For decades, marketing and consumer research have been built on the promise of the persona. A tidy, fictional archetype that captures the average customer in a handful of bullet points. She has a name. She has a stock photo. She’s 34, lives in the suburbs, enjoys yoga, and buys organic granola on Thursdays. t’s neat. It’s tidy. And it’s often misleading.
The problem with personas is that the modern consumer is not static, nor do they live in a vacuum.
Personas:
- Oversimplify complexity. Reducing diverse groups into single representatives.
- Lock thinking in stereotypes. Anchoring product, marketing, and service decisions to an imagined character rather than real human behaviour.
- Ignore fluidity. Consumers shift preferences daily depending on context, mood, influence, and community.
And here’s the uncomfortable truth. We’ve never been less defined by demographic checkboxes and never more defined by the tribes we choose to belong to.
A tribe is not about who people are on paper, it’s about what they believe, value, and signal to others. Tribes are bound by shared meaning. They are made up of people who might look wildly different demographically, but who speak the same cultural language, share rituals, habits and in jokes and who rally around the same causes, aesthetics and aspirations.
For example, its increasingly likely that a Gen Z student in Berlin and a Gen X professional in São Paulo might belong to the same DIY Sustainability tribe, swapping tips, sourcing the same niche brands and validating each other’s lifestyle choices online.
Tribes are becoming increasingly important in research. When we investigate tribes rather than personas, we stop asking, ‘Who is our customer’ and start asking ‘What are they part of?’
This shift matters because in this day and age communities drive behaviour. People act in alignment with the values, aesthetics, and norms of the tribes they belong to, even more than with their personal preferences. Age, gender and income become less predictive than the shared symbols and codes of a tribe.
Tribal belonging explains why some customers become loyal evangelists and others remain transactional.
Tribe-led research requires different questions and methods:
- Ethnography and netnography to observe behaviour in context — physical and digital.
- Language analysis to decode the symbols, slang, and cues that bond members.
- Journey mapping not by persona, but by tribe touchpoints – the places and moments where tribal identity is reinforced.
So, instead of persona (Lisa, 34, Suburban Mom) we identify tribe.
The Consciously Local: Members who prioritise neighbourhood sourcing, product provenance, distrust mass production and derive identity from being seen as supporting local.
Marketing to personas is like drawing a map based on outdated landmarks — you might recognise the scenery, but the roads have changed.
In a hyper-connected, post-demographic world, tribes are the true engines of preference, loyalty, and advocacy. Understanding them isn’t a creative luxury; it’s a commercial necessity.
The brands that win in the next decade won’t ask ‘Who is our customer?’. Instead, they’ll ask, ‘Who are they standing with, and why?’
When was the last time your research genuinely surprised you because you looked at a tribe, not a persona? What did you find?
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