Nextdoor’s Shady Marketing Tactics Ensure I’ll Never Use the App

This brand sent me a letter, pretending to be my neighbor.

A few years ago, I received a genuine snail mail letter from a woman I’d never heard of before — Katelyn, an alleged neighbor of mine.

In her typed letter, she invited me to join the Nextdoor app. Nextdoor is an app for neighbors, kind of like a Facebook group but dedicated to a local area.

Despite the friendly tone, I was immediately suspicious because the letter used classic marketing strategies.

Note how the letter played on FOMO, including the language, “Join today so you don’t miss out” and “This code expires in 7 days!”

(When I experimented with joining past the deadline, I was allowed to sign up regardless, rendering the deadline moot.)

I was confused, though, because it was the kind of communication I’d expect to see in an email marketing campaign I’d forgotten to unsubscribe from, not a letter from a real person.

Could Katelyn be an invention of Nextdoor? I googled Katelyn’s name and found a number. I sent her a quick text:

Katelyn quickly revealed the truth: Nextdoor is using my neighbors to try to get me to download an app.

Is it Legal for Nextdoor to Pretend to Be My Neighbor?

The short answer: yes, but it’s a slightly dark signup process, and I found the whole thing a little dubious when I signed up for Nextdoor myself.

When you sign up for Nextdoor, you’re presented with an option to send your closest 150 neighbors “personalized” invites which include your full name and street. These details are how I was able to find and contact Katelyn. Katelyn may not have intended to send the letters, but at some point during the signup process, she did agree to it by ticking a box.

When I tried it out, I found that if you’re trying to hurry through the signup process, it’s easy to click “accept” on this box by accident. Furthermore, the language to me was ambiguous. I clicked “yes” on an option to send out letters. Nextdoor’s app then took me to a post page on the app, which I was able to exit.

To me, that flow suggested that I had clicked on something that would prompt me to make a post. It did not suggest that “I” had sent out 150 letters.

But when I went to switch it off in my privacy settings, just in case, Nextdoor let me know that some letters might already be on their way.

Sorry to any neighbors who may have received those letters. I’m part of the problem!

Nextdoor seems to be aware of the potential for misunderstanding. They have posted a few helpful blog posts on the subject.

However, the company also seems to be doing whatever it can to keep that misunderstanding alive and well, as I experienced in my trial run-through.

This misunderstanding has been going on since 2019 at least, as I was able to find a few old news articles on the uncanny feeling of having a neighbor tell you they received a letter from you — that you didn’t send. “It’s a misunderstanding by some web users who unknowingly authorize the site to automatically send out hundreds of letters in their name,” writes MalwareBytes author Pieter Arntz.

Not only that, but Nextdoor provides a fake local return address on the letters they choose to send as themselves. “These invitations that are from Nextdoor, not your neighbor, may feature a local return address but do not include the name of a specific neighbor as the sender.”

I noted that my own false letter had a local return address, but was postmarked from California. And Katelyn herself told me she didn’t mean to send the letter.

It’s a legal, if bizarre, marketing technique. What gives?

Brands Are Still Trying to Be Our Friends

It’s not new for brands to infiltrate their way into our hearts and souls by trying to be our friends. Brands are constantly going for a relatable vibe.

As “relatable” changes, so too do brand marketing techniques. We all remember the rise of Wendy’s sassy Twitter/X feed as brands learned that they could “clap back” and get more followers (and sales). KFC once posted a thirst trap, for heaven’s sake.

Traditionally, we have seen brands follow consumers more and more digitally. Brands migrated first to radio, then television, email, social media, and finally TikTok as that’s where the youths were.

This is a step in the opposite direction: corporations sending physical letters to my home on behalf of an actual, real, local human neighbor.

I was skeeved out, to tell you the truth.

This Is a Step Beyond “Being a Friend”

Word-of-mouth is well known to be an effective marketing technique. When my mom recommends a hairbrush to me, I listen, because she’s my mom, she knows me, and she stands to gain nothing from recommending a hairbrush to me.

Influencers have been extremely effective at leveraging this technique due to the parasocial relationships formed by social media. One of my favorite beauty influencers, Ling KT, frequently motivates me to buy the products she tries and recommends. I know it’s not real, but she feels like a trusted friend.

That’s the feeling Nextdoor appears to be trying to capture with this dodgy marketing technique: fake word-of-mouth. Katelyn, my neighbor, would have no incentive to recommend Nextdoor to me unless she really liked it. She’s also a real, human person with opinions I could hypothetically trust, especially since all folks, but especially white, wealthy, senior people, tend to trust those who live near us according to a 2016 Pew Research poll. (I live in a very white, affluent, senior neighborhood.)

Nextdoor walked right past “be your Brand friend ™️” and went straight to the “pretend to be your actual human friend.”

Marketing Techniques May Feel Ineffective, but Most Work

To me, and Katelyn, and potentially the 150 neighbors of mine who are about to receive a letter from “me,” this feels strange and intrusive. I deleted Nextdoor from my phone as soon as I installed it for this experiment.

But marketing folks get paid a lot of money because however weird and strange their techniques may seem, they work. After Wendy’s started going viral on Twitter, its profit increased by 49.7% year on year. Steak-umm, the frozen meat sheets account that posts philosophical and self-aware marketing tweets, is hugely popular and enjoys a staggeringly loyal fanbase.

But does this one? While I obviously don’t have access to any A/B tests from Nextdoor, I do find it interesting that Nextdoor’s business is not thriving. “Nextdoor Holdings hasn’t been tracking well recently as its declining revenue compares poorly to other companies, which have seen some growth in their revenues on average,” writes the Simply Wall Street editorial team.

This won’t be specifically in response to a single bad marketing tactic, but it is interesting.

Fake Authenticity Turns People Off

Besides a few articles and Reddit posts about the odd strategy, Nextdoor has not received much flack. But this marketing technique had the opposite intended effect on me. I found this intrusive and I haven’t been back to the app since. Seeing the lack of earnings growth and low engagement numbers, I have to believe that I’m not alone, and that these tactics put off as many people as they attract.

Plus, consider that Nextdoor is the only company I know that does this. Success breeds imitation. If it were a functional strategy, more companies would be doing something similar. But they aren’t.

Furthermore, look at the engagement of, for example, promoted posts on Reddit. They are empty — no comments, no upvotes or downvotes, no brand engagement of any kind. This to me proves that false engagement and authenticity has the opposite effect. When we see it, we hate it.

As brands try to creep into any avenue they can to find us, one tactic that has proven resoundingly ineffective is fake authenticity. That letter may fool some into signing up, but those who question it and discover the true answer end up finding it distasteful. Undisclosed ads provoke anger and annoyance. Even the influence of influencers is on the wane — the bigger the influencer, the less effective the marketing campaign.

Brands can be neither our friends nor our neighbors. And the longer they try to pretend they are, the more money they’ll waste on these campaigns.

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