What is belonging, why is it so important to understanding what makes people tick, and how do we study it effectively?

To simply ask someone, “Where do you belong?” is an almost impossible question to answer. That’s because belonging isn’t just a feeling or a conscious affiliation. It’s woven into culturally contextual rituals, practices, interactions and behaviours, shared stories, rites of passage and mythologies.

To understand belonging, we need to explore how people live it.

This is where ethnography offers something distinctive. It seeks to understand people in the context of their everyday lived experiences — not just what they say, but what they do, how they construct their identities, the meanings they attach to objects and relationships, and what they hold sacred.

Belonging is something we do

Belonging may be experienced emotionally, but it is often made visible through behaviour.

The fact that someone drives an electric car, attends a Collingwood AFL game every weekend or regularly makes impulse purchases tells us relatively little on its own. It’s the cultural meanings surrounding these behaviours that reveal something deeper.

Symbolic interactionism, an analytical framework that informs ethnographic inquiry, reminds us that people act towards objects, places and one another according to the meanings they hold. These meanings are created, shared and continually negotiated through social interaction.

Consider what it means to be a dedicated Collingwood supporter.

It’s not simply attending a football match. It’s the memorabilia adorning homes and bedrooms, the folkloric stories of victories and heartbreaking losses, the intimate familiarity with players and coaches, and the conversations about everything happening on and off the field. It’s loyalty inherited across generations, stalwarts turning up rain, hail or shine, and the cultural politics, rivalries and controversies that shape the community’s identity.

Belonging is also about boundaries — the shared understandings of who is part of a community, who stands outside it, and what it takes to be recognised as one of its own.

These are not incidental details. They’re the cultural practices through which belonging is expressed, negotiated, reinforced and passed on.

For a brand like Four’N Twenty, such understanding could provide far richer material for an advertising strategy than simply knowing how frequently football supporters attend games or purchase pies.

Observing and inquiring into repeated actions, routines, rituals, relationships, objects and spaces — and understanding what they mean to the people involved — is central to the ethnographer’s purpose.

What questions alone cannot reveal

An ethnographic study might begin with a conventional business question: How do we encourage drivers of petrol vehicles to consider electric cars?
But meaningful ethnographic fieldwork cannot be confined to a predetermined list of questions. It requires the researcher to immerse themselves in participants’ worlds, allowing unexpected observations, objects, stories and interactions to guide the inquiry.

Consider the old hubcap hanging on a storeroom door. To an outsider, it’s little more than a discarded car part. To its owner, it might be a treasured reminder of their first Holden.

Or the dusty bottle of Castrol engine oil sitting on a garage shelf, evoking memories of learning to change the oil alongside Dad as a teenager.

Then there are the revving engines in a McDonald’s car park on Parramatta Road at 11 pm, signalling a gathering of young men and women from across Western Sydney, proudly showing off the muscle cars they’ve spent countless hours restoring and modifying.

Look beyond the cars themselves, and we might discover deeply personal stories of family, masculinity, friendship, aspiration, craftsmanship, status and community.

These objects and practices are not simply evidence of product preferences. They are potential expressions of identity and belonging.

Importantly, their meanings cannot be assumed by the researcher. They must be explored with participants, through observation, conversation and interpretation.

This is where ethnography can provide a distinctive contribution to marketing and insights.

Surveys can tell us how widely attitudes and behaviours are distributed. Focus groups can reveal shared perceptions, disagreements and the ways people discuss their experiences. Ethnography adds another dimension: understanding how meanings are constructed and lived within the social, cultural and material contexts of everyday life.

Participant-led immersion allows us to move beyond stated preferences and towards the personal histories and collective meanings that shape people’s relationships with products, brands and communities.

For marketers, this can be gold.

Making ethnography accessible at scale

Traditionally, in-depth ethnographic research has demanded considerable time, investment and specialist resources. Extended immersion in people’s everyday lives is not always commercially feasible. Add the cost and complexity of documentary filmmaking — recording fieldwork, selecting evidence and crafting stories that communicate the findings — and the investment becomes even more substantial.

But technology has fundamentally changed what’s possible.

Remote video platforms allow researchers to enter participants’ homes and everyday environments without the logistical demands of physical travel.

With participant guidance, cameras can become a means of exploring meaningful objects, spaces, routines and interactions from the participant’s point of view.

Smartphones have also made participant-generated video diaries and self-documentation far more accessible. People can record experiences as they happen, in their own time and in the environments where their lives unfold.

The broader cultural familiarity with filming and sharing aspects of everyday life has helped make these approaches more practical across larger and more geographically dispersed research samples.

And increasingly intuitive video editing, transcription and analysis technologies now make it easier to organise footage, identify patterns, develop interpretations and communicate findings through compelling visual evidence and storytelling.

Yet there’s an important distinction.

A video diary is not automatically an ethnography. What makes it ethnographically valuable is the methodology behind it — the questions, observations and interpretations informed by a deeper understanding of cultural practices and social meaning.

A virtual tour of someone’s home does not, by itself, reveal the cultural meanings of the objects and spaces within it. It still takes an ethnographically informed researcher to recognise the significance of seemingly ordinary details, ask culturally relevant questions in context, and explore meanings that might otherwise remain hidden.

The opportunity is not simply to collect more video. It’s to make ethnographically informed research more accessible, scalable and integral to how organisations understand people.

If organisations want to understand belonging, they shouldn’t only ask people where they belong, what communities they identify with or whether they feel connected to a brand.

They should explore what people do, the rituals they participate in, the objects they treasure, the stories they share, the spaces they inhabit and the relationships through which they make meaning.

Technology has made it easier than ever to observe people’s everyday lives. But observing belonging is not the same as understanding it.
That still requires the curiosity, cultural sensitivity and interpretive thinking at the heart of ethnography.

And that’s why ethnography matters more than ever.

About the author

Nick Agafonoff is a qualitative researcher, ethnographer and documentary storyteller with over 25 years’ experience exploring human behaviour, culture and consumer experiences. He is the Director of Authentic Video, specialising in video ethnography, research-led documentary storytelling and helping organisations uncover and communicate insights into people’s everyday lives.

Square Holes is a cultural insight studio.

We design mixed method explorations of people and culture beyond the category,  uncovering the patterns, tensions and shifts shaping behaviour to inform strategy, inspire innovation and enable confident decisions. Our studio model brings together the right mix of thinkers, researchers and specialists for each exploration. If you’re navigating change, entering a new market, or seeking deeper understanding of people and culture, let’s start a conversation >