IRL experiences are having a moment. Whether it’s to escape our feeds, feel connected, or simply experience something we know isn’t AI, we are drawn to the energy of being in the moment.
And like with most things, this isn’t a new phenomenon.
Émile Durkheim called this collective effervescence. He wasn't thinking about a product launch pop-up when he developed it either. In 1912, he was studying religious rituals, trying to explain why people gathered together felt something they couldn't feel alone. The energy in the room. The sense of being part of something larger than yourself. The way time moves differently when you're in it.
This collective effervescence is what we as marketers, CX pros, and humans in general are continuing to chase.
What It Actually Is
Collective effervescence is what happens when a group of people shares an experience so completely that the boundary between self and group temporarily dissolves. The specific quality of it, the aliveness that only exists in the presence of others who are feeling the same thing at the same time, cannot be manufactured in isolation or replicated after the fact. It leaves a mark on everyone who experiences it.
If you’ve ever felt like you’ve had an out-of-body experience at a concert, you know what this high feels like.
This is what brands want you to feel when you go to a conference. And that feeling can absolutely happen there, but it tends to happen in the hallways or at the bar afterwards. Most brands have stumbled into that moment at least once without fully understanding what created it or how to create it again.
Durkheim argued that these moments generate social energy that people carry with them after the ritual ends. They go back to their lives changed, bound to the others who were there, and to the institution that created the conditions for it. For brands, that's a mechanism worth understanding and building around intentionally, not a happy accident to hope for.
What It Looks Like in CX
The obvious examples are the big ones. Apple keynotes. Salesforce Dreamforce. Taylor Swift concerts that somehow became a masterclass in community building that half the marketing industry wrote a think piece about. But collective effervescence doesn't require a stadium or a nine-figure marketing budget.
It requires four specific conditions.
Shared presence means people need to be in it together, in real time. Replays and recordings don't carry the same charge because part of what makes the moment is knowing that others are experiencing it alongside you right now, that you are all inside the same unrepeatable window of time.
A ritual container means there has to be a structure that signals this moment is different from ordinary time. An agenda, a tradition, an opening that marks the beginning. This is why conferences have keynotes and why product launches have countdowns. The container tells people that something is happening and that it matters enough to pay attention.
Emotional permission means people have to feel safe enough to actually feel something in a group setting. This is where community-led brands have a real structural advantage. If your customers already trust each other, they will lower their guard together faster than a room full of strangers ever will.
A shared object of focus means everyone is looking at the same thing, responding to the same stimulus, moving through the same moment together. That synchronization is what converts a group of individuals into something that temporarily functions like a collective.
When all four conditions are present, people feel like they belong to something, and that feeling becomes part of how they understand their relationship with your brand going forward. No onboarding sequence or personalized email flow gets you there.
Why It Hits Differently Right Now
We've lost the baseline (the plot, if you will), and most people can feel it.
When everything is automated, optimized, and mediated by a screen, an experience that feels genuinely human registers as startling, almost disorienting. We've recalibrated so far toward digital friction and AI simulation that real presence has become remarkable by contrast. The bar for feeling something real has dropped so low that clearing it feels extraordinary.
Nothing feels intimate. Nothing feels real.
People are also hyperaware right now that they're being managed. Everything feels designed or automated within an inch of its life. That awareness creates a low-grade skepticism that most customers carry into every brand interaction, and it doesn't fully lift until something genuinely cuts through it. When you're in a room with other people and something real happens, that skepticism drops because you can feel in your body that it isn't manufactured and can't be.
And then there's the loneliness factor, which doesn't get enough airtime in CX conversations. Surgeon General reports, academic research, and broader cultural conversation are all pointing in the same direction: people are more isolated than they've been in a long time, and that isolation shapes how they experience everything, including their relationship with the brands they buy from. Collective effervescence fills something that is genuinely empty in a lot of people's lives right now, and that's exactly why it feels like magic right now.
When an in-person experience feels like magic, that's the feeling of a need being met that most people didn't know they really had. We don’t feel like we belong and nothing feels real.
We need to have the real. The drinks with friends. The concert of your favorite band. Going to a panel at a comic convention to see your favorite actors and creators. (sidenote: I went to GalaxyCon Richmond and got my copy of the Dark Phoenix signed by Chris Claremont. I practically floated out of the convention center).
That’s what people are starving for, and the brands that create conditions for them are building a kind of loyalty that no retention playbook can compete with once it takes hold.
The Replication Problem
How do you bottle this feeling? That’s the problem. You can’t.
Brands take the energy of a live moment and try to recreate it in a webinar. They clip the best parts of the conference and post them as Reels. They build an online community and expect it to carry the same charge as being in the room. Some of that content has real value, and some of those communities do meaningful work, but treating any of it as equivalent to the original moment leads to strategies that consistently underdeliver on their own promise.
Durkheim's framework is clear about what actually generates the energy: co-presence, ritual, and synchronicity. Remove those conditions, and you remove the mechanism. What remains is content about the moment rather than the moment itself, and customers can feel the difference.
Digital community maintains and extends the bonds that in-person moments create. It's the connective tissue between rituals, the place where the energy lands and continues to circulate after the event ends. But it needs the rituals to have something to work with, and something to connect back to, and that dependency runs in one direction.
What to Do With This
If you're building a CX strategy that includes community or events, the question to keep returning to isn't how to scale the feeling. It's how to create the conditions for the feeling to occur and then how to honor it once it does.
That means being intentional about your live moments in a way that goes beyond logistics and content quality. Are people genuinely present together? Is there a structure that signals this moment matters? Have you created enough psychological safety for people to actually feel something in front of each other rather than performing engagement from behind a professional mask?
The customers who were in the room are different after they leave it. They carry a felt sense of connection to the experience and to the others who shared it, and the days and weeks that follow are when brands either build on that or squander it. Acknowledging what was built rather than resetting to a generic nurture sequence is the difference between a community that compounds over time and an event that people remember fondly but feel no particular pull toward.
The social energy Durkheim identified doesn't evaporate when the event ends, and the brands that understand this build the infrastructure to catch it and give it somewhere to go.
That's ultimately what separates the brands building something durable from the ones executing a good event. Understanding that belonging is now an asset that deserves the same strategic attention as any other part of the customer relationship.
Your homework: go create real-life magic.