brand communities

Heaven’s Gate, Jonestown, Scientology, Manson Family … destructive cults abound.

Destructive cults manipulate their members and do not care about their well-being. It’s no wonder why “cult” has become a dirty, four-letter word.

Not all cults, however, are destructive. At their cores, cults are groups that demonstrate a strong commitment towards someone or something.

Many cults are benign, harmless. In fact, they can be helpful to their members’ well-being. Some cults even have the power to elevate and inspire their members.

When a benign cult is centered around a brand, we call it a Cult Brand.

Businesses that harness the power of cults—cultivating evangelical customers and cohesive brand communities—possess an uncommon competitive advantage.

These Cult Brands enjoy unprecedented customer loyalty, word of mouth, and profitability.

Is Cult Branding Right For Your Business?

Perhaps you think your business isn’t cult-worthy. Maybe you’re just not ready yet. Or, maybe you’re just not interested in the hard work it takes to develop and maintain a passionate fan base.

But, whether you’re poised to establish a Cult Brand or not, there’s a lot you can learn from the psychological dynamics of cults and how they form that can be applied to any business of any size.

For example, they instruct you on how to:

• Build meaningful connections with your customers.
• Be chosen more often than your competitors.
• Get your customers to build awareness of your business for you.
• Cultivate customer loyalty that impacts the bottom line.

Clearly, there’s a lot we can learn from cults. Let’s dive in.

5 Reasons Customers Join Groups

Before we lay out a strategy you can use to create a cult around your business, let’s briefly explore five reasons why customers join brand communities and movements in the first place:

1) Humans want to belong

From Abraham Maslow, we learned that love and belonging is a fundamental human need. Customers instinctively look for social groups they can feel a part of.

2) Humans need a sense of identity

Another psychologist, Erik Erikson, pointed out that humans reach a point in their development where they begin to form their own identities.

At this Fidelity stage, as Erikson called it, people develop the capacity to maintain loyalties and allegiances to valued institutions and ideals.

To help form identity, people associate with social groups, including brand communities, that bring importance and meaning to their lives.

3) Humans rally around shared values

Values and ideals are at the core of what people congregate around. Maslow called these values being values. They include ideals like truth, goodness, aliveness, uniqueness, simplicity, justice, playfulness, and self-sufficiency.

Different people resonate with different being values. Brands that clearly express specific being values act like homing beacons to customers who naturally seek out brands who have the same values they do.

4) Humans want peak emotional experiences

Emotions give us a sense of aliveness. Although modern humans tend to rely more on thoughts and reason, emotions give life texture and provide meaning.

People gravitate to groups that provide them with emotional experiences they can’t get on their own. (Try replicating, in the privacy of your living room, the elation fans experience at a Jimmy Buffett concert or a Star Trek convention.)

5) Humans seek hope

Life is difficult. Customers seek out groups that provide relief from life’s challenges.

Cult Brands create movements that provide the promise of a better tomorrow. Star Trek offers hope of a peaceful future. Harley-Davidson offers hope of freedom on the open road. Life is good offers hope and optimism for the good life.

7 Steps to Create a Cult, Tribe or Movement

The main thing you need to understand about customer communities is that your customers create them on their own. That said, here are seven steps you can take to increase the likelihood:

Step 1: Determine what needs your business fulfills

Figure out which human needs your business naturally fulfills. Then, determine how your brand fulfills these needs for your customers in a way no other business does.

Step 2: Identify your symbols

Determine what your business symbolizes in the minds of your customers. These symbols are also called archetypes.

The Harley icon, for example, showcases a flying eagle, a dynamic symbol of power, choice, and freedom.

Step 3: Discover your emotional targets

Uncover how your customers are emotionally connected to your brand. When the symbol enters their mind, what do your target customers feel?

Nike’s swoosh symbol may evoke feelings of determination, competitiveness, and triumph for its customers. Apple’s symbol may evoke feelings of creative self-expression, possibility, or truth.

Step 4: Clarify your brand values

While core values are internal to your organization, brand values are external. Your customers may never know your corporate values, but if you are effective, they will have a clear perception of what you stand for (your brand values).

All Cult Brands have clear brand values that attract like-minded people to their business.

The Life is good Company stands for optimism. Oprah stands for self-empowerment.

Step 5: Design your messaging

Ensure that your messaging promotes the fulfillment of your core needs, highlights your symbol, triggers your emotional targets, and captures your brand values.

That is, leverage these customer insights to develop more effective media.

Consider how companies spend billions on advertising without clearly understanding any or all of these psychological insights that drive advertising effectiveness.

Step 6: Target your messaging

Make sure your messages are in the appropriate market channels. Cult Brands know their customers, which means knowing where they hang out and what they like to do.

Energy drink Red Bull, for example, initially avoided traditional media, opting for grassroots marketing by handing out samples on college campuses. Then, they began sponsoring extreme sporting events where their target market congregated.

Step 7: Set up your environment

Provide people the tools to form their own groups. Whenever possible, create a space where your customers can meet and interact with one another—either in person or online.

