Who is your brand's out-group? What Reagan, Obama, Ford and Miller Lite all have in common

By Aaron Reid
April 11, 2011
A compelling out-group can be one of the most galvanizing forces of in-group loyalty. This is as true for playground cliques as it is for presidential candidates. This human truth applies to brands as well, and you can use it to your advantage in the way you communicate with your customers. Whether you use inspirational positive emotion or shameful negative emotion to motivate in-group loyalty is up to you and your brand’s values.
The “mean girls” in school galvanize loyalty by castigating out-group classmates in the cafeteria, on the school bus and in the locker room. This in-group clique carries a lot of brand power and it is motivated through the negative emotions of fear and social shame. Human sensitivity to social castigation is profound and, as David Brooks points out in The Social Animal, is rooted in evolutionary pressures to be accepted as part of the group in order to maximize  the propagation of our genes.
Miller Lite has used the power of social castigation to great effect in its recent campaign about the taste of its light beer. In this clip below, note the look on the bartender’s face after the fella (the target audience) says he doesn’t care how his light beer tastes.
[fve]http://youtu.be/kqM0tKwJw-E[/fve]
Did you catch the social castigation? Check this one out…
[fve]http://youtu.be/FYFgZf3q8gA[/fve]
No man wants to be looked at in that way. And certainly, no man wants to be laughed at by attractive women as illustrated in this one…
[fve]http://youtu.be/G9uG8akSPyk[/fve]
This is selling with shame. The implicit message is that these men should be ashamed for not caring about the taste of their light beer. You can bet that the next time they’re faced with the choice of ordering a light beer from an attractive bartender, that sense of shame will be sitting there, somewhere in their subconscious, motivating their choice in the direction of Miller Lite.
A brand’s out-group manipulation doesn’t need to be as blatant as it is in the Miller commercials. Ford has used an interesting out-group manipulation in its recent campaign for the F-150 featuring Dennis Leary as the narrator. See if you can tell who the out-group is in this clip…
[fve]http://youtu.be/ILi93hxe7gM[/fve]
Certainly, this audience doesn’t need a “bunch of donut-eaters in a focus group” telling them what they want in a truck. Did you hear how pejoratively Leary says that phrase?

Yikes! The out-group here seems to be anyone who is weak or might try to take away your independence by telling you what you want in a truck. Of course, the great irony here is that Ford is actually telling you what you want in a truck implicitly through the ad. No matter, this ad effectively drives subconscious connections of the self with the Ford brand as we revealed in this ad test using Sentient’s subconscious Automatic Brand Association methodology to assess automatic in-group associations with the Ford brand after viewing the ad.


Note that the effect is not captured at the conscious level, but rather it is captured only by tapping into the consumer subconscious. It is also important to note that this subconscious manipulation is highly predictive of preference for the Ford brand.
If you’re not comfortable with these out-group manipulations, there are many examples of in-group manipulations that have worked to great effect by focusing on positive emotions such as pride and hope. Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama are great political brands that have used positive emotions build energy and inspire loyalty with their in-groups.
Reagan had perhaps the ultimate out-group in communism and the Soviet Union during the Cold-war.
[fve]http://youtu.be/WjWDrTXMgF8[/fve]
Railing against all things anti-American and anti-capitalism galvanized a great sense of American pride and boosted the Reagan political brand (these effects can be found still to this day). Even now, “Socialism” and “Socialists” are great out-groups used (largely) by the political right to galvanize support within the base.
Interestingly, the Obama campaign also had a strong out-group to rally against during the 2008 presidential campaign: namely, the status-quo and feelings of hopelessness after eight difficult years in the world with wars and economic decline. The Obama brand rallied against this out-group with an inspirational brand message of change using the emotion of hope to motivate action and build loyalty.

 
The examples go on and on, and so we end with the question with which we began: who is your brand’s out-group? And if I may add another, how will you use that out-group to emotionally motivate loyalty within your in-group customer base?
 
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Aaron Reid

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Founder & CEO, Sentient Decision Science, Inc.


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