Needing to Belong (Why Brands Work, 6 of 8)

“Imitation, obedience to authority, and the fear of being different are forces that drive crowds.” Peter Bevelin, Seeking Wisdom

We humans are social, even tribal, creatures. We find safety, identity, and comfort by banding together with others. Our communities of family, friends, colleagues, neighbors, and interest groups help us to define ourselves and our values. At its best, our social nature has given us the ability to collaborate, form societies, and behave altruistically towards others. At its worst, it’s led to intolerance, hatred, and war.

From the beginning of history, our ancestors came together in communities in order to survive in a challenging and dangerous world. Our need to connect with other people emerged as an evolutionary need. It’s given us a tendency to reciprocate with others, show a strong concern for fairness, and punish people who threaten the group or its norms. We fear the disapproval of others, and our fear of exile from the group is among our greatest terrors.

The emotional need to be accepted members of social groups is a human universal—it’s found across all cultures and societies. In the 1940s, Abraham Maslow included belonging and love in his “hierarchy of needs” where it falls between the need for safety and the need for esteem. More recently, in 1995, Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary established the need to belong as a “fundamental human motivation” . People who don’t form steady, long-term and significant relationships suffer negative physical, emotional, and psychological effects.

In the 1970s, the social psychologists Henri Tajfel and John Turner developed a theory of social identity that built on the work of earlier psychologists and sociologists Their “social identity theory” provides us a useful guide for understanding the characteristics of human social behavior.

According to this theory, belonging in groups gives us comfort and connection. It provides direction and common to group members with a sense of shared purpose. It’s a source of our self-esteem and self-worth; we feel proud of our affiliations with the groups to which we belong. Finally, it’s a way for us to understand who we are based on a shared sense of identity.

Social identity theory also lays out the ways in which our positive identifications with the “in-group” can bias us against those outside of our group; the “out-group”. At our worst, we define ourselves in opposition to the other. We are not like them. And for anyone who finds themselves in the outgroup, the ostracization is felt as a painful and explicit exclusion—the dread absence of a sense of belonging.

We form shared identities with other people in many different kinds of groups. Our various memberships build like layers over the course of our lifetimes, sometimes complementing each other, sometimes in direct contradiction. Some are accidents of birth—the town where we were born or where we grew up; the generation in which we were born and raised; the ethnic or racial group into which we were born. Others are the result of our personal preferences, choices, and experiences—the schools we attended, the sports teams we support, our political parties or affiliations, or our communities of interest including those with shared hobbies, tastes, and activities. Some groups are open to anyone, others are exclusive and selective. Some form in an ad hoc manner and only last for a short period of time, others last for generations and maintain well-established laws and norms.

The way things are done around here

To maintain membership in a group, you have to live by its rules. Some of these rules will be outlined as formal bylaws, but most of the time they are unspoken cultural norms and practices that those in the in-group simply come to understand.

New group members attune themselves to behavioral signals from those who have been around longer. They pick up cues of how group members act, how they speak, how they dress, and what these signals say about how they see the world and their place in it. Being part of the group requires participation in rites in rituals, and newer members are quick to learn the ways in which these group practices are carried out.

Imagine a student entering a new school, an employee during their first day of work, or a soldier beginning basic training. Each faces the challenge of integrating into a new culture by adopting both the spoken and unspoken rules of their new group.

Our social identities—whether inherited or chosen—have a powerful influence on how we see ourselves, what we think, and how we act. Robert Cialdini’s classic 1984 book, Influence, cites six principles of persuasion— reciprocity, consistency, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity. Each exerts a powerful impact on what people think and do.

In his 2016 follow-up, Pre-suasion, Cialdini added a seventh principle: unity. Put simply: people are deeply influenced by others with whom they feel a shared sense of identity—the other people whom they recognized as being “one of us”. When in deep community with others, Cialdini says, there’s some degree of merging of the self with the other, resulting in a unity where “we is the shared me”. (Robert Cialdini, Pre-suasion, p.176)

Gather ‘round the brand

To understand why brands work, it’s important to understand them as communities to which we choose to belong. We use brands to construct and convey shared social identities. They give us a way to identify ourselves, identify others like us, and build social bonds.

The most successful brands have a very clear picture of who they’re for, of who they want in their community. They telegraph this clearly so that prospective customers, employees, and partners can evaluate if the brand is “for people like me”.

The strength of community bonds differs between brands and between different types of brands. It’s strongest for those brands—such as fashion, automotive, and sports teams—that we use in ways that are public, conspicuous, and seen by others. Wearing clothes made by a well-known designer or driving a flashy car are expressions of identity and membership in a particular community. We pay for the clothes and the car, but what we’re really buying is the belonging.

Social brands

Like other social groups, brands establish their own cultures, complete with shared customs, habits, norms, and rituals.

