Can Hermès Be Your Friend?
By Charlotte Vangsgaard, Eliot Salandy Brown, Lara Casciola, Johanna Li, and Olav Stavnem
What can luxury companies learn from a soft drink campaign and a Berlin nightclub about belonging?
Three things: brands cannot replace a true sense of deep belonging, exclusivity matters when it comes to luxury, and by focussing on enabling a sense of belonging between people, brands can strengthen their role as builders of community.
Brands cannot replace a deep sense of belonging
Through our research, we have identified three ingredients that contribute to a sense of belonging: feeling accepted, shared values, and reciprocity. We want to feel accepted by our family, friends, and social networks (1). Our values guide how we share and reciprocate our time, emotions, thoughts, money, or presence with people with whom we want to belong. These values are not stable. For instance, as we age, we continuously renegotiate with our families and friends what it means to be a husband, a daughter, or a confidant. We negotiate what we should reciprocate.
Companies can never offer the same emotional depth and instant responsiveness as human beings. But when companies stand on a deep understanding of their customers, they can offer us much more than a product or a service. They can offer us a reflection of who we are and who we want to be. Their brand can mimic a feeling of belonging. Most often, this feeling of belonging is weak, if there at all. However, the most refined brands have recognised that forging true belonging between brands and humans is impossible.
People want to be accepted by exclusive groups
One lever that brands utilise addresses the human drive to feel accepted by others. For it to be most desirable, it should feel within reach but not be immediately accessible, a contradiction famously captured by Groucho Marx when he said, “I wouldn’t want to belong to a club that would have me as a member.” Belonging must be verified by others in the group through acceptance.
Although they sit on opposite ends of the brand spectrum, the Birkin bag and Berlin nightclub Berghain, both excel in the game of exclusive acceptance. The Hermès sales associates create hurdles for eager Birkin fans to jump over until they finally receive a stamp of approval via a coveted bag, perhaps even, if extremely “lucky” in the colourway listed on their wishlist. You cannot simply walk in and buy the bag regardless of how much money you have. The sales associates have to deem you “worthy” of the bag, which you may achieve through purchasing other Hermès products over years and years while patiently displaying both loyalty and passion for the brand. Acquiring a bag becomes a symbol of acceptance – acceptance into an exclusive group of people who embody wealth and class as defined by the French luxury house.
At Berghain, the Hermès sales associate is replaced with a heavily tattooed bouncer, and similarly, you cannot simply walk in. Seeing the bouncer wave their hand towards the door is the Birkin of Berghain, a wave of acceptance into an exclusive social group. This form of acceptance, experienced both by the woman who has been offered a Birkin and by the young person stepping into Berghain, is a lever in activating a sense of belonging. However, where the two differ is that behind the doors of Berghain is a place designed to enable community, whereas behind a Birkin the community remains imagined. It is not to say that a fashion item cannot be a conversation starter but luxury brands such as Hermès do not act as a host of real life community building in the way that a physical space such as Berghain might.
Companies should focus on enabling a sense of belonging between people
While it may seem unfair to compare the ability of a nightclub to that of a luxury bag to enable a sense of belonging, it highlights a second lever that companies – luxury or not – can activate: enabling opportunities for their customers to build belonging between one another.
The immensely successful Share-a-Coke campaign, where Coca-Cola replaced its own logo on the bottles with the most popular names embodies this. In the U.S. alone, the campaign incentivised 1.25 million young people to have their first sip of the soft drink. Many people would gift or – if far away from each other – send digital pictures of bottles with their friends’ names on the label to each other. Coca-Cola realised that it could be the intermediate link of belonging – that it could be the enabling factor between people. Simple: buy a coke and share it with a friend. The campaign reminded us of our social bonds with friends and made it easy to do small, unexpected acts of kindness for them. Recent research shows that this means much more to the receiver than the initiator presumes (2).
Luxury brands are well versed in the arts of exclusive acceptance. This is the first lever and Hermès knows better than anyone how to use it. However, the second lever is yet to be pulled by luxury brands explicitly: enabling belonging between people. Learning from institutions designed for communities like Berghain and brands who position products as conduits of connection like Coca-Cola, luxury brands, in their own way can play an active role in strengthening communities. Amid our crisis of belonging, companies should offer a real community behind the gates of exclusivity.
Reflecting on your own brand’s values and its relationship with belonging, here are three questions we recommend that you consider:
How does your brand play with exclusivity and acceptance?
Does (or could) your brand facilitate belonging between customers?
What might your customers get out of a deeper experience of belonging through your brand?
References
Here we draw upon our own research and the work of Alison, Cobigo and Stuart (2012) in their meta-study “Conceptualising belonging“, Disability and Rehabilitation, 35:12.
Liu, Rim, Lauren Min, and Kate Min (2022), “The Surprise of Reaching Out: Appreciated More Than We Think”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Interpersonal Relations and Group Processes, https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/psp-pspi0000402.pdf