The Dual Imperatives of Brand Belonging
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When IBM iX embarked on a global study of belonging and brands last year, we were spurred on by a chorus of commentators alarmed at our growing isolation and social anxiety. Authors as diverse as Yuval Levin and Sebastian Junger are writing about the national consequences of our disunity and its causes, from nostalgia to an incomplete understanding of modernity. At least one government is addressing loneliness as a public health crisis: U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May has appointed a Minister of Loneliness. CEOs are writing social cohesion into their companies’ purpose: Airbnb and Starbucks have explicitly made “belonging” central to their brand purpose. Tech giants are grappling with “the cultural issue of the next half century”how we live with technology without eroding our humanity. Facebook replaced their former, outcome-neutral mission, “to make the world more connected and open,” with the more civic-minded “Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.”
IBM iX is one of the companies at the forefront of AI-generated marketing insight and the design of increasingly data-driven personalized brand experiences. We undertook a study of human belonging in part to better understand how technology could be a force for good in a fractured time, how we could help people be, to use Sherry Turkle’s expression, less “alone together.” First, our global qualitative conversations conducted with research partner Ipsos surfaced variations on a single theme across the U.S., Germany, Brazil, Russia, China and India: that while our digital connectedness is a marvel of convenience, self-empowerment and, particularly in developing countries, upward mobility, there are striking downsides. Many of us are inundated with news, notifications and posts, and we spend less time sharing pastimes from service clubs to shopping, and feeling the satisfaction of community. Our next research step was to understand what role brands could and do play in addressing the belonging deficit. How is the awesome power of hyper personalization of brand experiences to be deployed so that we also address the whole of human needs?
As marketing moves ever closer to markets of one, we discovered something rather counter intuitive: that 39% of the brand behavioral imperatives that matter to consumers and improve business performance are collective in nature. They are about consumers in social contexts. They are about people bound together by shared values, interests, rituals. They are about big ideas that derive their strength and allure from the shared cultural spaces and collective unconscious in which they have taken hold. It is up to brand experience designers and marketers to uncover these affinities and attitudinal commonalities, and to enable their shared expression.
