Marketing's Misuse of Our Craving to Belong

I’m a human like you are, and both of us are craving real human connection, to the deepest part of our souls. A sense of belonging and realness. A belief that someone wants to be with me. Not my talent or the access I can give or my money or the things I can do for them, but me. Just me. With all my strengths and weaknesses and weirdness.

Real Friends

I have good friends like that, and I recently spent four days with a bunch of them, strafing the mountain roads of western North Carolina on motorcycles and then lying about it over drinks in the shitty hotel every night afterwards.

You have friends like this, too. Maybe two dozen that you text from time to time, and maybe two or three who would bail you out of jail and keep it a secret. Or loan you money, no questions asked.

The Power of this Craving

This is one of the deepest longings in our souls. It’s what makes a child run into your arms, sobbing and shaking, when you show up at school after an incident. It’s what keeps you up until 3:30a, talking on the couch as if time stands still. It’s what drives you to defend someone who’s been misunderstood, getting angry as if it were you in their place.

What’s Bothering Me

Before dragging you this far, I should probably admit that this article doesn’t have much of a point except this: please don’t play this game of positioning your clients’ products and services as filling this hole in our souls. Just don’t.

Yeah, I get that we can build certain affinities with others who also enjoy specific brands. I have those brands myself: Leica, Festool, Newmar, KEF, etc. But they are nothing more than a shared experience with a brand. They don’t fill any holes. Or if they are filling holes, those holes aren’t very self-aware.

When humans crave belonging, and when you play on my deepest desires to belong by pretending to care about me in the name of commerce, you can go to hell.

I’m not angry. Nothing specific has happened. In fact, I decided to write on this three years ago and this is just the week when it happens.

What Is Effective Branding?

Now I’ll back off all that pontification and say that brands do, indeed, do some things for us:

• I can wear a t-shirt, see someone else wearing the same one, and it prompts me to say something to connect. This is especially true of sports teams. If I pass someone in Titans gear, I’ll do a fist bump and say “Titan Up” and then commiserate at how lousy we are.
• Storytelling for a brand can communicate who belongs, by showing diverse groups in the center of that focus.
• Rituals and traditions and anniversaries foster something inside us.

As useful as that is, though, it’s affinity and, beyond that, a facilitator of connections. But let’s not go too far and pretend that any brand, of any kind, can bridge the deep desire each of us have to belong.

Your kid might want a specific pair of sneakers to be seen as a part of the in crowd, but that’s all ethereal until the real connections happen, through conversations and actions.

Our Role on the High Road

As marketers, I just want us to be the ones keeping it real. The next generation of effectiveness will be built on authenticity and trust, and that requires that we understand and protect real belonging and not prostitute it for the ring of a cash register.

There’s only so much you can influence with your clients, but it’s still worth a shot. If nothing else, you’ll sleep better at night.