Identity Anchoring for Consumers

Who am I? It’s a question a lot of people are asking these days in our changing world. For marketers, this is a huge cultural shift underway. As trends shorten, people are building identity anchors. What does this mean?

Institutional trust is at an all time low. For brands and governments. Our world is changing and filled with uncertainty. There are no rules for this period of time and it will be about 10-15 years of going through this. My netnographic research is showing consumers increasingly building identity anchors. Trends are faster, but actual consumers are choosing slower.

Identity anchors are built from our habitus, our sense of who we are. Identity anchors can be a range of things; communities, rituals and belief systems that answer peoples “who am I?” Question. This can include brands. Anchors are the opposite of trends because they resist novelty. Fast stuff.

We’re in this weird period of time, so people seek some form of stability, something they can anchor themselves too and feel like they’re on a wee patch of solid ground. For marketers, you need to provide some form of anchoring with your brand.

If you’re brand is off in all directions madly chasing trends, you’re going to attract fickle customers. Not a good long term strategy in these rocky times. Massive amounts of AI sameness content isn’t helping either.

Brands need to do more social listening. Ideas for anchors don’t come from AI tools, they come from reading the cultural room, understanding the map for the territory. If your brand strategy doesn’t have any anchoring aspects to it, you risk your customers moving to ones that do. Research how your target market is building identity. There’s gold there.