Naming a business comes with different motivations: immortalizing a family name; appealing to whimsy; a straightforward declaration of the items sold. What’s more unusual is for you, the consumer, to be directly addressed by the company name.

But today one can dine at Citizen restaurant in St. Paul or Citizen Eatery in Austin, stay in the Citizen Hotel in Sacramento or browse at Citizen Supply in Atlanta. “There’s a seat for everyone at Citizens,” a poster at Citizens of Chelsea in New York reads, enticing passers-by to stop in for breakfast.

Given its usual association with voting, community meetings and other matters of public obligation, “citizen” makes for an unusual fit with the less dutiful, more indulgent world of shopping and dining out. But consumer brands are nothing if not laser-focused on responding to mass desire (when they’re not manufacturing it), so it’s safe to say that the curious convergence is not an accident. Rather, it may be a signal of a widespread yearning for belonging.

But are stores calling on the consumer to do more about America’s issues than just spend their money, or are they taking advantage of what they perceive to be a collective desperation for real community?

Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy has diagnosed our need for belonging as an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation.” According to an advisory report he issued in May, isolation doesn’t only feel bad; it also makes us sicker, less safe and less able to deal with our own problems.

Branding professionals and advertisers — those expert manipulators of consumer psychology — are embracing “citizen” in response to the moment. Stores and restaurants are selling acceptance and belonging, with a touch of virtue, homing in on what they perceive to be the eagerness people have to belong.

“‘Citizen’ makes people feel they’re part of the tribe, part of something,” said Seth Geoffrion, founder of the digital-branding firm Vrrb in Los Angeles. “The fact that it’s emerging right now spotlights that people feel disconnected from the civic process and being able to make change.”

For Mr. Geoffrion, the word is used to strike an emotional chord with consumers, as all effective branding does. “It’s aspirational,” he said. “‘Citizen’ invokes: I’m a member and I’m important. I’m a citizen, not a customer. It’s about a contribution, not a transaction.”

Indeed, beyond the legalities of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, at its heart, American citizenship means equal membership in a self-governing political community. Governing means exercising power, which is best done with knowledge, wisdom and right intention, and forming democratic habits of mind and character takes focused effort. That’s why educators and politicians have been calling for more robust civics education for decades.

Jon Alexander, an advertising executive who left the business to help start the New Citizenship Project, a British consulting firm that aims to help companies and institutions become more citizen-focused, said that his former professional community of advertisers-as-psychologists “understands at some level that there is a kind of deep hankering to do something more.” He said the urge is “to reclaim a bigger idea of who we are and what our contribution to society might be, and I think these brands are a symptom of that.”

Some brands are also recognizing the implications of using the term to signal their commitment to contribute, not just profit, leading consumers to feel that by patronizing them, they are punching their citizenship ticket.

Citizens, a food hall in the glossy Manhattan West development, donates unused ingredients to Rethink Food, a nonprofit that prepares meals for those in need. The international hotel chain citizenM says it builds according to high BREEAM and LEED environmental standards. Cotton Citizen says it sells clothing that can be worn for years, as an alternative to the world of fast fashion.

But so-called corporate social responsibility is old news by now. It has even been going by a new name lately: “ESG,” for environmental, social and governmental concerns.

But for some, the citizen-as-brand trend rings hollow.

“To me, the word ‘citizen’ is a synonym for ‘responsibility,’” Sarah Vowell wrote in an email.

Ms. Vowell, whose essays and books, including “The Partly Cloudy Patriot,” interrogate America’s past and present, said: “In a republic, every citizen is saddled with a perpetual, time-consuming, unpaid part-time watchdog job: keeping an eye on the patriarchs, extremists, egomaniacs and chumps who run our government and the military-industrial complex.”

“Sometimes,” she added, “the word ‘citizen’ reminds me of the first time I had to send in my income tax return after the Abu Ghraib photos surfaced, and just standing around the post office, unable to put my check in the mailbox because I wondered where that money would end up. So I guess go ahead and name your restaurant or hotel that?”

It was this darker implication of the word that inspired the name of the Upright Citizens Brigade in the 1990s. U.C.B., as it is known, grew into a major hub of improv comedy in Los Angeles and New York. Matt Besser, who founded the group along with Amy Poehler, Matt Walsh and Ian Roberts, said it was meant to evoke any number of “nefarious right-wing organizations” that were “trying to control the world.” “We wanted our name to sound like the opposite of comedy and the opposite of what we were,” he said.

An emerging group of citizens specialists has a more optimistic view.

Eric Liu, a founder of Citizen University, a nonprofit that educates and organizes people who want to participate more deeply in civic life, said the civic sphere is a playground for creativity, a place of imagination and innovation. Mr. Liu’s approach uses some of the secular appeal of religion, like connectedness, ritual and common values, to encourage becoming a “sworn-again American.” He emphasizes that acting like a citizen means engaging with power, which he hopes will bring some sex appeal to civics.

“How to Citizen With Baratunde,” a podcast hosted by the writer and media personality Baratunde Thurston, explores ways to “reimagine ‘citizen’ as a verb, not a legal status,” and promotes four pillars of “citizening”: participate publicly, deepen relationships, value the collective and understand power.

“We are in a very precarious situation with respect to our practice of democracy and our livability on this planet,” Mr. Thurston said. “These are intertwined crises that are putting a lot of pressure on us, and we are poorly positioned to meet that pressure and meet that moment if we are thinking primarily as individuals and if we are thinking primarily through a consumer lens.”

But money talks, and the work of businesses is to respond to what consumers are asking for.

Mr. Alexander, the former advertising executive, said the trend was further evidence that society is shifting away from “the consumer story” to “the citizen story.” Turning from seeing ourselves as consumers who happen to vote into citizens who happen to shop, he said, is part of a necessary transformation to confront many of the biggest challenges facing society today.

He said the raft of stores and eateries emblazoned with “citizen” could be a sign that the “citizen shift” is genuinely underway, but it could also just be a superficial attempt at “citizenwashing.”

“I think something bigger and broader is going on in the world right now, what we’ve given the name ‘the citizen shift,’” Mr. Alexander said. “The question becomes, Is this business co-opting citizenship or citizenship co-opting business? And I don’t think we know yet.”