Belonging is a basic human need, and brands can help create it. The trouble starts when the brand building community turns into exploiting the need for it.
We call this community-washing, when a brand sells the feeling of community without the substance. Where is that line, and what does crossing it do to people, alone or together?
It becomes a question of ethics: The brand gets the loyalty of a community, but it doesn’t take on the responsibilities a community relies on.
This is what brands end up doing:
- Exploiting real needs. Wanting to belong, be seen, find meaning, and be accepted are part of being human. A brand that promises to meet those needs with a purchase profits from the gap, and has every financial motivation to keep it open.
- Financial harm. Each new line, tier, or upgrade raises the price of staying in. For some people that becomes debt or compulsive buying. What makes it an ethical issue is when the brand designs belonging so it has to be renewed through buying.
- Overconsumption. Identity tied to buying pushes people to buy more, and more regularly, with environmental costs. When identity is something you buy, it’s never finished. There’s always a newer version of yourself to upgrade into. That leaves people with a constant, low-level anxiety of falling behind, and the only relief the brand offers is the next purchase.
- Exclusion. Belonging defined by what you own also defines who’s left out. Price becomes the membership fee, and community turns into status.
This isn’t just a marketing problem. It usually lands there, but the answers live in product, pricing and how the business operates.
So what does getting it right look like? A brand shouldn’t replace personal or social connection, but it can make room for it.
Football clubs like Liverpool, Juventus, AC Milan and Club América are the proof. They’re commercial businesses, yet at their best they’re home to real, healthy belonging, because it’s rooted in place, history and the fans themselves, not in what people buy.
So the questions every brand should ask itself:
- Do we connect people to each other, or only to us? Is it a campfire or an altar?
- Whose belonging is it? If we disappeared tomorrow, would the community survive?
- Can people leave freely? Without losing their data, their status, their connections or part of who they are.
- Are we honest about what we are? Leggings are leggings. A watch is a watch. Neither is a way of life.
The ethical line is whether the brand hosts a belonging that people own and could take elsewhere, or manufactures one that only exists through buying.
This article was co-authored with Judy Abel.
Judy Abel is Principal and Brand Strategist at Prospect Strategy, helping leadership teams build brands that hold up beyond the marketing. helloprospect.co