CMX Masterclass: What K-Pop Gets Right About Community (That Most Companies Still Don’t)
April 1 at 1pm ET. Hosted by CMX by Bevy, feat. Joshua Zerkel. Register here.
K-pop fandoms aren’t just highly engaged communities. They operate as coordinated systems.
When a new release drops, fans don’t just react. They organize, distribute, and drive visibility at scale. In these systems, community isn’t supporting growth. It’s how growth happens.
Most companies still don’t operate this way.
Community is typically built alongside go-to-market, not into it. So even when it’s active and valuable, it still functions as a parallel system rather than part of how teams drive adoption, retention, and revenue.
In this Masterclass, Josh Zerkel, Head of Marketing & Community at Gradual and builder of large-scale programs at Asana and Evernote, will use K-pop as a lens to explore what changes when community is designed into the go-to-market system itself.
In this session, you’ll learn:
- What makes community required in some systems and optional in others
- Why community-driven value often fails to influence business decisions
- Where community can change the outcome of core GTM workflows
- If your community is active but still feels separate from how the business actually runs, this session will help you see what’s missing and where to change it first.
Why Attend
- Understand why community still feels optional
- Even when engagement is high, community often doesn’t show up in how the business actually runs. This session breaks down why that gap exists.
- See what changes when community is part of the system.
- Learn how community can influence adoption, product decisions, and expansion when it’s built into workflows instead of layered on top.
Walk away with a place to start
Identify one area in your business where community can change the outcome of real work, without needing to restructure your org.
About Joshua Zerkel
Joshua Zerkel works at the intersection of community and go-to-market strategy, helping companies integrate community into product, marketing, sales, and customer success in ways that drive measurable business outcomes.
He has built and scaled global community programs at Asana, Evernote, and HeyGen, influencing adoption, retention, and revenue.
He is the author of The Community Code, launching alongside this Masterclass, where he explores how to design community as a core part of how businesses operate, not as a function that sits alongside them.