One backpack advertisement says, "Reinforced stitching. Replaceable buckles." Another says, "For people who repair things instead of throwing them away."
The first tells you something about the backpack. The second tells you something about the person who might buy it: practical, resourceful, someone who takes care of things instead of treating everything as disposable. And suddenly the question is not only Is this a good backpack? It is also Is this the kind of choice someone like me would make? The advertisement has moved from describing a product to inviting you to recognize yourself.
That small shift points toward one of the most important ideas in modern rhetorical theory: identification. This article, a companion to the Reclaiming Rhetoric video, explains what Kenneth Burke meant by it, the three main ways messages build it, what research on identity and persuasion adds, and the questions to ask whenever someone says "people like us."
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What is identification in rhetoric?
Identification is the process by which a message creates a sense of connection between a speaker, an audience, and a shared way of seeing the world. The concept is closely associated with Kenneth Burke, especially his 1950 book A Rhetoric of Motives (University of California Press).
Burke wanted us to notice that persuasion involves more than presenting reasons and waiting for someone to accept them. A message can also establish a relationship. It can suggest that the speaker understands people like you, that you share an interest, a value, an experience, a commitment, maybe even a way of looking at the world. His most quoted line puts it this way:
You persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his.
(Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives, p. 55.) An ordinary argument analysis asks, What reasons is this speaker giving me? An identification analysis adds another question: What connection is this message asking me to recognize?
Burke's debt to Aristotle
Burke built this idea on a classical foundation. In the same passage he cites Aristotle's Rhetoric, where Aristotle, discussing praise, repeats a remark attributed to Socrates: "it is not difficult to praise Athenians among Athenians" (Rhetoric 1.9). Aristotle's point was that a speaker should consider what a particular audience esteems and speak to it. Burke widened the point: what Aristotle treated as a technique for praise becomes, for Burke, a general condition of persuasion.
That makes identification a close relative of ethos. Classical ethos asks whether the audience trusts the speaker's character, judgment, and goodwill. Identification asks a broader question: does the audience see the speaker, and the speaker's cause, as somehow of a piece with themselves?
It does not have to be explicit
Identification does not require anyone to say "I am just like you." It can be deliberate, subtle, habitual, even partly unconscious. A speaker might invoke a shared profession. An organization might emphasize a common mission. A politician might speak about "families like ours." A brand might associate itself with independence, craftsmanship, environmental responsibility, tradition, innovation, or rebellion.
Look again at Burke's list: speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea. Only some of those are arguments. Identification can travel through an accent, a dress code, a reference only insiders will catch, the order in which a speaker raises concerns, or the attitude a speaker takes toward a problem. A speaker who mirrors an audience's frustration before proposing anything is building identification just as surely as one who names a shared value outright. That is also why identification can be hard to notice: much of it never takes the form of a claim you could dispute.
Persuasion, in other words, can involve not only accepting a proposition but recognizing a connection. Often the connection is offered first, and the proposition rides in on it.
Identification is not identicalness: consubstantiality
Burke uses a notoriously awkward word for an important idea: consubstantiality. The basic point is simpler than the word. Two people can share something meaningful without becoming the same person.
Imagine three neighbors running a community repair workshop. One participates because she wants to reduce waste. Another wants to save money. A third enjoys teaching practical skills. They do not have identical motives, and they may disagree about plenty of other things. But they can still identify around a shared project. Something important connects them.
That tension between connection and difference matters, because rhetoric becomes necessary precisely because we are not completely unified. Burke makes the point that identification is needed because of division: if everyone already wanted exactly the same things for the same reasons, persuasion would have little work to do. Identification creates enough common ground for people who remain distinct to see themselves as connected.
Three ways messages build identification
1. Shared ground
The simplest is shared ground. Return to the backpack: for people who repair rather than replace. Maybe you already value repairing things. Maybe you would like to think of yourself as practical and resourceful. The product is being connected to an identity you recognize, or aspire to recognize, in yourself.
Notice that the connection does not have to be demographic. The advertiser does not need to look like you, live where you live, or belong to your generation. The shared ground may be a value rather than a biography.
2. Shared opposition
Identification can also form through a common opponent. Suppose the company says, "We're tired of products designed to be thrown away." Now the us is partly defined by what we reject. Disposable products become the contrast against which a shared identity takes shape.
That is not automatically sinister. People can reasonably identify around opposition to something harmful: a neighborhood organizing against dangerous traffic, workers opposing an unsafe practice, citizens resisting corruption. The analytical question is not simply whether an opponent exists. It is what the opposition is being used to make us mean, and whether the opponent is described accurately.
3. The assumed "we"
Sometimes identification is built through a pronoun. "We know that taking care of things matters." Who, exactly, is we? The sentence does not stop to establish that everyone shares the value. It begins as though the common ground is already there, and the audience is invited to step into the pronoun. It is a quiet move, which is exactly why it is worth noticing in a rhetorical analysis.
Identification beyond advertising
The backpack is a tidy example, but identification does its heaviest work in politics, organizations, and movements.
- Politics. Candidates rarely win on policy detail alone. They talk about where they grew up, what their parents did for a living, which problems keep them up at night. Each detail invites some listeners to see the candidate as one of them, and the policy proposals inherit that trust.
- Organizations. A company that calls its employees "a family" is offering identification. It may be sincere. It may also make it harder to raise ordinary workplace concerns, because disagreement starts to feel like disloyalty.
- Movements and causes. Campaigns often succeed by persuading people that an issue belongs to them: that parents, or neighbors, or patients, or veterans have a stake. Changing who sees themselves inside the issue can matter more than any single argument.
In each setting the same analytical move applies: separate the connection being offered from the claims being attached to it, and evaluate both.
