Hot take: Brands are becoming the landlords of social life

Ochuko Akpovbovbo: if brands want to act as social infrastructure, they need to build spaces people actually want to live in

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CHERRY ON TOP 🍒 is our monthly newsletter exploring the ins and outs of everything that modern businesses need to truly shine. We dive into topics that live at the intersection of our two companies – ORCHARD STREET, a venture studio + angel fund & DALY, a comms+ agency –  as both help founders get the best ideas out into the world, through outstanding operations, comms, and culture-building.

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Alex here! There was a moment — somewhere between peak pandemic isolation and the sudden explosion of sponsored run clubs — when “community” stopped being something that arose organically, and started being something we expected brands to organize.

What began as a scrappy, sincere attempt to keep us all connected during lockdown has evolved into a full-blown social strategy. Now your calendar isn’t just dinners and drinks with friends; it’s “intimate gatherings,” “curated evenings,” and “founder-led circles.” Somewhere along the way, brands became the landlords of our social lives.

This month’s Cherry on Top — penned by one of my favorite Substackers, Ochuko Akpovbovbo — explores this tension. If your go-to third place is sponsored, is it still yours?

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Ochuko: One unintended consequence of writing a semi-successful “iykyk” pop business newsletter is that everyone assumes I live in New York — my readers, my exes, former bosses, and, most importantly, the PR teams of some of the most exciting consumer brands in the world. As the lucky few admitted into the inner sanctum of my Close Friends stories would tell you, my entirely hypothetical New York social calendar exists at the mercy of these oh-so-powerful PR teams: Galentine’s dinners, restaurant launches, craft nights, run clubs, reading clubs, supper clubs — a social scene brought to life in partnership with your favorite brands.

But how did we get here? Community, in its present form, was re-invented in the year 2020. I know because I was there.

COVID. Junior year. An international student, alone in my dorm room because the world was in lockdown and I had nowhere else to go. I tuned into brand-hosted Zoom calls and Clubhouse rooms, downloaded Geneva for the comfort of always-on “community chats.” Barely twenty and mildly disillusioned, I was eager to be swept into something larger than myself — where a venture-backed beauty startup selling $42 serum and implicit acceptance felt like more than just a brand. Supporting it felt like supporting “the culture.”

Ochuko!

We’ve hardly looked back since. That pandemic workaround — which positioned brands as bridges to belonging — didn’t dissolve when the world reopened. It solidified. Newly minted Community Managers and Strategists waxed poetic on LinkedIn. Community Playbooks became gospel. Discord channels and virtual hangs gave way to carefully curated, social-media-ready IRL events, where the boundaries between customers, communities, and fans quietly collapsed.

Somewhere along the way, brands stopped acting like hosts and started behaving more like landlords: owning the room, setting the terms, deciding who gets invited, and for how long.

You could argue that today’s aesthetically savvy brands didn’t invent this dynamic; they simply stepped into a vacancy decades in the making. Third spaces have eroded: community centers shuttered, affordable bars gentrified, union halls gone. In their place came private, paywalled versions of the same thing: coworking spaces, boutique gyms, members-only clubs — ersatz communities for the upwardly mobile. The privatization of belonging created a market, and brands swiftly moved in.

Today, brand-hosted gatherings are no longer a temporary substitute for community. For many, they’re where friendships begin and networks form, placing brands in the position of shaping who meets, who belongs, and how connection unfolds. But here’s the thing about renting community: the lease is never in your favor.

When belonging is contingent on a budget line item, it disappears the moment priorities shift. What looks like abundance reveals itself as provisional — access without ownership, intimacy without durability. For brands, this model is deceptively efficient: attention is captured, content is generated, metrics are met. For everyone else, it produces a strange social vertigo of constant invitations, sporadic connections, and little continuity. You’re welcome, but only for the night.

This isn’t a call for brands to retreat from social life altogether. The instinct to gather people is often sincere, even when KPIs are attached. But if you’re going to act as social infrastructure and build third spaces, you need to think less like landlords and more like caretakers — designing for connection and continuity, not just content. Here’s where I’d start:

Decide what you’re actually building

Not every gathering needs to be about creating community, and brands would do well to be honest about the distinction. If you’re planning a splashy, one-off brand moment with a clear objective, lean into that. Design for scale, press, and spectacle. There is nothing inherently wrong with an activation that knows it’s an activation.

But if you’re trying to build something more enduring, the strategy has to shift. Community is built through repetition, not virality. Fewer people, more often will almost always outperform one viral night. If there’s no shared rhythm, no familiar faces, no reason to return beyond novelty, it wasn’t a third space — it was a moment. Moments can be powerful. They’re just not the same thing.

Seen library event

De-center the brand

If your logo is louder than the conversation, you’ve already lost. The brand should be in the room the way a good host is: present, generous, but never the main character. People should leave talking about what they learned or who they met, not what they were sold. Let commerce come later; anything less is tacky at best and a complete turnoff at worst.

Melrose loft community event

Let the room shape itself

As someone who’s hosted events of all different sizes, I know how easy it is to fall into the trap of over-engineering everything. While you can encourage connection, it’s remarkably hard to truly engineer it. Focus on getting the right people in the room, then let the room do the rest. Uneven attendance, off-topic tangents, inside jokes you weren’t there for — these aren’t glitches. They’re proof people feel a sense of ownership in the space you’ve created. If everything runs too smoothly, you’re probably still performing community instead of experiencing it.

Branded reading event

Invest in continuity

Invest in continuity. The thing about community is that it requires habits — rituals, if you’re being romantic about it. Novelty can be fun and sexy, but familiarity is what builds trust. The line between an activation and actual gathering often comes down to that welcome sense of comfort: the same host, the same bartender, the same night every month. You can’t build anything solid with a rotating cast or a new venue every quarter. Ask yourself what’s regular and sustainable, and then carve out areas to surprise and delight.

Ochuko!!

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The Cherry on Top: All of this assumes you should be building community in the first place. My real hot take? Most brands don’t need community at all. Turning customers into fans might be all you need. Community takes effort and time — the kind you can’t automate or outsource. So before you go all in, ask yourself: is this actually helping you reach your goals, or are you just building it because everyone else is?