For the Culture

However, as most anthropologists will attest, humans are wired to live in curated collectives, as opposed to mass societies. So people formed new tribes within a larger society in order to find a “place” where they belonged. The French sociologist Michel Maffesoli referred to these new tribes as “neotribes.” The behavioral patterns within these neo

As Bill Bernback, cofounder of the advertising agency DDB, put it, “You don’t persuade people through intellect. You do it through their passions.”

Once we take on an identity marker, either by choice (subscription) or endowment (ascription), we implicitly inherit the cultural characteristics of the community through the interworking of the meaning-making system. Let’s explore this further by unpacking the systems.

Anaïs Nin is famously quoted as saying, “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” That is, the truth is not as objective as we would like to believe. The truth is culturally mediated and socially negotiated and constructed based on our communal view of reality—our beliefs.

Behaviors are the set of actions, manners, rituals, traditions, and ceremonies in which members of a community engage.

Durkheim argued that members who subscribe to a particular culture tend to act in concert to promote social solidarity among its members. He referred to this phenomenon as “collective effervescence.” This concept is superpowerful because it suggests that what we believe, what we do, how we make meaning of the world, and how we communicate are all b

Subsequently, the brand becomes a receipt of our identity that helps communicate who we are and how we want to be seen in the social world. Our identity and the corresponding cultural characteristics to which we subscribe are the biggest drivers of our behavior. We make sure that our actions and our belief systems are aligned. Otherwise, we find ou

It is an extension of who we are.

Culture is a realized meaning-making system. More accurately, it is a system of systems—a set of interdependent principles and mechanisms that all inform each other—which, collectively, influences practically everything that we do because of who we are and how we see the world.

Therefore, our cultural affiliation is anchored by how we self-identify—the categorical labels we use to tell people who we are and to associate with other people based on who they are.