Tribes, Brands and the Fate of Consumer Marketing

James A. Taylor, Ph.D.
The Lyle Anderson Companies

In the days following the terrible events of September 11, the country was swept by a peculiar feeling: unity. We became, for a short period of time, the united people of America. We were united in grief, anger, hopelessness and hopefulness. We shared moments of political and social unity so powerful, the President’s affective numbers reached the 90% level.

Contrast this interval of goodwill with the last few months. Martha Stewart was both cheered and jeered as she emerged from the Federal Courthouse only several blocks from ground zero. Wal-Mart faced protests, legal action and boycotts in its efforts to open stores in California. Coca-Cola was boycotted to protest the war in Iraq. Janet Jackson overshadowed Super-Bowl XXXVIII with a highly charged moment of couture indiscretion. Range Rovers were defaced by “eco-activists.” The rapper Ludacris sent Budweiser into a public relations spin nightmare. Abercrombie & Fitch got its catalog banished. And even Sports Illustrated was castigated for its swimsuit edition. And of course, President Bush’s affect numbers have returned to 50%. The American economy is back on trend.

What trend? In each case, the core promotional ideas radiated positively with some consumers, but were abhorred by others. What fascinates is the systematic quality of both acceptance and rejection. For those to whom the events and messages spoke loudly, they spoke to shared, “tribal” positive response impulses. To those to whom the events spoke contemptuously, they spoke to shared, “tribal” insult response impulses. In sum, these commercial messages carry the code language and metaphors of what some pundits are calling the “culture war.”

On Trend With Tribes
For a number of years, the economy and consumer tastes have been growing more and more tribal. By “tribal,” I mean the tendency of the American social landscape to grow increasingly hard-wired (or as sociologists call it, “ethnocentric”) in the choices groups of people make to respect (and purchase) the preferences of their social peers and reject the preferences of those who are not their peers.

Fault lines that are evolving in American culture create embedded economic sub-groups that are of special interest to marketers and media people. First, preference orderings that characterize tribes are becoming increasingly evident to members of the tribe. Second, distaste for the preferences, values and icons of one tribe are growing more antagonizing to other tribes. Our mild-mannered, un–self-conscious segments of the past are emerging–as self-reflexive, self-aware, interest-defending tribes.

The Social DNA of Consumer Tribes
Consider the following question: If you had learned that Mitsubishi had put its cars in a hip-hop/gangsta film celebrating midnight street racing, drive-by shooting and gang rivalry, would you buy a Mitsubishi automobile? The answer to this question depends upon whether hip-hop rivalry and its cultural trappings are icons for your tribe. Similarly, Jimmy Choo’s illustrious shoes, Viking appliances, Mercedes-Benz automobiles, heterosexual marriage, NASCAR racing, Seiko watches, Harvard University, Keepsake Jewelry, Mary Kay cosmetics, Heineken Beer, Tag Heuer watches, Best Buy appliances, Prescriptives, and even a product like Tide detergent help to define one’s tribal identity.

What should interest mass (or even massive) marketers is that the choice a consumer makes not to purchase any one of these brands depends on a desire to not misinform people about the tribe one belongs to. People in tribes: are highly disciplined in their brand preferences; are ready to change as new brands, services and ideas gain currency within the tribe; are acutely aware of their affinity group; and selectively seek relationships with members of their tribe. At the same time, tribal members: discriminate against the icons of other tribes; avoid information that offers insight into the rationale behind the behavior of other tribes; and avoid creating relationships with tribal outsiders.

The tribes can be organized by at least three key social variables: value-orientation, relative social
class and age*:

Value-orientation will refer to a bundle of values— political, religious and social—that distinguish conservatives (CVs) from progressives (PVs).**
Relative social class refers to a bundle of variables (income, occupational rank, investment portfolio, etc.) that distinguish individuals with a relatively high level of discretionary income (HDs) from those with little or virtually no discretionary income (LDs).

Age refers to the physical age and health age of the individual and his or her spouse—for this article I am considering only adults and have conceptually divided the population between tending young (TYs, 22–45 or so) and tending mature (TMs, 46–90).

