Brand tribalism
You don't buy the brand. You join the tribe and the logo is the gang tattoo.
Grounded in the research on Brand community (Wikipedia)
So what actually is brand tribalism?
It's when a brand stops being a product and becomes an identity group you belong to. The term traces to Muniz and O'Guinn's 2001 "brand community" research: a brand community is a structured set of social relationships among people who share an attachment to a brand. Apple vs Android, Nike vs Adidas, Stanley cups, supreme drops. You're not loyal to the object. You're loyal to the us the object signals.
What's the science under it?
Social identity theory, Henri Tajfel and John Turner, 1979. Your self-concept is partly built from group memberships, so your brain auto-sorts the world into in-group (us) and out-group (them). The minimal group paradigm proved it: Tajfel split strangers into meaningless groups and they instantly favored their own. A brand is just a ready-made group with a logo. Owning it = membership card.