I’ve been thinking about something the manager of a tiny wine shop in north London told me a few years ago. Her weekly repeat customers, who were her best clients, hardly ever left evaluations. On Instagram, they failed to tag her store. They didn’t sign up for the loyalty scheme. Three of them would stand by the Riesling shelf on Saturday mornings, exchanging notes on a bottle that one of them had brought home the week prior. It wasn’t until a fourth regular entered, inquired about the precise bottle, and remarked, “Sarah told Mike, and Mike told me”, that she found out about that.
Brands consistently fail to include that tiny chain, which is almost laughably low tech. Seldom do the most beneficial product discussions take place in settings where businesses can observe them. They take place in the side rooms. small ones. frequently unseen.
| Topic Snapshot | Details |
|---|---|
| Subject | Invisible social circles formed by repeat customers |
| Field | Consumer behaviour, community strategy, customer experience |
| Core Idea | Loyal buyers migrate conversations into private, peer-led spaces outside brand-owned platforms |
| Anchor Research | Robin Dunbar's social brain hypothesis; Sandstrom & Dunn on weak ties; Alexis Madrigal's framing of "dark social" |
| Relevant Channels | Private Slack rooms, WhatsApp groups, closed LinkedIn circles, neighbourhood chats, group DMs |
| Why It Matters | Influence and trust increasingly live in places brands cannot measure |
| Reference Source | [Harvard Business Review – The Surprising Power of Online |
This has a subtle logic that predates the internet by a great deal. For many years, anthropologist Robin Dunbar has maintained that humans can only sustain roughly 150 interactions in a meaningful way, with a considerably narrower core of approximately five. He asserts that the bottleneck is the brain. The intriguing thing is that this same infrastructure appears to control consumer behavior. On a public feed, they do not wish to broadcast a recommendation to two thousand strangers. They want to send it to a small WhatsApp group of three or four friends who have similar tastes, as well as to the one buddy who will genuinely care.
We might have been misclassifying this behavior for years. The term “dark social” was first used by marketers in 2012 by Alexis Madrigal to characterize the type of sharing that evade analytics dashboards. Although helpful, the word gives the entire situation a conspiratorial feel. Nothing about it is gloomy. A mother is not hiding from anyone when she sends her sister a review of a pram. She simply has more faith in her sister than in a rating.
As you observe this happening in several businesses, you begin to notice something that seems almost architectural. It appears that every ordinary client keeps two layers. There is an inner layer where the actual opinions are found, and there is a public layer where people might like a brand’s post or write the odd five star rating. Someone comments, “It’s fine, but don’t get the blue one, the stitching falls apart”, in reference to the inside layer. The company’s website will never contain that sentence. In any case, it might decide a hundred purchases.
In a 2014 publication, researchers Gillian Sandstrom and Elizabeth Dunn proposed that our sense of belonging is significantly influenced by even the people we hardly know. The barista who keeps track of your order. You notice your neighbor at the bus stop. These seemingly insignificant links seem to have significant psychological effects. Consumers seem to have similar opinions about the brands they stick with. Seldom is a favorite café merely a café. Every Tuesday, they nod at the same faces at this location. The coffee has virtually little to do with the loyalty.
Additionally, there’s a feeling that these circles have become even more covert during the last ten years. Public platforms increasingly seem like a job. People watch what they say, perform on them, and are concerned about screenshots. Private channels seem faster, safer, and more truthful. According to Forrester’s research on B2B buying groups, even crucial purchases are increasingly being made in social settings, frequently in group discussions that are hidden from vendors. In consumer life, the same instinct manifests. The in store consultation has been replaced by the bridal party’s WhatsApp group. The parenting forum has given way to the school gate debate.
How brands should react, if at all, is still up for debate. In an effort to draw clients back into visible areas, some are attempting to create their own communities. Some do well. The majority create platforms that feel a bit too closely watched, and the regulars stealthily retreat to their secret rooms. Observing a business attempt to create intimacy by implementing a leaderboard is almost heartwarming.
It appears that the most astute operators have adjusted and accepted the loss of visibility. Small, shareable items, such as a sample, an early invitation, or a piece of news worth sharing, are given to their top clients, and they have faith that they will be shared. Instead of measuring posts, they measure if the correct people return. It is a more modest strategy, and most likely the practical one.
Beneath the electronics, it’s difficult to ignore how antiquated everything seems. Whispers about which tailor is skilled, which dentist to stay away from, and which butcher to use have long existed. The platforms fluctuate. They don’t in circles. They just go to where the conversation seems most comfortable. For the time being, that means having a hundred calm group discussions someplace on a Tuesday night to decide what will be purchased tomorrow.
i) https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LimitedSocialCircle
ii) https://www.arkusinc.com/archive/2011/social-circles
iii) https://theartofcharm.com/art-of-personal-development/how-to-build-a-social-circle/
iv) https://theconversation.com/how-cafes-bars-gyms-barbershops-and-other-third-places-create-our-social-fabric-135530