The power of shared experiences: What the Montreal Canadiens playoff run teaches communicators

The most remarkable thing about the Montreal Canadiens’ playoff run is not only what is happening on the ice. It is what is happening around it.

Across Montreal and far beyond Quebec, people gather in bars, restaurants, and living rooms to watch games together. Entire communities are being united by a common emotional experience. For a few hours, politics, work stress and social divisions fade into the background. The same phenomenon happened during the Blue Jays’ World Series run last year.

Public spaces become gathering places, and people who otherwise have little in common suddenly share the same emotional highs and lows. In a fragmented and increasingly individualized society, those moments matter more than we often realize.

In an era where so much of life has become individualized and digital, these moments remind us of something deeply human: people still crave shared experiences, shared emotions.

That has important implications for organizations trying to communicate, build trust and create engagement in today’s environment.

Communications today

Over the last decade, communications strategies have become increasingly sophisticated at personalization, segmentation and hyper-targeted digital engagement. Organizations have become very good at speaking to individuals. But in doing so, many have underestimated the strategic value of creating moments people experience together. In a fragmented media environment, the rarest commodity is not attention. It is shared attention.

Shared experiences generate something increasingly difficult to achieve in today’s communications environment: collective attention.

When people experience something together, it becomes more credible, memorable, and influential because it is reinforced socially, not just individually. That is why sports remain so culturally powerful. A Canadiens playoff game is not simply content nor entertainment. It is a collective ritual. Millions of people react simultaneously, celebrate together and create memories together.

The best PR and public affairs campaigns operate in a similar way. They do not simply deliver information. They create participation, conversation, and generate emotional connection. They give people something to rally around and a reason to engage with one another.

This matters even more in a fragmented media environment where audiences increasingly exist inside personalized digital ecosystems. Shared moments cut through the noise because they create common reference points. They create belonging: something increasingly difficult for organizations to generate through messaging alone.

That is also why experiential communications matter. Organizations cannot rely solely on transactional messaging or polished advertising campaigns to build trust and engagement. Audiences expect participation, relevance and a credible reason to engage.

The organizations that succeed will be the ones capable of creating experiences people actively choose to engage with, whether through live events, public affairs initiatives, community engagement, partnerships or storytelling that creates emotional resonance rooted in a genuine understanding of the audiences they serve.

In a world saturated with personalized content, mass engagement has become one of the most difficult communications challenges. Creating shared emotional resonance is one way organizations can begin to meet it.

What this means for organizations

At NATIONAL, these are the kinds of conversations we are having with clients as they look to build stronger engagement, trust, and connection in an increasingly fragmented environment.

This is particularly important in public affairs, where trust in institutions is fragile and public debate is increasingly polarized. Public trust is not built solely through policy announcements or technical expertise. It is built when people feel connected to one another, to their communities and to the institutions around them.

As artificial intelligence, remote work and digital personalization continue reshaping society, experiences that bring people together physically and emotionally will only become more valuable.

Of course, no organization can simply recreate the emotional bond of a Game 7 win (Go Habs Go!) That is precisely the point. Shared experiences cannot be forced. They have to be earned through relevance, credibility, and participation. But organizations can create the conditions for people to gather, engage, contribute, and feel part of something larger than themselves.

For organizations, the challenge is no longer simply how to reach audiences. It is how to bring them together. The brands, institutions and leaders that succeed will be those capable of creating meaning, belonging, and shared emotional experiences people genuinely want to be part of.

Because in the end, humans are simply better off together.