Some of the statistics coming out of current research paint a very tricky picture for brands and marketers today. 79% of UK adults have lost trust in at least one brand (YouGov, September 2025), 66% say they have boycotted a brand as a result.
Given news and opinions travel faster than my kids to the paddling pool this week, we’ve all seen and feared headlines showing that, the cost of brands getting comms wrong has gone up.
At the same time, briefs are asking more than ever – more proof, more specificity, more impact – in an environment that is more crowded and more sceptical. And yet, the starting point often looks familiar: segmentation, optimisation, targeting.
Marketing has become exceptionally good at finding people. We can model, activate and personalise with extraordinary precision. But, as tech and platforms advance and become more accessible, precision alone isn’t a silver bullet – but it is an important baseline.
When most brands can find the right person, at the right moment, with the right message, communication starts to risk commoditisation.
The advantage no longer sits in access and reach, it sits in understanding. Many plans answer who to reach and how to reach them. They are less clear on why that person should care.
Belonging in Britain, created with our partners Global, set out to explore what identity is made of and where it becomes visible, shared, and influential. Our first study found that identity does not live in isolation, it plays out in the groups people choose to belong to. We discovered that tapping into the communities people belong to is a more effective and more durable route to connection than dividing audiences into the binary, reductive demographics that have long dominated media planning.
But research is only as valuable as it is current. So, we went back with our questions and another year’s worth of cultural change to account for.
Despite a year of headlines dominated by division, debate, and disagreement, we were surprised to find that Britain was not becoming more fragmented. Belonging was actually growing. People were actively finding each other through communities built around the things they love. Connection wasn’t disappearing, it was simply happening somewhere the commentators – and their algorithm – can’t easily see. Communities are environments which hold up a mirror to who we are, how we want to be seen, our values, and where we want to be.
At a point where consumer confidence is still well below the dizzy heights of a decade ago, communities are where we can find some of the most commercially useful mindsets in the country. For example, among people in communities:
- 77% feel a sense of agency, saying they have choice and control over their lives, compared with 46% of the general public.
- 63% feel confident about their own and Britain’s future, compared with 51% nationally.
- 86% have taken some form of action as a result of something seen or heard in their community.
Trust. Confidence. Agency. Readiness to act. These are not soft signals, they are the conditions marketers often spend millions trying to manufacture, but here, they already exist.
It would be easy to misread this as a transactional and executional opportunity, so let me be clear; it is not an invitation for brands to barge into people’s most meaningful spaces waving a campaign mechanic. Nobody joins a community in the hope of becoming a touchpoint on a media plan.
The more useful interpretation is to consider that communities are one of the clearest windows we have into how influence actually works. Inside communities, influence is exchanged, not just delivered. It moves through organisers, experts, creators, moderators, teammates, regulars, local voices, friends of friends, the person who always knows what’s happening before everyone else does.
These are people who understand the codes of that space – the tone, the rituals, the in-jokes, the expectations. And so, the context shapes how messages land – or whether they land at all.
Without that context, communication risks becoming generic – and generic communication is easy to ignore, and even easier to replace. The risk is without insight, communication collapses into sameness. We’ve all been bombarded by another message, another impression, with little to distinguish it, anchor it, or make us want to pass it on.
For brands, the real opportunity with communities is to learn from them.
That means treating communities as an input into strategy, not merely an output channel. Before asking where the brand could appear, ask what the community reveals about the audience – from who they are to how they think. What do people value here? What are they trying to become better at? What do they need help with? What would feel genuinely useful? What would feel out of place? What would feel clumsy, or worse, extractive? What role could a brand credibly play, if any?
These are better briefing questions than “What does our target audience over index against?”
Unlocking rich, real human insight that sparks new approaches for comms is an art our industry – especially on the media side – seems to be forgetting. Applying these questions move us from thinking about data points to thinking about people with lived context. They help us move from ‘Running shoe intender’ to ‘New runner trying to feel legitimate’, or from ‘Sports fan’ to ‘Someone whose week is shaped by ritual, loyalty and shared emotion’. That shift is where competitive advantage lives.
At the same time, different types of communities lend themselves to different roles – which means our business objectives should guide how we leverage communities:
- Shared interest groups are powerful for discovery: they are where people are exposed to new products, services, experiences and ideas through the enthusiasm of others.
- Belief-based communities can help shape opinion, because they already gather around values and points of view.
- Shared life experience or characteristics groups can influence lifestyle choices and behaviour change, often because advice comes with lived credibility.
- Location-based communities can drive exploration, visits and real-world action, because proximity makes the next step feel natural.
Now, this does not mean that every campaign needs a community activation. But it does mean that every campaign can benefit from understanding where community sits in the audience’s life, and whether that could help answer the brief, or shape the message, the media role or the experience.
Precision still has a crucial role to play by helping us locate the individual. Community helps us understand the human context that makes communication land.
In an increasingly commoditised communications environment, the brands that audiences will take notice of and resonate with will be those ones who took the time to understand them well enough to truly connect.
To explore the Key Insights from this year’s research and get your copy of the full report, click here.