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BJ Bueno

How to Become a Cult Brand

THE BIG IDEA: Certain businesses excel at fostering undying, cult-like following among their customers. Our study of Cult Brands reveals seven rules any business can follow to attract loyal customers.

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Some customers have a religious devotion to a particular brand. They may go so far as to permanently scorch their skin with the logo or image of the brand they love.

While this may appear extreme to you, fifteen years of research into Cult Brands has shown us that the psychological reasons behind cult followings illuminate the drivers behind customer loyalty in any business.

So even if you don’t aspire to have customers tattoo your logo onto their heads, if you’re interested in creating loyal, profitable customers, there’s a lot to learn from Cult Brands.

Cult Brands create emotional experiences that lead to feelings of belonging, a sense of shared consciousness with a group of people. The customers of Cult Brands often feel like part of a family instead of consumers of a business. This is a powerful, emotional connection.

Apple, Harley, IKEA, Star Trek, Zappos, MINI, and The Motley Fool all invite their customers into their clan.

So how do they do it?

7 Rules for Cultivating Customer Loyalty

We’ve identified seven core rules that all Cult Brands tend to share. These rules are the fundamental tenets that all Cult Brands consciously or instinctively follow as they do business.

Keeping these rules in mind makes it easier to decide how to grow your business and foster loyalty.

The Seven Rules of Cult Brands provide a framework for ongoing business success. As you read through each rule, think about ways you can apply it to your organization.

Rule #1: Differentiate

Cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead summed up the challenge facing today’s marketers: “Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.”

Your customers are driven by two simultaneous desires that appear to be diametrically opposed to each other. They want to stand out from the crowd and be a unique individual while simultaneously wanting (and needing) to be part of the crowd, receiving the social support and approval of like-minded individuals.

How do people meet these opposing needs? By belonging to a group they identify as being unique, often outside of mainstream society.

If you’ve got a home, you need furniture. The community of people who need furniture is considerable. But the community of people who need furniture with minimalist charm and serious organizational capacity (and enjoy quirky Swedish names) is smaller and distinct—just different enough to make IKEA irresistible to legions of their fans.

Your customers want to be part of a group that’s different. It’s that simple.

Rule #2: Be Courageous

Even in the face of doubters and critics, Cult Brands dare to be different—and succeed. Cult Brands are successful because they are wholly unlike every other company in the marketplace.

Cult Brands believe in themselves, their products and services, and their customers. They want to challenge conventional wisdom and transform it when given the chance. Willing to take significant risks, the people behind Cult Brands are fighters and leaders, not quitters or followers.

When Whole Foods started in 1980, there were less than six natural foods supermarkets in the United States. Today, the natural and organic foods market is estimated at more than $28.6 billion.

Cult Brands, however, don’t waste their time or energy worrying about who is following them. Their attention is focused on how to better serve their customers.

Rule #3: Promote a Lifestyle

Cult Brands sell more than a product or a service. Customers want more than just things; they are seeking experiences.

Experiential purchases are more meaningful than material purchases. As such, all Cult Brands sell lifestyles. They develop and sell “the tools” that help their customers pursue their dreams and celebrate distinct lifestyles.

Cult Brands remove barriers for their customers. The would-be musician no longer needs to shell out thousands of dollars for expensive instruments and equipment. They just need to download the right apps onto their iPad, and they’re ready to rock.

Apple promotes a creative lifestyle that facilitates self-expression. Jimmy Buffett celebrates life as a party. The Life is good Company promotes a laid-back weekend BBQ with friends.

Your customers have aspirations. Those aspirations are powered by emotions. If you can support your customers in the realization of their aspirations, they will associate their positive emotions with your business.

Rule #4: Listen to Your Customers

Cult Brands focus on serving the wants and needs of the customers they have. They have the ability to listen to their customers’ discontent and create solutions that build strong, enduring loyalty.

By listening, Amazon.com discovered that the high cost of shipping interfered with how often their customers made purchases. In response, they launched Amazon Prime in 2005, a program in which members enjoy unlimited free two-day shipping in exchange for a yearly fee.

