The Culting of Brands

Few stronger emotions exist than the need to belong and make meaning. And brands are poised to exploit that need.

INTRODUCTION

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• When research subjects were recounting their reasons for joining and committing, they were describing the profound urges to belong, make meaning, feel secure, have order within chaos, and create identity.
• Demographically they tend to be from stable and financially comfortable homes and are above average in intelligence and education. They are, in fact, a desirable target audience.
• Suspend your prejudice about cult brands, too. They are not necessarily small, niche, and populated by consumers unrepresentative of the larger market."
• Cult Brand: a brand for which a group of customers exhibit a great devotion or dedication. Its ideology is distinctive and it has a well-defined and committed community. It enjoys exclusive devotion (that is, not shared with another brand in the same category), and its members often become voluntary advocates.
• The common belief is that people join cults to conform. Actually, the very opposite is true. They join to become more individual. At the heart of the desire to join a cult, in fact any community to which you will become committed, is a paradox.
• He told me "a Mac made me creative. No, actually I was creative to begin with, and in some ways they made me more creative."
• It has taken has taken that part of his identity that he siders his most defining characteristic, his creativity, and accelerated it
• 1.determine your potential franchise's sense of difference, 2. declare your own difference with doctrine and language, 3. demarcate yourself from the outside world, and 4. demonize "the other."
• Note also the commitment to accelerate the sense of each customer's individualism within one of the most cohesive "community" brands in the world. It's an expression of the cult paradox.
• The Declaration of Independence, both in name and content, overtly removed itself from prevailing world thinking. Framing a clear system of ideas that depart from cultural norms provides the sharpest delineation between the organization and the rest of the world. And it provides a beacon to the disenfranchised.
• Passionate commitment is often in proportion to the strength of the vision and ideas contained within the organization's theology.
• An ideology only gets you so far. It is in the day-to-day interaction between the cult brand and its members that a true bond of difference can be made.
• Demonization is a highly effective means of creating separation and a distinctive group identity.
• Nike can invoke a collective sense of identity as the brand of self-achievement even from its position as market leader by demonizing "not doing it," a fear for millions of fitness conscious consumers.
• But for real commitment, the recruit and existing members need to feel that they have a relationship with "an other" or "others." The buy-in to the ideology and tangible benefits comes later.
• Individuals brought into the group before they bought into the ideology, both the other way around. They found that the most successful recruits were the ones who had social relationships with members of the group before they joined.
• Five important principles comprise the primacy of the person.
1. Recognize and gear your organization to focus on the person.
2. Get the right membership. There is such a thing as a good and a bad member. A cult or cult brand must discriminate between well-socialized individuals who will engage new prospects, and those who will be unproductive because they are not.
3. Create opportunities for meeting and interaction between members and nonmembers. More interactions will lead to more recruits to the brand or cult.
4. Liberate your representatives to focus on interaction. Remove distractions. The idea is prospect and make him or her simply to engage the feel good.
5. Love-bomb. Overwhelm them with welcome. "Lovebomb" is the epithet given to the technique used by the Moonies at their recruitment weekends. Make a potential recruit feel that he or she is the only important person in the room. Their well-being is the source of yours. It's not about you; it's about them.
• How can you communicate to the organization the importance of the person beyond simply saying that it's important? You can create myths and stories that carry the moral for you. Myths are potent communicators of ideology.
• The most potent myths-makers tend to be someone of significance within the organization.
• Members need to interact with each other, but more important, nonmembers need to interact with those already involved
• Ultimately, people buy the person not the thing.
• a technique that came to be called "love-bombing." Love-bombing consisted of a continuous, often exhausting series of exercises that made the potential recruit feel that they belonged to the happiest, most welcome group they had ever tripped over. It was an environment where all judgement was suspended and criticism banned.
• There are two critical and related characteristics of cohesive communities: shared experience between members, and a sense of responsibility and mutual dependence.
• It had a clear and rigorously applied ideology. It had rules and regulations, ritual, traditions, mythology and storytelling, hierarchies, an acute sense of difference from the world around it, and an unashamed sense of moral superiority. There was uniformity of appearance and language. There were common symbols and potent iconography. There were enemies, both actual and internalized (such as fear of failure). The induction process is a "breaking down and building up experience." It is one that crystallizes the individual through a group experience.
• People today pay for meaning more than they pray for it. In contemporary culture we seek and find answers not only through traditional channels, like religions (and new religions) but also in such places as rock groups, sororities, companies, and brands.
• Commercial enterprises need to provide meaning as much as individuals want to buy it. It's a craving need of the commercial world, too. They must produce content beyond the product benefits. Products are cheap, and they increasingly have little or no unique value of their own.
• Providing a meaning a system that people can buy into is harder to imitate and easier to charge a premium for.
• Today's most successful brands don't just provide marks of distinction (identity) for products. Cult brands are beliefs. They have morals--embody values. Cult brands stand up for things.
• Some of the best belief systems, religious or commercial, build on ideas already prevalent in the culture. As such, their ideology was more able to be bought by that culture, but it was different enough to be distinguishable from it.\
• Meaning systems should provide interpretation, give purpose, and create a sense control or certainty.
• A mere half a century ago, it was the producer that the brand legitimized--the origin and authenticity of the product. Today a brand legitimizes the consumer-the individual's and community's origin and authenticity.

Marketing is about values. We have to be very clear on what we want our customers to know about us. They want to know who is Apple and what do we stand for. What we're about is not making boxes for people to get their jobs done, although we do that very well. Apple is about more than that. What Apple is about, its core value is that we believe that people with passion can change the world for the better. That's what we believe. - Steve Jobs

• Cult brands also fail if they don't move relatively quickly beyond the early adopters to the majority of consumers, the ones who provide the real revenue and profit.
• The problem with new or different ideas is that people hate new and different ideas.
• Your objective should be to focus acquisition investment on the conservative majority; those who are slow to adopt the new, but who, when they do, are slow to leave it.
• They must crack the conundrum of selling something unfamiliar to individuals who, at heart, want the familiar.
• Successful revolutionaries are the ones who have figured out how to seduce the masses by making their proposition appear not so revolutionary.
• Tension can be one of the biggest challenges facing a cult leader. It is the single biggest intangible that needs to be understood and managed if you ever wish to see your cult flourish. At one extreme, a cult's deviance from the social norms can become so offensive that society cannot tolerate its existence. At the other, the cult might be so tame it becomes indistinguishable from its surroundings, rendering it indifferent and irrelevant.
• cult creation: the cult paradox, difference, making the novel familiar, power of the person, clear ideology, a sense of mutual responsibility, contact, and so on
• You may be able to kill off one cult, but another will surely emerge to satisfy the latent needs of a dissatisfied consumer population or congregation.
• Absorbing competitive ideas into your own organization has also been a tactic used for thousands of years. This can be a very successful long-term strategy. It can produce its own problems, of course, typical of many attempts to merge organizations with different cultures.
• Piggybacking onto other communities has been a successful strategy of cult formation throughout history.
• Few stronger emotions exist than the need to belong and make meaning. And brands are poised to exploit that need.
• I've studied cults because they are the most extreme manifestation of community, and I wanted to understand how devoted communities can be formed around brands.

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