Super-serve the super-fans; nurture deep community.

principle — attributed to Steve Gottlieb

Gottlieb's twenty-five years at TVT Records taught him to super-serve super-fans rather than chase the top forty. Creating evangelists and word of mouth depends on nurturing deep community, not on shallow reach. Shindig was originally designed for artist-fan engagement on the same logic. The pattern generalizes. Any business whose growth depends on advocacy benefits more from depth in the existing relationships than from breadth into new ones. Reach is easy and shallow. Depth is hard and compounds. The music industry learned this thirty years before the rest of marketing started catching up.

For platform builders, brand strategists, and community leaders thinking about whether to optimize for reach or depth. The principle is most useful as a corrective when growth pressure is pushing toward shallow acquisition.

super-fans, deep-community, music-industry-lessons, evangelists