The Belonging Playbook for B2B Growth

Marketing Execution with Mark Donnigan · Jul 30, 2026 · 20m

80% of startups now invest in community as a primary marketing strategy, yet 70% of existing brand communities fail because they default to selling. As a CMO, that gap tells me most B2B teams are sitting on an untapped growth engine. Mark Schaefer's framework in "Belonging to the Brand" reframes community not as a support channel but as the core revenue architecture. Dana Malstaff built a six-figure business in nine months with zero sales team, zero marketing budget, and 80,000 members who buy everything she creates. The unlock? She stopped optimizing for transactions and started engineering…