Strategy can describe what community should look like. Only building one teaches you what it actually takes.
Mezzanine has been working with organisations on brand, purpose and culture since 1999. In that time, the work has spanned brand strategy, creative storytelling, organisational design and the kind of deep consulting that happens when a business is trying to understand not just what it does but why it exists and whether it's actually living up to that.
A significant part of that work has always been about community. How organisations build genuine connection with the people they serve. How culture gets created and sustained, or quietly erodes. How trust is built over time through consistency between what a business says and what it actually does.
In 2013, Luke and Shane Burrell started having to answer them in the most direct way possible: by building INNX.
The strategic framework for building community is well established, and it's right as far as it goes. You need a clear and genuine purpose, something that explains why the community exists beyond the commercial logic. You need values that are specific enough to actually guide decisions rather than sit decoratively in a brand document. You need to understand the people you're building for at a level of depth that goes beyond demographics. And you need consistency: the experience of being part of the community has to match what the brand promises, every time, across every touchpoint.
Mezzanine had spent years helping other organisations build those foundations. When it came to INNX, the brief was clear, the values were genuine, and the purpose was specific. Newcastle needed an environment where ambitious, independent, creative people could do their best work alongside each other. The brand framework was solid.
Then the building opened, and the real education began.
Community, it turns out, is not primarily a brand problem. It's a human one. And human problems don't resolve through strategy documents, however good those documents are.
The things that actually build community at INNX are not the things that show up most prominently in the framework. They're the accumulated weight of small, unglamorous, consistent choices. The way a new member is welcomed on their first day. The willingness to notice when someone is having a hard week and say something. The culture of genuine celebration when a member hits a milestone, where the win is treated as a win for the room rather than just for the individual. The conversations that happen not in structured events but in the kitchen, in the hallway, in the ten minutes before everyone gets back to work.
None of these are scalable in the way a brand strategy scales. They're personal. They depend on specific people choosing, again and again, to show up for each other in ways that aren't required but matter enormously.
Strategy can create the conditions for that. It can't substitute for it.
Mezzanine works frequently with organisations on what gets called values alignment: the gap between the values a business claims to hold and the actual day-to-day experience of the people inside and around it. In consulting contexts, that gap is often visible from outside before it's acknowledged from inside. It shows up in decisions that contradict stated values, in hiring choices that don't reflect cultural priorities, in the difference between how a brand talks about its people and how those people actually feel.
Building INNX put that same question much closer to home. The values of INNX, courage, creativity, genuine community, human-centred thinking, aren't just brand attributes. They're commitments that get tested every time a decision is made about how the space runs, who gets welcomed, what kind of culture is actively maintained versus what's left to chance.
The experience has reinforced something Mezzanine has always believed but now understands more personally: values aren't what you write down. They're what you do when it's inconvenient.
The thread running through both organisations is a belief that business is most valuable when it genuinely serves people. Not as a brand position. As an operational reality.
For Mezzanine, that means working with clients who share the conviction that building a brand well means building an organisation well, that the external story and the internal culture have to be the same story. The work spans brand strategy, creative and storytelling, marketing and campaigns, film production, events and digital, and it's all in service of helping organisations build something that lasts because it's genuinely worth sustaining.
For INNX, it means maintaining a coworking space in Newcastle that earns its community's trust every day, not through the quality of the furniture (although that matters) but through the quality of the environment it creates for the people inside it.
The two organisations share founders, share a building, and share a belief. The work is different. What drives it isn't.
If you're thinking about the brand and culture of your own organisation and want a conversation with people who've spent a long time on both sides of those questions, Mezzanine is the place to start.
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