The Business of Belonging by David Spinks

Author:David Spinks [Spinks, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781119766117
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2021-03-11T00:00:00+00:00

Creating Intentional Barriers to Entry

It might seem counterintuitive, but making it a bit more difficult to join your community, or making it difficult to reach a certain status in your community, will tend to create a stronger sense of social identity and belonging for those members.

Effort justification is a concept in social psychology that stems from Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance.2 It describes a person's tendency to attribute a higher value to an outcome that they had to work harder to achieve.

We see effort justification play out in a lot of social groups from military training, to pledging a sorority or fraternity, to converting to a religion, to trying out for a sports team. Groups that require a great investment of time, energy, or work in order to gain membership can become very strong social identities and highly committed communities.

Please don't start hazing your customers. But you can think about the requirements that someone needs to meet in order to join your community, or reach a status within your community.

To become an Airbnb “Super Host,” there are a range of requirements that hosts must meet. They can't cancel bookings, they have to maintain a minimum rating, and they must reach a minimum number of bookings in order to qualify.

Yelp has a range of requirements as well around how many reviews a Yelp user must have in order to be invited into the Yelp Elite.

Our inclination is to make the process of joining our communities as easy as possible. But the easier it is to get into your community, the less value people may apply to membership.

Some communities take the simple step of adding an application to join the community. So you can't just sign up, you have to fill out a form and answer questions to essentially show that you are a good fit for the community. That simple process of having to apply can make people value membership more greatly, and feel confident that the group will be curated and safe since every member is vetted.

Other communities make their community open to anyone, but make it difficult to reach a specific status within the community. For example, anyone can join the CMX community, but you must apply and go through an interview to become a CMX Connect host and start hosting local events under the CMX brand.

The members of communities with higher requirements are very proud of their membership. When they meet another member, they feel an immediate connection to each other. It's because they all went through the same struggle to get there. They all had to earn it.

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