The control paradox: deepening community engagement by letting go

Introduction 

We are witnessing a fundamental shift in how brands and consumers relate to each other. In certain spaces, the traditional paradigm of paid media – built on the assumption of captive attention – is crumbling under the weight of technological and cultural change. From the widespread adoption of ad blockers to the migration to ad-free premium streaming and now AI platforms, consumers are actively reconstructing their relationship with commercial messages. 

This transformation reflects a deeper societal shift: from passive consumption to active participation. As the effectiveness of traditional paid media declines, companies are rediscovering older, more organic forms of market relationships through owned, earned, and shared media.   

At the heart of this shift lies community engagement – not as a marketing tactic, but as a fundamental rethinking of the relationship between companies and their most engaged consumers. Through our ethnographic work across the gaming, media, and fashion industries, we’ve observed how passionate consumers aren’t just customers; they’re co-creators of meaning. 

Through deep examination of three distinct cases, we’ve uncovered the underlying principles that govern successful community engagement. These principles transcend individual industries or products, revealing fundamental patterns in how companies can authentically engage with their most passionate consumers. What emerges is not just a strategy for marketing, but a new model for understanding the evolving relationship between companies and communities with implications on engagement, product innovation, and growth. 

Three cases of next level community engagement  

Paradox Interactive 

“We see players almost as much as owners as our shareholders,” says Marcus Hallberg, Head of Communications at Paradox Interactive. This isn’t just talk. Paradox Interactive has discovered something counterintuitive about community engagement: sometimes the best way to build strong relationships is to let go of control. The Swedish game developer creates complex strategy games that players spend hundreds of hours mastering, but their real innovation isn’t always in game mechanics – it’s in trusting their players to help shape their games’ evolution. 

Instead of tightly controlling their intellectual property, Paradox turns their games into platforms for creativity. Players don’t just play these games; they transform them. Through modding tools and open platforms, communities create everything from detailed replicas of real-world transit systems to complete reimaginings of historical settings. A medieval strategy game might become a post-apocalyptic America, or a city-building game might gain a perfect replica of Copenhagen’s metro system - all created by players, not the company. 

When important decisions need to be discussed, Paradox ensures the actual decision-makers – not community managers – engage directly with players. The Head of Sales discusses business models pricing on the company’s forums, developers explain technical choices and design decisions, and leaders acknowledge mistakes. 

This approach was tested during the troubled launch of Cities: Skylines II in 2023. When performance issues and mod compatibility problems emerged, Paradox’s deputy CEO Mattias Lilja acknowledged: “We knew we would have some issues... we had more than we hoped. Some of those were definitely things we should have caught.” The company postponed paid DLC releases and organised a feedback round table with community representatives – acknowledging they needed player input to get back on track. 

Players can tell when a company truly values their input versus managing their reactions, and Paradox has learned that being honest about failures is better than pretending to be perfect. As one executive notes, “Our paid expansions and sequels are almost like a tip jar for players – if they feel heard and respected there is less resistance to paying for new content and it allows us to provide large free updates to the game as well.”

This balance of letting go while staying engaged has become Paradox’s signature strength and is key to the value proposition embedded in its offering.

LEGO 

LEGO’s journey to success illustrates that sometimes the best ideas come from your customers. When facing bankruptcy in 2004, LEGO discovered something surprising – their most valuable asset wasn’t their plastic bricks but their passionate community of builders. 

Instead of trying to control how people use their products, LEGO created spaces where different types of builders could thrive in their own ways. Through their Ideas platform, which was launched globally in 2011, adult fans submit and vote on new designs that often become official sets. Their Ambassador Network connects local building communities directly with the company. Most importantly, LEGO learned to listen – not just to polite suggestions, but to fundamental ideas about what LEGO could become. 

