A growing body of work explores how and why parties use appeals to groups in their communications. This work finds that “group-based appeals” are a central feature of contemporary party competition. Yet scholars disagree on a key conceptual question: what ‘counts’ as a group for the purposes of a group-based appeal? While all agree that appeals to consolidated socio-demographic categories – such as “women”, “the working class”, and “Catholics” – should be included, there is disagreement over whether to consider other kinds of group categories, for example, “feminists”, “hard-working families”, and “the German people.” We wade into this morass in two ways. First, we introduce a typology of group-based appeals, distinguishing between statements based on the kind of attributes they use to invoke group boundaries, whether sociodemographic, moral/cultural, political/ideological, or national. Second, we apply this typology to a corpus of British and German election manifestos, quantifying parties’ use of appeal types across categories. Empirical sections of the paper test the overall performance of a ‘broad’ versus ‘narrow’ conceptualization of group-based appeals, and also explore whether the use of appeal types varies systematically with particular party characteristics, especially age, governing experience, and left-right ideology. We test the effect on these different types of group appeals on voters' on party preferences with a survey experiment.