Concept
Brand Belonging
Brand belonging is customers' sense that they are part of a real group of people like them around a product. In Marketing Rebellion, Mark W. Schaefer treats the need to belong as one of the strongest human needs, and one that technology does not change.
People choose a running club, a café or a piece of software partly because of the people who come with it, and buying from a brand can be a quiet way of saying 'I am one of these people'. In Schaefer's reading this gives a human company something more durable than a price advantage: a discount can be matched tomorrow, but a place among people like you is hard to copy. Customers who feel they belong tend to stay longer, forgive mistakes more readily and bring others, because recommending the brand is recommending their own circle. The company does not create the need; it can only build a place where the need is met, and that place has to be real. A community forms when customers meet each other, help each other and share something beyond the purchase: a skill, a problem, a standard. The brand's role is closer to a host than a broadcaster. Belonging can also be misused: a manufactured us-against-them identity, or a community turned into a promotions channel, cools the group quickly. A simple test helps: would members still come if nothing were on sale that day?
A real-life example
A running-shoe store in İzmir answers online price competition not with discounts but with a free Saturday morning run for every level, and sells nothing on Saturdays. A year later the group has more than eighty regulars, and most new customers say a runner from the group sent them.
How to use it
- 1Identify what your customers share beyond the purchase: a skill, a problem or a standard.
- 2Host a useful gathering where customers meet each other, and keep the sales pitch out of it.
- 3Measure belonging by what members do for each other, not by follower counts.