Jeep owners have one of the most vibrant and dynamic brand communities anywhere. This Jeep culture dates back to the years after American vets, returning from World War 2, could buy Jeeps for their personal use.

Jeepers, as they call themselves, have their own lingo , norms, and etiquette that may be unmatched for nuance in the world of commercial brand communities. Jeep culture is governed by well-established social norms. Jeepers even have their own greeting, the “Jeep wave”—a casual, flip of 1, 2, or 5 fingers from one hand, held at the 12:00 position of the steering wheel.

(For a masterclass on the etiquette of the Jeep wave. See “Jeep Wave explained” on Matt Moore’s YouTube page . In the video, Moore’s young daughter interviews him on the topic and he breaks it down for her in loving detail. Towards the end of the video, he also does a great job expressing how emotionally fulfilling belonging in this type of community can be. “It just feels good. You know you’re part of a community and I think that’s the neat thing.”)

It’s considered rude not to return a wave from a fellow Jeep driver, however you have to know your place in the pecking order. As in many cultures, the world of Jeep has an unforgiving hierarchy: If you’re driving a Grand Cherokee and you try flipping a wave at an oncoming Wrangler driver, don’t be surprised if they ignore you. In Jeep culture, driving the more expensive vehicle may put you lower in the pecking order.

For industrial products like Jeep, the product comes first and the community forms only later. However, in the digital age, some savvy entrepreneurs have first formed communities and then developed a product or business idea based on that community.

The community is the message

The internet has been a boon for building and maintaining communities. The minute that people got their hands on networked computers, they started to form communities of interest. As far back as the 1970s, even before the advent of the personal computer, early internet enthusiasts used messaging “bulletin boards” to organize themselves and connect with others that shared their interests.

Ever since, successive waves of network technology have provided people with unprecedented power to form communities without any central management, planning, or decision-making. These communities can form around any area of interest, passion, or purpose.

Online communications, particularly social networks, have made this process more efficient and streamlined than ever before. Communities can now form, evolve, and spread as organic, self-organizing and self-perpetuating entities. These exist around shared cultures and interests of any kind imaginable—whether you’re a birder, a gamer, a guitarist, a classic car enthusiast, or a newly minted surgeon. No matter what you’re into, or what you’re looking for, you can connect with others who share your passion.

These communities will often form their own brands as ways to identify themselves, attract new members, and express their pride. Most of these brands are open and unmanaged—they are developed by the community, for the community. And yet, online communities have also paved the way for new kinds of commercial brands that could never have existed in the past.

Emily Weiss started the fashion blog Into the Gloss in 2010 shortly after graduating from college. The blog primarily featured interviews with prominent and successful women and sometimes included photos of the women’s bathrooms, toiletries, and medicine cabinets. The blog was a hit, and within a few years was getting several hundred thousand visitors per month.

Through her interviews and her deep connection to her community of readers, Weiss knew that people were looking for a “skin first” line of beauty products that were subtle, natural, understated; unlike the commercial products that were available at that time. The loyal community that formed around Into the Gloss, and the insights into what they were looking for, enabled Weiss to raise $2 million in 2014 with which she launched the wildly successful makeup brand Glossier. Weiss flipped the script on the ways brand and community catalyze: the community came first, the brand came next, and the business followed that.

Wanting to belong and wanting to transcend

Our desire to belong, to join up with others, carries a kind of contradictory tension within it.

At the same time as Robert Cialdini introduces “unity” as a factor of human influence, he also points out this contradiction in our desire to be a part of a group: sometimes we want to fit in and other times we want to stand out.

And, as he explains, these contradictory motives map to two favored brand strategies: “The ’Don’t be left out’ variety, urges us to join the many. The other, of the ‘Be one of the few’ sort, urges us to step away from the many.” (Robert Cialdini, Pre-suasion, p.74) He goes on to explain why these two opposing urges—to fit in and to stand out—may have developed:

“Humans encountering threatening circumstances would have developed early on a strong tendency to be part of a group where there is safety and strength in numbers and to avoid being separate where there is vulnerability to a predator or enemy. The opposite would be true, however, in a situation with sexual possibilities.” (Robert Cialdini, Pre-suasion, p.74)

Cialdini’s team has gone as far as to demonstrate this with an ingenuous experiment. Audiences that have just watched a violent or frightening film respond positively to messages that promise community and belonging, while those who’ve watched a romantic film are drawn to messages that promise distance from the crowd.

Commercial brands play on both of these desires—to be part of a group and to stand apart from it. Brands can make us feel either secure or special. Next week we’ll turn our attention to the ways that brands tap into our judgment of people and situations.

Questions:

Why do you think that belonging is such an important need for people? How do you satisfy your own need for a sense of belonging?

What are the groups from which you derive your social identity? Are there brands associated with these groups with which you also identify?