Belonging: At Home in the Crowd
Maria Cury in conversation with author David Sikorjak and musician Clyde Lawrence
Over the past few decades there has been a fraying of our social fabric, illustrated by growing distrust in institutions, political polarisation and the diminishing of local communities and physical spaces. We are more lonely and fragmented than ever and yet at the same time, we see the rise of so many seemingly easy ways to connect with one another, especially online. When we talk about issues like how to make sense of our post-lockdown landscape, how to build inclusive organisations in an increasingly remote world or how to get communities to come together to tackle problems like climate change, what we are really talking about is belonging, and how to get it right. But what is belonging really, and how is it created? We put this to author David Sikorjak and musician Clyde Lawrence – as well as ReD partner Maria Cury – to understand belonging in sports, in music, and beyond, and to discover what lessons we can learn and apply in our work across industries and in our lives.
The text below is an edited and condensed transcript of the event.
Let’s start with the power of belonging. David, what’s special about sports fandom?
David Sikorjak: When I was at Madison Square Garden, I wanted to understand what this ecosystem of fandom was about. Later, when I started consulting on my own, whatever space in sports I was studying, the same thing came out; fans were doing this not because of adoration for LeBron or the Cowboys or the Yankees, it was because there were other people involved. There was a connection that was fuelling their engagement. So my co-author [Ben Valenta] and I had this thought: ‘Well, if this is true, if social relationships are incentivising the crazy behaviors we see in sports fans, then fans should have more friends’. We ran a bunch of surveys, and that translated to the bigger the fan, the more friends. But it’s not only that, the bigger the fan the more they interact with those friends, the more they value those relationships, the closer you report being to your mom, to your dad, to your spouse, to your kids, and so on. From this early insight, we saw that really what’s going on underneath this is actually a social good, a device in our culture for connecting with other people through something that most people have some command of. We can all talk sports.
Clyde, you have built a thriving community around your band, but it seems like not all of that is driven by a love of music. How have you thought about building your community and fan base?
Clyde Lawrence: I think that we strive to create a community of people that are hopefully really enjoying our music, but are also enjoying the story that our music is telling. Once in a while when I check our fan chatrooms, so much of what’s being discussed on there isn’t our music, even though the only reason why those people arrived at those places was our music. What they’re talking about are natural extensions of our music, like funny TV shows or things that feel in line with the brand of our music. So it’s almost this offshoot community that forms and we try to do as much as we can to foster that. I think the natural course of the trajectory of our career and how we’ve chosen to build it contributes to that in a lot of ways. We’re an independent band, I think that’s a massive difference. By just having the trajectory of our career be this slow burn where each fan is coming to us by literal word of mouth – obviously there’s a million ways you can find us on Tik-Tok or on TV – but the fact that it has been this slow burn, I think has a natural way of engendering people into a community because they don’t feel like something’s being forced upon them. If you have a song that blows up overnight, when you haven’t built that upon the foundation of a big fan base, then what you have is a bunch of fans of a song and not a bunch of fans of an artist.
We saw that really what’s going on underneath this is actually a social good, a device in our culture for connecting with other people – David Sikorjak
Maria Cury: I think part of what you’re describing is precisely what we’ve seen in work that we’ve done recently around these moments where you feel you have a commonality with others, and that commonality is made visible to you. What becomes really fascinating is pinpointing the commonalities that in that moment are really relevant and important to know, reinforce, or double down on. One of the things that we’ve been unpacking is that belonging is a feeling, right? We know it when we feel it. But it also has certain functions in our lives. It offers us different things. It could be that it provides us with a safe space to be vulnerable or experiment with different parts of our identity that we’re not ready to broadcast out into other spaces. Or it could be that it provides us with knowledge or connections. But there are these different ways in which belonging really serves a function as well as a feeling in our lives.
DS: If you’re a sports fan, you have a tool. It is a device you have to just say hello to somebody. But it’s not actually just hello, it’s: ‘Should Ronaldo play the next game?’ and that leads to a conversation. You talk about these things because we just want to connect – that’s all we want to do as humans – and these are just easy ways into a deeper conversation about life.
Clyde, a high proportion of your fans don’t just follow you, they love you. How have you and your band members managed to actually build those superfans?