It’s an initiative that has been more successful than anyone could have ever imagined. Over 20 million people are Amazon Prime members. The typical Amazon Prime member buys as much as 150 percent more than non-Prime members. It’s a powerful example of the results of listening.

Respect your choir. Listen to them. Value their opinions. Reward them. Never ignore an enthusiastic follower of your business. Remember that all core followers want to believe, but first, they need to see miracles in the form of unexpected gifts and surprises.

Do extraordinary things for your choir and they’ll become incredible brand evangelists.

Rule #5: Support Customer Communities

Cult Brands know how to build strong, ongoing relationships with their customers by developing and supporting customer communities.

Cult Brands aren’t afraid to use today’s profits to support customer communities to generate powerful, long-term goodwill for their businesses and their brands.

When possible, they establish social events that reflect their missions. MINI created their annual Take the State tour. Life Is Beautiful puts on their popular Music Festival each year.  Harley supports HOG Rallies worldwide. (We attended their 105th Anniversary event in Milwaukee and recorded the magic.)

Rule #6: Be Open, Inviting and Inclusive

You don’t have to earn your way into a Cult Brand by proving you’re cool enough. Cult Brands take it as a given that you’re already cool enough.

Cult Brands welcome customers of all ages, races, creeds, and socioeconomic backgrounds with open arms. They don’t discriminate against anyone who doesn’t fit into an idealized customer profile. Everyone is welcome.

Cult Brands prove to their customers that they are indeed open and inclusive by helping to fulfill the deep human needs that we all share, including belonging and self-esteem.

Rule #7: Promote Personal Freedom

Deep inside every human being on this planet is a need for freedom.

According to Abraham Maslow, the feeling of freedom is a bridge to self-actualization: we want to be able to grow and express our own unique identity and worldview without fear of consequences.

Harley promotes freedom on the open road. Vans promotes freedom from convention. Linux promotes freedom of information. Apple promotes creativity and self-expression.

Cult Brands are empowering and expansive. When customers engage with a Cult Brand, they come away feeling like they can do more, and do it more effectively.

Tapping into the Forces Behind Customer Loyalty

Integrating the Seven Rules of Cult Brands into your operations expands the number of ways you can tap into the forces of customer loyalty.

Consistent application of these principles will strengthen the bond you have with your existing all-star customers, while simultaneously creating new customers.

As your customers deepen their emotional connection with you, their loyalty will grow. Your organization will become stronger, more resilient, and more differentiated.

Oh, you’ll probably become more profitable too.

July 6, 2018 by

Putting Archetypes to Work in Your Organization

How do you put archetypes to work?

Start at the center.

The center is unique for each organization.

Your strengths hint at it.

Your organization’s passions point you in the right direction.

The forces that drive your customers to do business with you provide invaluable clues.

This center should be expressed in your ultimate vision, your core values, and the language of your corporate culture.

How will you know when you’ve found your center?

Your heart will awaken.

Your employees will come together as teams. Innovation will increase by the passions of the men and women guided by archetypal forces deep within them. Your stakeholders will observe it. Your customers will hear the call to adventure.

Remember: the more archetypal, the more essential, and the more human your center is, the more cohesive your organization will become. And, the more easily you’ll attract customers who want to join forces with you.

Onward!

June 8, 2018 by

Your Business Archetype

When you uncover your business’s archetypes you get to know the DNA of your organization. It is from these fundamental symbolic images that all of the desired behavior for employees and customers spring.

When you know your archetypes, you can ensure consistency in your culture and your branding.

Your understanding of archetypes:

  1. Uncover the symbolic images and emotions that best express what your business is about in the context of your customers’ and employees’ lives.
  2. Determine the humans needs your customers and employees are trying to fulfill when your archetypes are active in their minds.

These key insights can transform the future of your business. With this understanding, your team can find creative ways to consistently play and express these images and needs in ways that are meaningful to your customers and your employees.

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P.S. Listen to our discussion on the future of retail with SAP’s Global Vice President’s Nancy Case and best-selling author Scott McKain: Retail Relevancy: Distinction Trumps Differentiation.

