I changed schools at the beginning of year 11 from a very free thinking, hands-off high school (with shock horror… no uniform!) to a strict high-performing girls school with a bright pink uniform (as unflattering as it sounds).

It was a tough transition – By year 11, friendship groups had been formed, cliques established, best friends secured.

With the help of a girl who caught the same bus as me, I managed to land a spot with a very cool group of girls and they were all lovely. Not a Regina George in sight. I was immediately invited to all the parties, invited on group weekends away, and most importantly had somewhere to perch at lunchtime.

BUT a few months into the year something was nagging at me. I realised I didn’t BELONG with that group. No one called me after school to debrief on the day. No one invited me one on one to the movies on the weekend or asked my opinion. Not because they were mean, it just didn’t occur to them. I realised it didn’t really matter if I was there or not. I had a community, I had somewhere to perch, but no sense of belonging.

So I set out to find a group of friends who were just as weird as I was (am). And boy did I… I found a group of drama/art creative weirdos beyond my wildest imagination – and before the year was out I knew I’d found my place.

Reflecting on this experience really helped click for me the difference between being in a community, and feeling like you belong. And the importance of knowing the difference when it comes to building a brand.

Community is a strategy. Inclusion is a strategy. Belonging is an outcome. It’s elusive, hard won and powerful.

Finding our place in the world, truly belonging somewhere, is among our deepest held human desires. We know when we haven’t landed. Nothing sits right.

True belonging moves people. It pulls people in. People recognise themselves in what you’re saying and connect to your mission on a personal level. It’s where true ride-or-die brand love grows. The type of brand love that compels people to sacrifice, to yearn, to take action and to invest – sometimes to the point of being irrational.

The other thing about belonging is it’s a bit elusive. A deeply human feeling that takes time, focus and commitment to cultivate. (Notice I said cultivate, not manufacture.) And in a world demanding pace – shortcutting and hacking our way to success, when it comes to aiming for belonging within a brand community, there’s a tension there that can feel, quite frankly, a bit hard and labour intensive.

Ugh. Can’t we just create a facebook group and tick ‘build a community’ off the list?

Flip the coin, and I wonder is there a reassurance in the fact that this very human, ride-or-die brand love can’t be bought or manufactured? In a world where my 12-year-old nephew  just launched a new slime business with a vibe-coded website and 350 five-star google reviews he bought for $11, I think there is.

So how do we foster a sense of belonging?

1. Belonging starts from the inside out. Invest in getting your brand strategy right. Brand strategy is not about being “ON BRAND” at all costs – brand strategy is about guiding actions and defining culture. Invest in making sure you and your team understand it, truly believe in it and can genuinely live it. Let it guide decisions, behaviours, systems and processes. Bring it to life! Don’t let it sit in a PDF on your server no one looks at. Use it to deliver on your brand promises. Belonging grows from trust, clarity and consistency.
   
   
2. Know (and love on) your audience. Go beyond their demographics or solving their immediate problem. How are you uniquely seeing and tending to the emotion behind their problem? What does the outcome actually represent emotionally for them? Relief? Hope? Acceptance? Overcoming? When you understand that, you move from trying to impress, to trying to include. Remove friction. Speak to the person behind the demographic category, plainly and directly.
   
   
3. Belonging is active, relational and participatory.Develop opportunities for your audience to contribute and co-create. True belonging goes both ways. Every touchpoint should feel like an open invitation to connect, to respond, to contribute. When an audience is empowered to actively participate, they stop being consumers of a brand and become a part of it. Being able to contribute validates your audience, it invites them in and gives agency and trust.

Everyone is searching for their place, not just somewhere to perch. It’s the human experience. So give it to them, again and again, and again. Belonging takes time. It’s iterative. It won’t be perfect at the start. But just start!

If you build it from the inside out, understand the emotion behind your audience’s needs, and invite them into the process, you’ll build something people feel part of and there’s power and magic in that.

In part two of this article I’m going to run through an example of an organisation we recently worked with who embeds belonging in their actions and are seeing the benefits.

Stay tuned…