
He shares with us how to leverage branding to build community, what makes a strong startup brand, and how Yelp Elite became the contagious super user community that spread Yelp across the globe. Nish Nadaraja, the creator of the Yelp Elite program in 2004, sat down with me to talk about how he applied branding psychology to community building and created a movement that is still going strong… 10 years later.
This is what happens when you merge branding with community and bring people value, exclusivity, and access to connect with one another in new ways: they talk about your brand, excitedly, and they spread the word. They spoke excitedly about their secret club, sharing that they’d officially been inducted into the cool crowd: they were the Yelp Elite. In the front, my friend’s 21-year-old sister and her law school friend spoke in hushed tones about the exclusive party they attended where they loaded up on free swag and free booze.
I was 16, sitting in the back seat of my best friend’s sister’s Prius as we drove down the highway from San Francisco to Palo Alto. I still recall the first time I heard of the Yelp Elite Squad.
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