June 1, 2018 by

How Leadership Archetypes Really Work

Archetypal-Leadership
THE BIG IDEA: There are seven behavioral patterns that characterize distinct leadership styles. Becoming aware of all seven will help inspired leaders identify their strengths and provide additional options based on the context of the situation.

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You don’t have to spend much time in executive meetings to observe that there are different ways of moving people to action.

Tom, for example, tends to give his employees commands. He’s coercive in his communication, patriarchal. “Do what I say” is the sentiment behind his statements.

Linda, in contrast, is authoritative. She has a clear goal in mind that she shares with her team. She gives her team the freedom to find their own way to achieve it. She leads others by saying, “Come with me.”

In our work with executive leaders, we’ve observed a set of common patterns of behaviors, or archetypes, that C-level executives tend to exhibit. Psychologist Daniel Goleman’s research on leadership revealed six distinct styles. The following archetypal descriptions coincide with Goleman’s findings.

Meet the Ruler

Tom (above) is an example of the Ruler style of leadership. The Ruler is generally driven by power, status, and certainty. The Ruler demands immediate compliance. This style works well in difficult situations like company turnarounds and with problem employees.

The Ruler often comes off entitled, arrogant, and authoritarian. This coercive style was the default archetype in past generations of executives. In modern business, however, the Ruler archetype inhibits creativity, autonomy, and psychological freedom—vital ingredients for cultivating a thriving corporate culture.

Meet the Visionary

Linda (above) personifies the Visionary archetype of leadership. The Visionary is authoritative as opposed to authoritarian or dictatorial. With this style, the leader has the confidence to be led by a compelling vision, but doesn’t seek control over employees. The Visionary provides freedom to employees to determine the best path to actualize the vision. This style works especially well when the organization lacks clarity and direction.

Although the Visionary style works effectively in most situations, it doesn’t work, Goleman observes, when the team is more experienced than the leader. In such cases, employees may perceive the leader to be out-of-touch or arrogant.

Meet the Mentor

The Mentor archetype of leadership is akin to the role of a teacher, trainer, or coach. Trust is vital for this archetypal style to manifest, for employees must trust and believe in the leader’s ability, authenticity, and intentions. The Mentoring leader helps build the employee’s character, competencies, and other dimensions of personal development.

This coaching style requires constant feedback and an environment where employees are committed to improving and addressing areas of weakness. Cultures that support self-actualization needs can best capitalize on the Mentor archetype. However, when the culture doesn’t support growth and its employees are unwilling to change, the Mentor’s ways will be resisted and resented.

Meet the Athlete

While virtually all leadership styles are achievement-oriented, the Athlete personifies this focus to an extreme: the quintessential over-achiever. The Athlete strives to be the best, to push himself to the limits, and so he demands the same unequivocal high performance of his employees. Unlike the Mentor, the Athlete expects employees to be self-directed.

The Athlete’s passion for achievement can have a positive impact on highly competent, self-motivated employees. The Athlete can, however, create resistance in other employees who may feel overwhelmed and pressured outside their comfort zone.

Meet the Servant

The Servant style demonstrates an ability to inspire others to action by putting people first. Leaders that employ this humanistic style demonstrate empathy, the ability to listen, self-awareness, and strong organizational skills. The Servant exemplifies the primary quality of Collins’ Level 5 leadership: humility. Participative by nature, the Servant is culture-oriented with a talent for team building. The Servant improves morale, fosters emotional bonds, and seeks to create harmony.

The Servant, however, may not offer sufficient critical feedback and advice, which can promote poor performance and create uncertainty for employees.

Meet the Ambassador

The Ambassador exercises a democratic style of leadership that strives to bring people together, giving all employees a voice while building consensus. This approach can be useful in generating creative thinking by allowing a diversity of perspectives to enter the discussion. A natural peacemaker, the Ambassador demonstrates a high level of social intelligence with charm and strong listening skills.

In attempting to establish harmony and stability, however, the Ambassador may foster an environment that produces endless meetings and directionless employees.