Each construct reflects potent forces for binding tribes and elaborates the differences among them. People who are conservative tend to govern their decision-making and ethics by reference to principles of right versus wrong. Progressives tend to apply fairness as their ethical standard. More affluent people are apt to believe in reward for merit as a just basis for allocating resources. The less affluent tend to view entitlement as a just basis for allocation. Older Americans see their possession of the vast majority of American assets, preservation of social security and permanent health benefits as their return for a lifetime of contribution, while younger Americans tend to see their elders hoarding assets and public resources at the expense of their ideas, entrepreneurship and innovation.

Organizing the Tribal Consumer
The emerging consumer culture has mass, in the form of discrete tribal affinity groups. It has velocity, in the sense that the groups are accelerating in their organization of structure and recognition of “tribal-self.” It has energy in the sense that tribes increasingly find fault with other tribes and take their antagonism out via political friction, resource competition and disgust and dismay. In short, we are re-organizing the social milieu around the magnitude of dislike (and even hatred) tribes have for one another. Hence, culture war.

The chart at the right shows a representation of the emerging tribal culture [See chart 1]. The simple 2x2x2 cubed matrix represents all possible combinations of the three binomial variable clusters (CVs/PVs, HDs/LDs, TYs/TMs) defined above.*

The resulting cube has eight cells. Each cell represents people who collectively make up a tribe. The people in each cell have specific preferences for certain brands, products, ideas, leaders, media, art, food, health care and services. As well, each group chooses away from the same list when it is a brand, idea or service that has icon status for another tribe. Put simply, when choosy moms choose JIF, other moms run to Whole Foods Organic Chunky.

This simplified, three-dimensional representation makes it relatively easy to determine who will be happy and who will be antagonized by your targeting. First, any single tribe is a homogeneous market in which brands symbolize membership. Second, any time two contiguous cells share two points of similarity you can simultaneously target people in both cells with a single message and common media. Third, any time two cells have one or no contiguous boundary there is little possibility of message consistency and substantial risk of interposing your product into tribal conflict. Fourth, the degree to which a product is defined in or out of any individual’s preference set will vary by how near the individual lies to the “cusp” of his or her cell, with respect to the adjacent cell. Fifth, the greater the distance between two cells in the matrix, the greater their mutual distaste for both one another and the objects they possess. Culture war, indeed!


Some Ideas about Tribal Impact on Ideas and Brands
In the table at right, I have summarized my (non-quantitative) observations about the nature of these differences. These are hypothetical, but in my experience, realistic cell fills.

Taste, symbolism and consistencies within tribal strata distinguish tribes. Similarities create membership solidarity. Differences create “territorial irritations” that yield inevitable, complex culture clashes. A brand that is iconic for one group is iconoclastic for another.

This goes for media behavior, too. With rare exceptions, media choice is tribal. Preferred media will respect tribal belief. Likewise, media will be rejected when its content challenges prevailing sentiment and belief. Denial inoculates the tribe against contrary points of view. The old reliables—evening news, national magazines, family programming and radio—no longer deliver the whole matrix of tribes.

Winning Tribal Markets
For brands, this tribal consumer architecture produces real dilemmas. If, like Timberland Boots (and more recently, Uggs), a product offering hits the sweet spot of, for example, the Deaners, tribal rejection inhibits diffusion across the matrix. Marketers face two choices. One is to become comfortable with being an important brand to a single tribe (or a small cluster of contiguous tribes). This means choosing reference media iconic to the interests of the tribe, for example, Outside Magazine for Deaners. It means radiating values that are authentic for your tribe. It means investing in events and personalities that truly represent the authentic preferences and rituals of your tribe(s). And most of all, it means sticking to your target like glue. “You can’t win ’em if you won’t join ’em.”

But there are risks: winning in one tribal market creates distaste in another. Rolex watches are despised by RobbinsHoods. Tide is unacceptable to Deaners. NasCards (and other conservatives) despise The New York Times, the icon progressive newspaper. Ask yourself this question: By winning a tribal segment through appeal to their preferences, what is lost elsewhere?

The second choice is to embrace a brand strategy that appeals to all the tribes. Consider the idea of a brand that symbolizes unity. By evaluating your brand’s capacity to be symbolic of a core human virtue—a belief shared by all—a marketer can transcend inter-tribal prejudice. You can have it all if you can find a “silver bullet.”

