Event Wrap Up:

Maryam Banikarim has more than 25 years of marketing experience, managing global brands, and international teams. She is a purpose driven change agent, and the Head of Marketing for Nextdoor, which brings neighborhoods and communities together on their virtual platform. This event is for anyone and everyone looking to grow their community, whether it be internally at work, externally to customers and consumers, and even at home with your local neighborhood. 

Listen to the full Virtual Roundtable [56:40]

Come for Utility, Stay for Community.

• How do we create a more welcoming platform? 
• It all starts with a wave
• Nextdoor changed their logo from the house to the "wave" to make it more approachable and warm
• People were not looking for a sense of belonging, but wanted to plug in to find the things they needed
• Need to have trust and verification as a part of any platform 
• Does not always need to be geographical, it can be cause-based, business-based, etc. 
• In a time of the pandemic, people are wanting to use community more to get what they need, but also to connect with others around them

Using Community as a Forum for Engagement

• Small businesses are core to neighborhoods, how can you use the community to help?
• People are becoming more and more innovative with the pandemic on how they can help their local businesses 
• Nextdoor has allowed people to get verified quickly to market to their local neighborhoods through the platform 
• Using the relationship between marketing and product team - insights really matter and teaming together is more important than ever to help both marketing plans and product roadmap

Experiment and Learn Quickly

• Portraits of Understanding: Hyatt Regency & World of Hyatt
  

• Marketers want to take risks, but get pushback from executives that it doesn't align with the overall plan 

• When you take risks and experiment, it also empowers your employees as well as your customers and consumers

• Leave room for creativity 

• Sometimes you need to get a little scrappy

• NYC Next: Scrappiness at it's finest to bring back passion and excitement to New York City