The Belonging Effect: Why Employees Who Get Branded Merch Feel More Connected at Work

For his dissertation at London College of Fashion, our founder ran a survey of 173 UK employees. Some had received company-branded merchandise from their employer. Some hadn't. He tested four things: organisational identification, sense of belonging, brand advocacy, and retention intent, each measured on a validated seven-point scale.

All four came back statistically significant, at p < .001. But one gap was bigger than the rest, by a clear margin.

The strongest finding in the whole study

Sense of belonging, measured using Hagerty and Patusky's (1995) validated scale, produced a Cohen's d of 1.006. That's a large effect by any standard, and it's the largest of the four hypotheses tested: organisational identification came in at 0.735, brand advocacy at 0.922, retention intent at 0.817. Belonging topped all of them.

In practical terms, employees who'd received company merchandise scored 5.68 out of 7 on the belonging scale, on average. Employees who hadn't scored 4.56. That's a 1.12-point gap, backed by a t-test of t = 5.924 (p < .001) and a reliability score for the scale itself of Cronbach's alpha = .883, well above the .80 threshold for good internal consistency.

Break the scale down into its four individual questions and the gap holds at every one:

• 82.6% of employees who'd received merch agreed "I feel valued as a member of my team," against 50.7% of those who hadn't.
• 85.9% agreed "I feel a sense of connection with my colleagues," against 52.3%, the widest gap of the four.
• 88.0% agreed "I feel comfortable being myself at work," against 58.5%.
• 84.8% agreed "I feel my contributions matter to the organisation," against 58.4%.

Every item moved in the same direction, by roughly 26 to 34 percentage points. That consistency is what makes the number trustworthy. This isn't one outlier question dragging the average up.

Why belonging, specifically

The dissertation paired that employee survey with a separate, concurrent strand of research: interviews with five UK SME founders and senior decision-makers, across hospitality, architecture, biopharma consultancy, IT managed services, and sustainability, about what merchandise actually did for their teams. Two of them, independently, reached for the same word: tribe.

"It's not really about the clothing itself, it's about belonging and tribe. If you look at our restaurant, you'd say the product is steak and chips, drinks, service, ambiance. But if you go further, why do people come back? It's about a feeling and a sense of belonging... Have you ever read Seth Godin's book Purple Cow? The principle is about belonging to a tribe, a bit like music, you have your favourite band of the moment. To build that following, you need to constantly draw your early adopters in."

— Managing Director, hospitality group (~120 employees)

An IT managed services CEO in Scotland put it more plainly:

"It gives people a sense of belonging, a feeling of being part of something. From an internal perspective it's good for staff morale. If people are smartly dressed in branded clothing and feel good in it, it creates a sense of pride in the brand and a desire to represent it well."

Neither founder had seen the survey results. Neither knew belonging would turn out to be the largest effect in the whole dataset. They just described, in their own words, roughly what the numbers ended up showing.

What this means if you're deciding whether merch is worth it

Is branded merchandise the cause of stronger belonging? Almost certainly not in isolation. Companies that invest in merchandise tend to invest in their people more broadly, and belonging is shaped by dozens of things a T-shirt has nothing to do with: management, workload, how people are actually treated day to day.

But a well-chosen branded item is one of the most visible, tangible, and accessible places a company can signal that someone belongs to something. Not a novelty pen nobody keeps. The hoodie someone actually wears at their desk. The jacket someone's proud enough of that they bring up who made it. It's the reason we push clients toward things people would choose to wear anyway, not the cheapest item with a logo stamped on the side.

A reminder that belonging isn't built by a logo. It's built by whether people feel like the thing they're wearing was made for them, not just labelled with a name.

If you're thinking about what that could look like for your team, get in touch.