BTW, Your Business Needs Lateral Relationships, Too
6 min read
The best way to understand how relationships drive business outcomes is to start somewhere most business writers wouldn’t think to look.
Alcoholics Anonymous has no marketing budget, no content strategy, no algorithm, and has never run an ad. Its co-founders passed away decades ago. Today it operates in approximately 180 nations, with more than 123,000 groups and over two million members worldwide, making it the most commonly sought source of help for alcohol problems in the United States (AA World Services, 2023).
And the thing about it is that it works.
Not perfectly, not for everyone, but well enough that researchers have spent decades trying to explain why something so structurally simple outperforms some clinical treatments, including cognitive behavioral therapy (Kelly, Humphreys & Ferri, 2020).
What predicted recovery was support from other AA members, people who understood what it meant to be in their shoes. Support from people outside AA, including clinicians, didn’t show the same effect (Humphreys et al., 2002). The peer relationship did something the professional relationship couldn’t, because being helped by someone who has lived what you’re living produces a different kind of trust. That trust is what researchers call a lateral relationship, a connection between equals, running horizontally between people rather than vertically through an authority.
That distinction, lateral versus vertical, turns out to matter far beyond recovery. The two relationship types serve different functions and produce different things (Hartup, 1989).
Vertical relationships are easy to build, easy to scale, and easy to measure. They also require someone at the top to keep them alive. Lateral relationships do not.
The structure underneath the outcomes you want.
In 1989, developmental psychologist Willard Hartup published a paper in American Psychologist drawing a distinction between two types of human relationship.
Vertical relationships exist between people of unequal standing.
Parent and child. Teacher and student. Creator and audience. Leader and follower.
These relationships provide guidance, inspiration, identity anchoring but they are structurally asymmetrical, and that asymmetry has a specific consequence.
In a vertical relationship, everyone is connected to the same person or source. They are not connected to each other.Horizontal relationships exist between people of equal standing.
Peers. Members who know each other. Colleagues at the same level.
Power is distributed and influence moves in both directions. The relationship produces cooperation, conflict, and reciprocity; the texture of being in relationship with another person rather than connected to one. Hartup’s argument was that both are necessary but not interchangeable.
They serve different functions and produce different things, and you cannot get from one what only the other provides (Hartup, 1989).
The creator-to-audience relationship is vertical. So is brand-to-customer, leader-to-follower, platform-to-user.
Most of what gets built in the name of community, adoption, and performance is vertical by design, one person or brand at the center, everyone else connected to it. That structure is easy to build and easy to measure. It is also, by its structure, incapable of producing what only lateral relationships can produce.
Lateral relationships are the infrastructure for collective action and collective action is what produces the outcomes builders actually want.
Word of mouth, peer recruitment, and people showing up without being asked are produced by people who know each other, not by people who know you or the brand (Muniz & O’Guinn, 2001; McAlexander, Schouten & Koenig, 2002).
In Business: Harley-Davidson.
Researchers who spent years inside the Harley-Davidson community found that what produced loyalty wasn’t the relationship between rider and brand. It was the relationships between riders.
Harley understood this early.
When they founded the Harley Owners Group (HOG) in 1983, the explicit goal was to connect riders who were scattered across the country, to each other, not just to the company.
Today HOG has over one million members and is the largest factory-sponsored riding club in the world. When Harley created conditions for riders to meet, those lateral relationships formed and strengthened. People talked about it because they knew each other. New riders joined because existing ones brought them in. The researchers found that facilitating those shared experiences measurably changed loyalty outcomes. The brand gave them something in common. The riders did the rest (McAlexander, Schouten & Koenig, 2002; Harley-Davidson, 2023).
Research on brand communities finds that when lateral relationships form, members develop a felt sense of responsibility to each other, to bring others in, to help newcomers, to keep it going. That responsibility is not manufactured by the brand. It emerges between people (Muniz & O’Guinn, 2001).
Put simply, what makes a group work is whether the people in it have relationships with each other.
When they don’t, every outcome you want requires you to generate it. You become the engine and engines need fuel and burn out if they don’t get it. When the lateral relationship layer exists, the group generates those outcomes on its own (Muniz & O’Guinn, 2001).
The question worth asking is whether any two people in the group you’re building know each other independently of you or the brand.
The implication for builders.
If the people in your group only encounter you, they will only have a relationship with you.
Creating the lateral relationship layer means creating the conditions for people to find each other. Research on how relationships form finds that structure matters more than intention. People connect with whoever the conditions make it easy to encounter repeatedly, not necessarily whoever they have the most in common with (Festinger, Schachter & Back, 1950). Design for encounter and relationships follow. Leave it to chance, and they don’t.
When those conditions exist, research shows people recruit for you, advocate for you, and keep the thing going without being asked (Muniz & O’Guinn, 2001). When peers trust each other, they work harder, do more than their job requires, and produce better outcomes than teams where the only strong relationship is vertical (Acosta-Antognoni et al., 2025).
Without the lateral layer, every outcome you want has to come from you. That is a dependency, and dependencies are fragile.
You cannot manufacture those things from the center.
You have to build them into the structure from the start.
Sources:
Acosta-Antognoni, H. et al. (2025). A meta-analytic examination of the association between vertical and horizontal trust and the in-role, extra role, and organizational levels of performance. ResearchGate.
Alcoholics Anonymous World Services. (2023). A.A. around the world. aa.org.
Festinger, L., Schachter, S. & Back, K. (1950). Social Pressures in Informal Groups: A Study of Human Factors in Housing. Stanford University Press.
Hartup, W.W. (1989). Social relationships and their developmental significance. American Psychologist, 44(2), 120–126.
Humphreys, K. et al. (2002). Social networks as mediators of the effect of Alcoholics Anonymous. Addiction, 97(7), 891–900.
Kelly, J.F., Humphreys, K. & Ferri, M. (2020). Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12-step programs for alcohol use disorder. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 3.
Kelly, J.F. et al. (2011). The role of Alcoholics Anonymous in mobilizing adaptive social network changes. Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 114(2–3), 119–126.
McAlexander, J.H., Schouten, J.W. & Koenig, H.F. (2002). Building brand community. Journal of Marketing, 66(1), 38–54.