With a CAGR of 14% in the past 5 years, LEGO has been vastly outgrowing the toy industry, suggesting that their strategy is working. And the role of these communities is likely to grow even more in the future. As LEGO’s former Strategy Director Jacob Wachmann notes, “Having a positive and productive relationship with communities is likely to grow even more in the future as earned and shared marketing increases in importance.” The billion-dollar question is therefore how to maintain, grow, and leverage these communities even more in the years ahead. For LEGO, the answer to this question lies in the realisation that for building strong communities authenticity matters more than opportunity. As Jacob notes, “It’s easy to see several opportunities to tap into different communities, but the tricky part is figuring out how to do this authentically.”  

Achieving this authenticity is about creating spaces with minimal moderation where community members can freely inspire and interact with each other: adult fans create complex designs that spark children’s imagination; local building groups test new concepts; retail spaces become community hubs; online platforms let everyone share their creations and build meaningful relationships with other members of the community. Each group adds something unique, and LEGO’s role isn’t to direct but to enable these connections. 

These spaces are constructed with two principles in mind. First, they create multiple ways for people to engage, from casual building to expert design, while making it easy for people to deepen their involvement if they choose. Second, when connecting different communities, they focus on finding real points of connection rather than forced partnerships, such as the LEGO ideas Nintendo Set, which created a space where two separate communities were united. 

By giving up some control, LEGO have gained something more valuable: a constantly evolving ecosystem of creativity that keeps their brand vibrant and relevant. 

Malmö FF 

While LEGO and Paradox show how companies can build authentic communities around their products, Malmö FF demonstrates what happens when the community literally owns the company. Like all Swedish football clubs, Malmö FF operates under a model where members must retain at least 51% ownership, which in effect means that keeping your owners happy and your community happy is the same thing. As the club has shown, successfully engaging with their community in this situation hinges on knowing exactly where to draw the lines between influence and independence. The club has turned this understanding into both sporting and commercial advantage, building one of Sweden’s largest and most engaged fan bases.  

The club’s success stems from a precise understanding of engagement boundaries. “Opposed to most companies, we have a great deal of insight into what our fans [customers] want,” explains Pierre Nordberg, Support Liaison Officer at Malmö FF. “We are all supporters as well and have an intuitive sense of what will fly and what will not.”

This translates into clear rules around engagement. The club actively involves fans in certain decisions – from shirt designs to technology implementation. But there are strict boundaries around community independence. As Nordberg notes, “Club sponsored tifos are a big no-no. Being independent from us is a big part of their identity. The tifo is supposed to be a gift from the fans to the club.” Overstepping these boundaries would fundamentally undermine the authenticity that makes the community valuable. 

The club has mastered the art of treading the fine line between enablement and interference. They can provide stadium access or share player information, but cannot fund materials or suggest messages. This precise understanding of engagement boundaries and where community independence is critical has created a self-reinforcing cycle of authenticity and value creation. 

The case for giving up control – strategically 

Our research across gaming, toys, and sports reveals a fundamental paradox in how to be successful in the increasingly important categories of owned, earned, and shared media: by letting go of control in specific contexts, companies can deepen their engagement with communities. The conventional wisdom that communities can be managed through careful control misunderstands how meaning emerges between consumers and organisations. 

The cases of LEGO, Paradox Interactive, and Malmö FF demonstrate that meaningful community relationships emerge not from tighter management, but from thoughtfully designed spaces of possibility. This isn’t about leaning back and hoping that the community takes the wheel – it requires companies to design these spaces around specific forms of value creation, whether through product modifications, innovation pipelines, or cultural expressions. The key is understanding exactly which spaces to open up and which guardrails to maintain.

This insight challenges fundamental assumptions about organisational and brand management. As communities gain unprecedented ability to amplify both support and dissent, companies face a choice between maintaining the illusion of control and developing sophisticated models of selective influence.  

Authentic community engagement requires a sophisticated understanding of unpredictability not as a risk to be managed, but as a necessary condition for meaning to emerge. Companies must move beyond seeing communities as entities to be directed and instead create systems that enable genuine surprise and mutual transformation. This isn’t about abandoning structure – it’s about designing for productive unpredictability.