The Search for the Silver Bullet
This is hard. Silver bullet brands are dearly won. It’s not a pure question of advertising and promotional spend: Goldtoe dominates the men’s hose market across the matrix because word of mouth associates them with professionalism in dress. A silver bullet brand is associated with a universal manifestation of a human aspiration (e.g., hope, courage, competence, power and intelligence) or an emotional sentiment (e.g., love, happiness, kindness, esteem, respect, desire, even lust). This singular silver bullet brand construct—this brand promise—adds margin to products by delivering a universal sentiment or idea that is shared among all people and compelling at the deepest human level. In order to succeed at this game, you must build your business and corporate culture around being authentic in your delivery of your brand promise.

There are three critical analytic steps to constructing a brand promise and one rule.

1. Determine what is true of your business.
2. Determine what is meaningful to your consumers.
3. Determine what is distinctive within your category.

Where truth, meaning and distinction intersect, you will (may) find your brand promise—your silver bullet. But the rule is: you may only choose a single virtue if you intend to sell across the whole matrix.

Again, this is difficult in a tribal world. You, too, are influenced by your tribe. You see what your peers value; you deny what is not valued. Despite this, silver bullets can be created. Wal-Mart did it: value. Coca-Cola did it: refreshment. Tiffany’s did it: love. Dell did it: competence. Jeep did it: freedom. Frito-Lay did it: taste. Volvo did it: safety. Disney World did it: fun. McDonald’s did it: consistency.

Note how all these brands, and the ebb and flow of their value to consumers and investors ebbs and flows according to the consistency by which they cling to their central premise—their brand promise. Second, in each of these cases, the authentic brand promise arose from a commitment the founder and his heirs made to the consumer. Third, the promise is validated by experience and the experience of seeing others use the product. Silver bullet brands are transitive with respect to the matrix of tribal boundaries precisely because they are unyielding in their association with a primal human virtue that trumps tribal prejudices.

Silver bullets can be found in a tribal world, often in strange places. Yellow Freight, now Yellow Roadway Transportation, recently found one. The company went from Fortune’s list of the ten weakest companies to its ten best in just seven years by concentrating on the single virtue: certainty. The company’s revenues, morale, customer depth and breadth, and stock price rose. Indeed, its capital value increased by 625% over the period 1997–2003.

If you pursue this strategy, you must be both confident and disciplined. Identify a core, primal emotional commitment that your consumers will use to communicate to themselves who they are and who they are not. To build a silver bullet, you will have to endure the pain of critics doing their worst, obsess on message, invest in public relations and spread your media around the tribal matrix.

Last Tag
In any case, succeeding in a tribal economy involves strategic choice. You can join the battle on behalf of your tribe, or you can steer clear by seeking universality. Tribal strategies are simpler, but they offer lower payoffs, especially in terms of volume and marketing cost per unit. Just ask the folks at BMW what it’s like to be an icon brand across the board. Their marketing expense runs roughly $400 per sale. Lincolns, by contrast, cost more than $5000 per automobile to market. It’s a definite Reaganista brand.

In a private conversation, Malcolm Gladwell characterized this choice as the strategic dilemma over whether one wishes to be catsup or mustard. If catsup is your game, you get to be Heinz and Heinz is what catsup tastes like. If mustard is your game, your product becomes a condiment icon—standard fare for one tribe’s sandwiches and appalling to the others.

As we ponder this choice, we will be in a country that grows increasingly fragmented by multilateral hostility. I am not sure how I feel about this, nor am I confident that events will push us toward a renewed sense of common purpose. It seems that sometimes hostility leads to a bridge at Antietam or the banks of the Volga, and other times, renaissance grows from social contradiction. I hope we are on the edge of the latter.

James Taylor’s career has included lead marketing positions at Ernst & Young, Gateway Computers, Iomega Corp. and E.F. Hutton. He served as CEO of Yankelovich, Skelly & White and headed up Hill & Knowlton’s flagship New York office. He has served as a marketing and branding consultant to many of the world’s leading corporations in categories as diverse as accounting, toys, automobiles, pharmaceuticals and weapons development. Jim has been chosen by The Wall Street Journal as one of America’s five leading business futurists. He currently is producing a major work on the history of trust and a book tentatively entitled, The Search for the Silver Bullet: Brands, Meaning and the Desire to Acquire.

*I readily acknowledge that at least three additional tribal-forming variables are omitted: race, location (urban-rural), and education. However, space is limited and I suspect these variables will prove to be highly correlated with age, class and values.

**Progressive seems to be the word that is used to describe people who once were called liberal—i.e., people aligned in their support of entitlements, the environment, economic homogeneity, etc.