CL: We’re always trying to find ways to pad what we know is an incredibly awesome layer of super fans with a massive amount of other fans. But ultimately, the people we care most about are those superfans. A lot of it is about maintaining a really close, direct connection with your fans. Me and my sister are the two lead singers of the band, so there’s already this inherent family dynamic. I think that people find that they really know us as people through both our music and our social media channels. There are a lot of bands or artists who aren’t always themselves: they’re wearing crazy outfits and everything about their brand is intentionally inaccessible in often a very appealing and artistic way. That’s just not what we’ve chosen to do.
DS: One recommendation when we did the MSG project was that you shouldn’t worry as much about communicating garden to fan, as fan to fan connection. So how can you accentuate that experience for them? So I love that you guys came to that. They’re bonded by each other and they’re connected to you guys so much more than if it was just the music.
If you have a song that blows up overnight, when you haven’t built that upon the foundation of a big fan base, then what you have is a bunch of fans of a song and not a bunch of fans of an artist – Clyde Lawrence
We are living in a society that’s more fractured than ever, where people feel more alone than ever. How do you see sports playing a role in these bigger challenges?
DS: Where writing the book got interesting for us was when we were tapping into issues of polarisation. We were thinking about how divided we are as a country, about the hate between Democrats and Republicans, about how we have grown separate. There are things that have nothing to do with politics that signal whether you’re a Republican or Democrat, and that’s kind of funny, but also really dangerous because it creates a deeper in and out group. Many issues of polarisation were hot at the time in 2020. Take something like mask wearing; that was polarised for obvious reasons. We saw Democrats up here as adherents and Republicans down here. But when you cut underneath that and break them out by how big of a fan they are, you saw movement within both groups. The same held for when we looked at issues or perceptions on race; you saw Democrats up here, Republicans down here. But when you broke them out by how big of a fan they were, the bigger the fan, the more open they were. So the higher the approval of Black Lives Matter amongst Republicans, the bigger the fans they were. Long story short, sports breaks those two stacks. There’s not many things in our culture that allow us to connect with other people that are different than us and that the softening that we see around polarisation is happening partly because of that contact and partly because your obsession with sports diminishes those things that might be polarising us.
There are these different ways in which belonging really serves a function as well as a feeling in our lives – Maria Cury
These days, we typically congregate more around individuals as opposed to institutions or movements. What does this say about the means of building community today and how it’s changed over time?
CL: I think that a lot of it has to do with being a fan of a song or being a fan of even just the music specifically versus the people surrounding it. Like those people that were huge Bob Dylan fans in that time, many of them were as big of a fan of what Bob Dylan represented as his music. It’s an interesting question of whether that’s able to exist more then or now, because now you have more access to those people through social media and there’s more of an expectation that those people are putting themselves out to you every day. On the other hand, maybe in an earlier era where those artists or those individuals were less accessible, there’s more of an opportunity for fans to mythologise them a bit.
MC: I think it speaks to some of the broader shifts that we’ve seen societally around there being a decline in a lot of the institutions that we would normally feel a sense of belonging to, whether that’s declining enrolment in universities and colleges or feeling like you can’t trust the healthcare system. And so turning more to these individuals – whether that’s online creators or a particular artist, or even just an interest or a passion – we see people turning to them to find a source of community because those more traditional institutions are just not quite what they used to be in terms of being able to source a sense of belonging.
The person that listens to you on Spotify is a totally different level of fan than the person who is going to come to your show, and different again to the person who’s going to come to your show early and buy a shirt – Clyde Lawrence
MK: A sign that we’ve seen across our research is that it is much easier for folks to feel shallow belonging nowadays; you have this sort of shallow ability to follow individuals at your fingertips right? You can sit there at 2AM and scroll through TikTok and feel part of something. But that doesn’t actually connect you to other people. You get a dopamine hit from that initial sense of, ‘Oh, there’s something here where I’m part of,’ but you don’t actually build fans, you don’t actually build community.