Meet the Shapeshifter

The Shapeshifter is faceless. It is able to take on all of the above archetypes without exclusively identifying with any of them. The most effective archetypal leadership style depends on context. The context might include market conditions; the stage of development of the company; the corporate culture; organizational objectives; and the situations, abilities, and stage of development of individual employees and their teams.

The most skilled leaders are Shapeshifters. Outperforming leaders don’t just use one of these leadership styles; they’re skilled at numerous and possess the flexibility and adaptability to shift between styles as needed.

Remember: you are not defined by any of these archetypes, and yet you have the ability to express all of them through you.

How to Become a More Effective Leader

Each leadership archetype has its strengths, but each also has a shadow element that can lead to poor performance. The key to improving your ability to effectively actualize the positive aspects of these leadership archetypes, according to Goleman’s research, is growing your emotional intelligence.

Emotional intelligence is a set of skills. All skills can be learned. The core competencies of emotional intelligence include self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skill.

Goleman’s team has found that emotional intelligence, not cognitive intelligence, is the defining characteristic in outperforming leaders. We find this to be a fascinating area of study and we encourage executives to learn more about how emotional intelligence can transform their ability to get results and to improve their organizations.

Google has developed an extraordinary program on how to build emotional intelligence through mind training exercises. The program is called Search Inside Yourself.

Based on decades of scientific research from the world’s top psychologists, neuroscientists, and coaches, it is one of Google’s most popular programs within their organization. And now, Search Inside Yourself is publicly available. We invite you to check it out.

May 25, 2018 by

How to Get the Conversation Started

Recently, I was consulting a CEO on strategic presentation skills, they tended to keep talking without stopping and needed some work to better connect with the people in the room. We talked about the importance of pausing during the presentation and asking a question to engage the audience. With this small adjustment, speaking became more impactful, and the message connected.

One of the best ways to achieve engagement is by using open-ended questions, questions that encourage your colleagues to share ideas and opinions, and by carefully listening to what they say you will kindle mutual respect.

Here are some of my favorite opened-ended questions:

What inspires you?

What is the most meaningful part of your job?

What do you value most in life?

Would you tell me more about ___?

What’s the most important priority for you with this?

Who benefits from your vision?

Try finding opportunities to ask questions and see how quickly you engage people when you listen to what they have to say.

March 23, 2018 by

Know Thy Customer

This could be called the first law of Cult Branding.

Know thy Customer better than they know themselves.

This could be called the Secret Law of Cult Branding.

Customers Don’t Know Why They Buy.

This might be deemed the problem with the conventional market analysis.

Don’t Ask Why, Observe!

If customers don’t know why they buy then how do we discover why? Jane Goodall became a primate expert. She permanently moved in proximity with a troupe of chimpanzees and lived with them for years. She watched chimps grow up, grow old and die. She unraveled the vibrant social life of chimpanzees and how it affected their behavior. Humans are vastly more complicated than chimpanzees. It takes more than an anthropology study to grasp the mechanisms at play when it comes to human behavior.

Most of the Human Experience is Below Conscious Radar.

The Landscape of the Subconscious is much, much bigger than the Conscious realm. Human behavior is a dynamic interplay of the conscious/subconscious. This is one critical reason that Cult Branding has become well versed in the science of the subconscious.

Human Behavior is Primarily Social.

The evolution of human beings is fundamentally the story of social systems.   Virtually all human behavior is socially driven or has social implications.

Where We Live Matters, and it is Changing!

Cult Branding understands that human behavior is complex and highly reactive. They also know that the world is in a state of flux and the old rules don’t apply. To understand the customer, you have to look at the environment they operate in.

Why is Cult Branding Different?

To know thy customer requires a profound grasp of human behavior, the subconscious mind as well as the marketplace. Taking this information and extrapolating the more profound memes and themes of the mind of your customer and using it to create a more compelling customer experience is what Cult Branding is all about.

Do you Know Thy Customer?

February 23, 2018 by

How Mindfulness Improves the Workplace

“The best way to capture moments is to pay attention. This is how we cultivate mindfulness. Mindfulness means being awake. It means knowing what you are doing.”
Jon Kabat-Zinn

The truth is that many of us spend most of our time in the office. Think about how you can transform the lives of those around you by becoming more aware.

