Nextdoor (Zip)code of Conduct
Oh, Nextdoor. You funny, fickle place on the internet. If you’re familiar with Nextdoor, you know it as a place to either ask for recommendations from your neighbors OR see them go off about their hyper-local annoyances. Nextdoor’s official description is, “the neighborhood hub for trusted connections and the exchange of helpful information, goods, and services,” but anyone who uses it can attest to the often-unhinged posts that take up space on the forum all too often. ENTER: our “Good Forums Make Good Neighbors’ spec campaign.
For this month’s ‘just for fun’ project, we wanted to ideate a fun, clever, self-aware way to remind Nextdoor users to maintain the integrity of the app’s intended purpose: a helpful, communal experience. We later realized they have an existing pop-up entitled, ‘Good Neighbor Pledge’ which confirmed our strategy, but also confirmed that if you want to get people’s attention and convince them to adjust their behavior, welp, you’re gonna need more than a tame, bland tone of voice.
A big, ‘ol “duh” that we believe humor is the right strategy for a community guidelines reminder, but more specifically, we employed a self-deprecating, self-owning, self-aware comedic style to illuminate that the brand is sharp enough to recognize the aspects of their product that aren’t ‘great,’ BUT ALSO confident to boldly state them. This tone is disarming, empathetic, and instead of pointing fingers, says, hey as a community, we can make this a better place to live/post. We used examples of Nextdoor posts and language to showcase what Nextdoor is at its best, and how users should interact with one another.
The goal? Use wit to get people to realize that complaint rants rarely do anything but incite bickering and more importantly, they aren’t what Nextdoor is intended for.
More helping, less harping.
As the world’s first humor marketing agency, Obedient has developed creative branding for industry darlings like Clif Bar, Native, Blue Bunny, Argent, Waterboy, JOI, Fanny, The University of Chicago, Alleyoop, Roche, GEN Z, and The Dallas Cowboys. But they would never brag about it here. obedientagency.com