A shared identity is not a shared interest in everything
Here is where identification becomes especially important to analyze. A genuine shared identity does not establish a shared interest in everything.
You might sincerely value repairing rather than replacing. The company might sincerely manufacture a backpack with replaceable parts. Neither fact proves every claim the company makes. Are replacement parts actually available? Are repairs practical? Does the construction justify the durability implied? Is the price reasonable? Does the company itself operate in ways consistent with the identity it invokes? An appeal can recognize something true about you and still ask you to accept something unproved about the product.
When identity marketing backfires
Identification is not an automatic persuasion button. Research on identity-based marketing has found a revealing complication. In a series of studies, Amit Bhattacharjee, Jonah Berger, and Geeta Menon found that messages that explicitly tell consumers a product is what people with their identity should choose can backfire, because they threaten people's sense that they are expressing their identity freely (Bhattacharjee, Berger & Menon, 2014).
This might express something you value is different from people like you must choose this. That distinction matters because identification works through connection, not mind control. Audiences can accept the identity and reject the conclusion. They can reject the identity altogether. They can decide the connection is superficial. Or they can decide it is real but insufficient.
Identification can widen the circle, too
Identification does not only narrow groups into smaller tribes. It can also widen cooperation. Research on group identity and helping behavior suggests that changing how broadly people understand the relevant us can change who receives concern.
In studies with Manchester United supporters, Mark Levine and colleagues found that when participants' identity as fans of their own club was emphasized, they were more likely to help an injured stranger wearing their team's shirt than one wearing a rival Liverpool shirt. When a broader identity as football fans in general was made salient, help extended to the rival supporter as well, though not to a stranger in a plain shirt (Levine et al., 2005). The boundary of identification changed, and so did the behavior.
That research comes from the social identity tradition rather than directly testing Burke's theory, but the rhetorical lesson is useful: how us is defined can make cooperation narrower or broader. It also explains why so much epideictic rhetoric, the rhetoric of praise and shared values at ceremonies and commemorations, works by redrawing the circle of who counts as one of us.
Questions to ask about any identification appeal
- Who am I being invited to be? A practical person? A responsible parent? An independent thinker? A loyal member of a community?
- What actually connects that identity to this speaker, product, organization, or cause? A real shared interest, relevant experience, demonstrated commitment, or mainly an aesthetic association?
- Who is included in the "we," and who is placed outside it?
- Does the shared identity create useful common ground, or does it make disagreement look like betrayal?
- What still needs evidence? Even if the connection is genuine, which claims have not yet been demonstrated?
You do not have to reject the identity to examine the argument attached to it.
Using identification honestly as a speaker
If you are the one trying to persuade, identification is not something to avoid; it is often what makes a message hearable at all. A few habits keep it honest:
- Claim only connections that are real. Shared experience you actually have, values you actually hold, commitments you have actually demonstrated.
- Offer, don't dictate. "If you care about repair, this may interest you" respects the audience's agency in a way "people like you buy this" does not.
- Keep the evidence visible. Let the connection open the door, then make the argument as if it had to stand on its own.
- Watch who you leave out. Every we draws a boundary. Draw it no narrower than the argument requires.
Recognizing yourself is not verifying the claim
Return to the backpack. Replaceable buckles tells you something about the product. For people who repair rather than replace tells you something about the person the message invites you to become. That invitation may be meaningful. The product may even deserve the association. But recognizing yourself in an appeal is not the same thing as verifying everything attached to it.
Identification helps explain how a message can become a relationship, and how that relationship can become a reason to act. So when you hear some version of people like us, do not ask only whether you belong. Ask what connects us, and what you are being asked to accept because of that connection.
To keep going, browse all articles, explore structured lessons on the Courses page, or see the illustrated guides on the Guides page.
Foundations Series · Volume 2
How to Analyze Any Argument
A visual guide to claims, evidence, assumptions, and reasoning. Stop reacting. Start diagnosing.
A visual method for seeing where an argument actually works, and where it does not. Name the claim, test the evidence, and find the assumption holding it all together.
Sources and further reading
- Burke, K. (1950). A Rhetoric of Motives. University of California Press
- Aristotle, Rhetoric 1.9 (Perseus Digital Library, trans. J. H. Freese)
- Bhattacharjee, A., Berger, J., & Menon, G. (2014). When identity marketing backfires: Consumer agency in identity expression. Journal of Consumer Research, 41(2), 294–309
- Levine, M., Prosser, A., Evans, D., & Reicher, S. (2005). Identity and emergency intervention. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 31(4), 443–453
- Reclaiming Rhetoric, Terministic Screens Explained
- Reclaiming Rhetoric, Burke's Pentad
Frequently Asked Questions
What is identification in rhetoric?
Kenneth Burke's term for the way a message creates a sense of shared ground between speaker and audience, so that persuasion works through connection as well as reasons.
What did Kenneth Burke say about identification?
In A Rhetoric of Motives (1950) he wrote that "you persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language… identifying your ways with his."
What is consubstantiality?
Burke's word for sharing something meaningful while remaining distinct. People can identify around a common project without having identical motives.
How is identification different from ethos?
Ethos concerns the audience's trust in the speaker's character and judgment. Identification is broader: the sense that speaker, audience, and cause belong together.
What are examples of identification?
"For people who repair rather than replace," "families like ours," a shared opponent such as "products designed to be thrown away," or an assumed "we."
Can identity-based appeals backfire?
Yes. Research shows that telling people what someone with their identity must choose can threaten their sense of free choice and reduce persuasion.
Is identification manipulative?
Not inherently. It can widen cooperation as well as narrow it. The key question is what claims ride on the connection and whether they have been shown.
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