Oatly, Klarna and waterdrop® discuss a new era of brand building in Budapest.
The Good Persona’s Community Culture conference makes its debut at Budapest’s Toldi Cinema on 24 September, focusing on a fundamental shift in brand building: from capturing attention to creating genuine connections.
For years, the marketing playbook was straightforward: more reach, more impressions, more content, more followers. But while attention has never been easier to buy, keeping it has never been harder. Community Culture, The Good Persona’s new conference taking place at Toldi Cinema on 24 September, sets out to ask a different question: what comes after attention?
The 200-person, English-language event will bring together international experts from Oatly, Klarna and waterdrop®, alongside community builders, creators and agency leaders, to explore why relationships, community and a sense of belonging are increasingly taking precedence over reach and follower counts in brand building. The conference approaches this shift through three key areas: community building, AI and the creator economy.
“We believe the next generation of great brands won’t win because they make better ads, but because they build better relationships. Attention on its own is fleeting. What interests us is how you turn that attention into a community – and ultimately into a genuine connection with a brand,” says Csenge Tassonyi, Co-Founder of The Good Persona.
How can a global brand still feel local and human?
Leonore Cortes Holmström, Co-Lead Community Management at Oatly, and Dan Wozniak, Country Lead Hungary at Klarna, will each deliver a keynote exploring how global brands can turn presence into relevance – and audiences into genuine communities.
Hungarian community builders will bring another perspective to the conversation. Viki Környei, Co-Founder of Latte Holding, the company behind Running Latte Club; Jade Hutton-Mills, Founder of HER.Collective; and Bianka Fuller, psychologist and content creator behind the ÉnTervező community, will discuss what it takes to turn an audience into a community – and why the ability to do so is becoming an increasingly powerful competitive advantage for brands.
When anyone can create anything, what is creativity worth in the age of AI?
The AI section promises to go beyond yet another list of tools. The AI Reset will examine how artificial intelligence is reshaping the creative industry from three agency perspectives: social-first, design and tech, and PR and community building.
As execution becomes faster, cheaper and more accessible, the discussion will focus on a more fundamental question: what will continue to make ideas, creativity and human connection valuable?
Smaller audience, greater influence?
The Creator section challenges another long-standing assumption: that the biggest follower count automatically means the greatest influence. The Nobody Wants to Go Viral Anymore panel will explore how genuine influence can be built within a niche – and what happens when a smaller but deeply engaged audience becomes more valuable than viral reach.
The section concludes with Bettina Reibnegger, Global Marketing & Communications Director at waterdrop®, and her keynote, From Performance to Presence: How waterdrop® Scaled (and Rewired) Its Creator Strategy. Drawing on waterdrop®’s own experience, Reibnegger will explore how creator strategy is shifting away from reach alone and towards long-term presence, relationships and a creator mindset.
“We’ve sat through too many conferences where the talks turned out to be little more than sales pitches. So we built the entire day around one question: what makes a brand something people actually want to belong to today? Follower count certainly isn’t the answer,” says Réka Bittera, Co-Founder and Head of Engagement at The Good Persona.
Community Culture takes place at Toldi Cinema in Budapest from 1 p.m. on 24 September, bringing together brand and marketing leaders, founders, creative professionals, community builders and creators. The full programme and speaker line-up are available on the conference website.
The Good Persona has already been contributing to the international conversation around the future of brand building. The team returned to Cannes Lions this year, recently launched its own industry podcast, The Good Persona Talks, and the agency’s founders have previously been named to the Hungarian Forbes 30 Under 30 list.
Community Culture is the next step in that conversation: bringing international brands and experts together with some of the leading voices from Hungary’s creative and community-building scene – on one stage in Budapest.