CL: Something we experience difficulty with all the time is the ability to use analytics to predict how one metric of a certain type of fan could lead to a different type of fan. People that are very analytically minded are always telling us to look at exactly how many Spotify listeners we have to determine where we should play. And yes, that is a good idea. But the person that listens to you on Spotify is a totally different level of fan than the person who is going to come to your show, and different again to the person who’s going to come to your show early and buy a shirt. You might have more casual fans in one place and more serious ones in another. For us, the only great predictor of how many people will come to our next show is how many people came to our last show and multiplying it by some assumed amount of growth.
DS: What we found in sports is the compounding factor of fandom. So it matters. I can predict your engagement in the NFL by your engagement in college football, college basketball, the NHL, and baseball. The more of those sports you check off, the bigger fan you are; one leads to another. You have baseball friends, you have football friends. You and they might overlap and they might give you incrementally more friends. One provocative thought I have is that if NFL want to deepen their fandom in this country, what they should do is help their casual fans be NBA and MLB and NHL fans, because if you plug them into other networks that’s going to get them into fantasy leagues and get them deeper into NFL.
How are developments in the metaverse and the rise of NFTs and Web3 shifting behaviours and norms around fandom?
CL: I think that there are increasingly easy ways for artists to gamify their fans. And I think that those are amazing tools and they’re also things to be a little bit wary of. Something I spend a lot of time thinking about is how to take advantage of this incredible ability to gamify the idea of being a Lawrence fan and stratify the different levels of fandom without taking the artistry out of it, because I think there is something so intrinsic about that that is important to people actually connecting with the music. Our inbox is filled with a new tech start-up every day that’s like: ‘Oh, I’m turning your everything into an NFT’, and you can do all these different things that are all really smart individually, but the saturation of that could create some challenges for artists.
MC: I’m skeptical about people wholesale moving into these virtual means of connecting and completely disregarding in real life connection. One of the surprising things that we’ve seen across studies with young adults is how much of a premium they really place on engaging with communities where there is the opportunity or the promise to potentially connect IRL. They may engage in a light way with these more ephemeral or virtual-only kinds of communities or groups, but it’s the in-person ones where they say: ‘Okay, I’m going to invest more, even if I just feel the potential that one day I could meet in person with this group.’
CL: In terms of the digital versus real life divide, at least for me, I like to think about ways to make digital engagement with fans something that’s not a replacement or a worse, less connected version of what could have been a real engagement, but instead something that’s only made possible by digital. For example, when Covid-19 happened, I was four shows into a 35 show tour and we went home and cancelled the rest of the tour. But then we thought, what do we want to do? I think we were the first band to go on what we call a virtual tour. A lot of other bands were doing virtual concerts, but they were kind of just making them feel like a concert that you were seeing a livestream of. But we decided to do something that doesn’t resemble a concert you can come to in real life at all. We decided to do something that’s an entirely different thing that could only be done digitally. And that’s something that even once the world is back open, people might want to see us do digitally again and then come see the show in person.
I like to think about ways to make digital engagement with fans something that’s not a replacement or a worse, less connected version of what could have been a real engagement, but instead something that’s only made possible by digital – Clyde Lawrence
David Sikorjak
David is the co-author of Fans Have More Friends (2022). Prior executive at Publicis, NBC, and Madison Square Garden, he now heads Dexterity Consulting that blends research, analysis, and empathy to transform how brands think. David is a husband, father, yogi, little league coach, and Yankees/Knicks/Jets fan.
Clyde Lawrence
Clyde is the co-lead singer and songwriter of Lawrence, an eight-piece soul-pop band comprised of musician friends from childhood and college. The band has gained a devoted following for its high-energy, keyboard-driven sound, which features tight, energetic horns and explosive lead vocals. Their latest album is Hotel TV released on Beautiful Mind Records.
Maria Cury
Maria is a lead on ReD’s technology practice, studying the role of new technology in daily life to advise on product development, visioning, and strategy. She has worked extensively on projects relating to belonging and our relationship to technology, and has published on advancing applied ethnography and developing mixed methods approaches to ReD’s work.
Moderated by ReD Partner Mikkel Krenchel
This conversation took place at ReD’s NYC office on Tuesday December 6th, 2022. ReD Dialogues are events that bring together voices from the humanities, business, and the arts for curious and explorative conversations on the world’s most business critical issues.