"The question isn't whether they'd buy you. It's whether they'd want to be seen with you."
My cousin is coming over from California next month and I’ve already started curating the restaurants I’m going to take him to. They aren’t my usual lunch spots (sorry, Pret), but places that I realise are more about how I want him to perceive me: worldly-wise, culturally in tune, and perhaps a little cooler than reality. That isn’t vanity (well, not entirely) – it’s human nature.
People have always used what they buy, watch, wear, listen to and attend as a way of saying something about themselves. What has changed is how visible those choices have become.
Our latest Belonging in Britain research suggests brands, media, and events are playing a bigger role in identity than many marketers might assume. Nearly one in five people say they contribute to ‘what makes them, them’. Among 18-24s, these choices are amongst the strongest expression of identity outside family, personality, and passions.
That makes me stop and think. We are used to thinking about brands as signals of taste, aspiration, or affiliation, but technology and platforms have accelerated the speed at which culture moves, made more of our choices public, and given people many more ways to signal who they are. Increasingly, our identities are built as much through what we choose as what we inherit.
Historically, we tended to think about self-expression in obvious categories: fashion, music, cars, beauty, sport. Today, it extends into far more ordinary decisions: a football club, a podcast, a creator, a festival, a gym membership – even a coffee order. These increasingly act as cultural shorthand for who they are and what they value. These things create association. Association creates meaning. Meaning, when handled well, creates commercial advantage.
Which means it’s no longer enough to ask whether someone might buy your brand – instead, the more revealing question is whether they would want to be associated with it.
Twenty years ago, we’d sit in workshops debating ‘brand ‘personality’ and asking what people might say about our brands when we weren’t in the room. Since then, landscape and society have changed dramatically – but the question hasn’t. In fact, it has become more important because what people say about your brand increasingly determines the role it plays in their lives.
Would people recommend you? Share you? Bring you into a group chat? Mention you unprompted? If they did, what does that say about them? That is a harder test than awareness. Plenty of brands are known, but fewer are picked to become part of someone’s social identity.
Identity is becoming less about the boxes people inherit and more about the worlds they choose to enter.
Those worlds are visible in communities, fandoms, feeds, events, creators, and shared rituals. In other words, they are visible in culture. And culture is where people learn what has value, what feels current, what gets passed on, and what gets left behind.
If a brand helps someone express something they value about themselves, it becomes more than a product choice, it becomes part of their story. And that, in turn, can create loyalty that is difficult to replicate.
The risk, however, is that identity is personal territory. Brands that misread the room can quickly make the person who chose it feel exposed, embarrassed or badly served. And with these decisions so public in the current social climate, that sort of mistake travels.
This has implications beyond brand strategy. If people increasingly use brands as signals, the environments surrounding those brands matter more too.
Our research found that 74% say at least one form of media contributes to their identity. This should make planners, creatives, and marketers think differently. Throughout my career, I’ve found many people treat media as a delivery mechanism. But,increasingly, it is part of the message: the podcast someone recommends, the publication they subscribe to, the creator they follow.
If your brand wants to stand for local pride, local publishers, events, and geo-targeted media may be more powerful than scale alone. If it wants to stand for integrity, working with platforms that offer transparency is crucial. Media choices don’t simply deliver associations, they can help create them.
So, the practical question is not simply “how do we make our brand more shareable?”. It is ‘what identity role can this brand credibly play – and do our communications and media choices reinforce it?’ This creates a useful checklist:
Brand – what does choosing this brand say about someone, if anything? Is that meaning deliberate, accidental, or unclear?
Comms – are we reinforcing the desired meaning or diluting it?
Media – what associations are we borrowing from the environments and moments we use?
Partnerships – which creators, communities, or experiences make that meaning stronger?
Media choices carry more weight than they are often given credit for. Context shapes association: the same message in a trusted environment can feel relevant; in the wrong environment, it can feel opportunistic. This has real implications for media planning and activation: the channel, publisher, platform, creator, and format all influence what the brand comes to mean – and this is about thinking beyond media ‘blacklists’.
Brands that navigate this well tend to understand the difference between visibility and belonging. Visibility gets you seen and association shapes perception, whereas belonging gets you chosen.
Not every brand needs to become a lifestyle brand. But every brand should understand the role it can credibly play in people’s lives, whether that’s confidence, expertise, rebellion, humour, or cultural fluency.
Strategy needs to identify the role the brand can credibly play in people’s lives, while communications need to make that role legible. People should recognise what it stands for through creative, messaging, and experience, while media needs to place the brand in environments that reinforce it rather than dilute it.
As identity becomes more visible and more consciously curated, brands are competing for more than attention and purchase. They are competing for preference, recommendation and advocacy – because being chosen is valuable, being recommended is more valuable, being woven into how people see themselves is where some of the deepest and most durable value sits.
The brands that achieve that don’t just understand who their audience is, instead they understand what their audience is trying to say about themselves.
And in a market where products, targeting and technology are increasingly easy to replicate, that understanding may be one of the few genuinely sustainable advantages left.
You can explore the full Belonging in Britain research for a deeper look at how identity, belonging and media are shaping the way people connect with brands today here.