This shift toward more humanistic management practices doesn’t merely improve productivity, creativity, collaboration, loyalty, and profitability; it can also help the people around you become better spouses, better parents, and better citizens.

You can invite your employees to grow by finding ways to make the workplace more engaging (less static), more inspiring (less mundane), and more open (less fixed). As Abraham Maslow put it, “We must try to make a particular kind of people, of personality, of character, of soul one might say, rather than try to create directly particular kinds of behavior.”

When we practice mindfulness, we are training our brains to examine internal and external cues rather than react to them, so we can better manage emotions and develop into our full humanity.

February 16, 2018 by

Serve a Social Purpose

The letter BlackRock’s Larry Fink sent CEOs highlights ideas that are familiar to our readers. Here’s the insight:

“Society is demanding that companies, both public and private, serve a social purpose. To prosper over time, every company must not only deliver financial performance but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society.”

But here is the twist, if you want to improve the organization, you have to develop yourself.

Chief executives invest an average of 30 minutes in personal development each day. The goal is to lift the organization; this is the drive of relatedness, or what authors like Dan Pink and Tony Hsieh have called purpose.

This universal need to connect and care for others doesn’t just motivate individuals—it translates to bottom-line profits too.

Wharton organizational psychologist Adam Grant ran an experiment with call center employees who were tasked with calling people to ask for donations. He randomly separated them into three groups. Each group had the same conditions except for a five-minute story each group read before their shift.

The first group read stories from other call center agents about how their job helped teach them transferable sales skills (a personal benefit).

The second group read stories from university alumni who benefitted from the donations raised by the call center and how the scholarships helped them (a purpose that connected the agents with something greater than themselves).

The third group read stories that had nothing to do with personal gain or purpose (the control group).

Grant couldn’t believe the results of this study.

He replicated it five more times to be sure: while the personal benefit group showed no change in their performance, the purpose group more than doubled their dollars raised.

The call center employees in the purpose group couldn’t identify what exactly was driving their behavior.

They merely doubled their productivity!

Could helping others and making a difference in people’s lives be a factor in motivating people to higher performance?

It certainly appears so.

January 19, 2018 by

Trust is built in unscripted moments

Building a culture of trust is mostly one-to-one in nature.

Over time, simple interactions accumulate and help create rapport and friendship, which are critical ingredients for a high-performing workplace.

Try to be present in the small moments; this will lay the foundation for a more significant purpose—to create a culture built on trusting your colleagues.

Are you paying attention to those small moments where you can affirm your interest in those you work with?

January 12, 2018 by

Here’s the best of 2017

As the end of the year quickly approaches, we want to say thank you for being our reader. You represent the best in your industry and we look forward to bringing you insights on building brands that both employees and customers love in the coming year.

Below we curated the most popular, shared, and discussed articles from the Cult Branding blog in 2017. Please enjoy these three fantastic blog posts as a way to reflect as we enter 2018.

We wish you and your family a happy, healthy, and fantastic New Year.

Happy Holidays!

The Cult Branding Team

Bringing Your Brand Image To Life

Why do images have so much power?

Our logos and marks are symbols. Symbols are triggers of archetypal images—energy patterns that rest in the unconscious. These primordial images are not personal to each but are aspects of the “collective” of all of us. Read more about bringing your brand image to life.

Cultivate Workplace Passion

In today’s rapidly changing business environment, you need passionate people because such people can drive extreme and sustained performance improvement.

What does a passionate person look like? Find out more about creating a passion-driven workplace.

The Downfall of Sears: Why You Need To Compete In The Future, Not The Present

Anyone that’s done any retail research in the last decade will have noticed the growing importance consumers place on convenience. The rising importance of convenience isn’t a new trend—marketing scholar Eugene J. Kelley wrote about it in 1958. But, what is new—and what will continue to be new—is the ways retailers can satisfy it. Learn more about the importance of convenience and how to compete in the future.

December 29, 2017 by