Tribes & Communities

• Humans are wired up not just as social animals, but to be group animals. We have a drive to merge ourselves into ingroups (and regard others as outgroups). This drive is described by Social Identity Theory.
  • Each person will have many ingroups that can vary from weak and loose to strong and very tight (that people will fight and die for)
  • Ingroups can come and go (some stick around our whole lives, others are very short lived)
  • We extend to our ingroups the willingness that we have to process the world in self-serving ways. We are the good guys, bad things are generally other people’s fault
  • Ingroup processes are different from reference groups and cultures, in the same way that your upper arm, forearm, and hand are separate – they can act independently from each other, or together in coordinated action (to pick up or throw something)

There are two types of ingroups that we discuss in CB:

• Communities are groups built around some commonality (living close by, a brand, an interest, etc)
  • They have 3 markers: Consciousness of kind, a sense of moral responsibility, and presence of shared rituals and traditions
  • The culture (with its rituals and traditions) helps bind them together with values, and people can be very motivated to defend them against threats to those rituals and values – because they are seen as attacks on the integrity of the group itself
  • People can be motivated to spend money on markers of their community
  • Brand communities are built around members of a brand – often online, but not always, and ideally not exclusively so.
    • Brand communities have practices that include social networking with each other, developing their skills and knowledge at brand use, developing engagement with the community (documenting milestones with badges, etc), and managing the impression that other people have of the brand.
    • More intense communities are likely to have more of these practices more deeply developed
    • Managing brand communities is tricky for firms. They have to resist the impulse to try to own it, and to try to make it just something their marketing department does for communications purposes. Healthy communities tend to be run by and for the consumers, and the brand can just help set the environment for it to grow. If they do this they get not only a loyal following, but a lot of deep insight into how their product can create value for consumers
• Tribes are ingroups like communities, except that they are not built around any one focal thing.
  • They tied to together by the human need for belonging – our impulse to have a pack, ingroups we belong to
  • What ties each tribe together is a (sometimes shifting) combination of tastes and activities and ways of dressing – we build a constellation of markers that identifies our tribe as a ‘we’, an ‘us’.
  • Tribes can be weak and tight, they can be lasting or ephemeral.
    • This can make them tricky for marketers to engage with, and can require careful research and sensitivity.
    • But they can be rewarding too