Establish social events that reflect your mission. Star Trek conventions, Jimmy Buffett’s concerts, and Harley’s HOG Rallies are excellent examples.

Set up conditions for a fun, playful environment where friendships can be forged. The stronger the bond members have to one another, the stronger the bond members will have with your business.

Onward

Remember, never attempt to control your community. Instead, participate as a co-creator.

Okay, now it’s your turn to go start a movement, establish a tribe, create a Cult Brand.

As human beings, we have many different kinds of relationships. The relationship you have with your boss is probably very different than the relationship you have with your romantic partner, and both of these relationships are different from the relationship you have with your favorite baseball player and the kid who was your best friend in third grade.

We not only have relationships with other people, but also with ideas and philosophies. Identifying yourself as a skeptical person or an Evangelical Christian, for example, will impact the way you view and interact with the world.

We also have relationships with inanimate objects, such as cars or roller coasters. You’ve surely heard people proclaiming how much they love (or hate) their cars. Space Mountain, one of Disney’s flagship rides, is so beloved by some people that they have their weddings there.

Brands are a unique combination of a set of ideas and inanimate objects that serve as an ideal platform for relationships.

A Cult Brand is born when a group of individuals rally around a brand’s beliefs and values and the lifestyle that supports those beliefs and values. These brands spark a magical participation with their customers.

When people feel bound to a group or community of shared beliefs, at least part of their identity is tied to the group.

Allowing Customers to Express A Deeper Part of Themselves

You can be a corporate attorney running frantically from meeting to meeting, but when you enter a Jimmy Buffett concert you morph into a Parrot Head; litigation, conference calls, and the stress of daily life slide into shadow.

Now, life is all about taking it easy. The most important things on your agenda are burgers, cocktails, and connecting with friends in the paradise of Margaritaville.

Cult Brands are successful because they allow people to be who they want to be—not the person they’re forced to be to meet the demands placed on them personally or professionally.

Cult Brands provide a route to self-expression that feels natural and intuitive to their Brand Lovers.

Cult Brands provide an experience and a community where Brand Lovers feel like they belong.

Providing The Means for Self-Expression and Belonging

Now, as a result of the pandemic, people are hungry for ways to connect with each other. Bringing customers together has always been important—it’s arguably the hallmark of a Cult Brand—but the need is even greater at the current time.

Keep in mind that finding ways to help customers express themselves is vital to your cause.

Below are a few fun ways to cultivate brand loyalty for your business by helping you attract great customers and build lasting relationships:

Gatherings

Not all your customers have the time or energy to gather together, but some of your customers would actually enjoy gathering together to share ideas, learn, and be together. Apple, in its humble beginnings, hosted Mac user groups where programmers would band together to form small companies to develop software for the startup.

Festivals

Once you have reached a critical mass of Brand Lovers, it might be time for the festivity. Harley-Davidson hosts annual events that bring together over 1 million bikers from around the world. Many people are familiar with event marketing, but if you take that concept to the next level you may be destined to have your own festival, and possibly a unique story will emerge about you in your customers’ minds.

Food

A very interesting fact about Cult Brands is that they tend to share food with their customers. This fact is most likely connected to the idea that if you’re going to have people come together, humans need (and love) to eat. But this simple act of doing what we do each day has a hidden power of influence that makes us like those people that we eat with. Some researchers have shown that judges are more lenient on the offenders after their lunch break. So if it works on those of us with the strongest opinions, it can work for your Brand Lovers who already like you too.

Onward

What beliefs and values do your customers identify with?

How can you build a community to reinforce a lifestyle aligned with those beliefs and values?

Remember Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs?

Biological needs. Safety and shelter needs. The need to belong and to feel loved. Self-esteem and the need to feel good about oneself in relation to others.

These are basic human needs. Every human being has them.

Every customer is constantly looking to meet these needs. And every business—consciously or not—attempts to help their customers meet at least some of them.

Meeting customers’ basic needs is the starting point. Your company needs to constantly develop new and superior ways to meet these needs.

But, meeting customer needs and base level desires isn’t enough. Your competitors can probably meet your customers’ basic needs too.

There are two areas of Maslow’s hierarchy that differentiate Cult Brands from other businesses. And it is these two areas that hold the secret to customer loyalty and prosperity.

The Need to Belong: A Driving Force in Human Motivation

From the moment we are born, we are partly defined by the communities we belong to. Even the smallest baby is part of multiple communities: she is part of a family, an ethnic group, even a nation.

As we grow and develop, we make choices that expand our identity. One way we do this is by joining or associating with various communities or social groups.

We join communities by our actions. We join communities by sharing a common belief. Joining groups makes us feel like we belong to something bigger than ourselves.

Cult Brands tap into this driving force by giving their customers the sense that they belong. The values and beliefs of the brand become part of their customers’ own identity.

The need to identify with a group and feel a sense of belonging is so strong that some customers go so far as to “brand” themselves with the logo of the company they identify with. Brand tattoos, then, provide membership into a social group.

After interviewing Brand Lovers of many of the world’s quintessential Cult Brands—like Apple, Linux, Vans, Harley, Life is good, Star Trek, Oprah, and IKEA—a common theme we hear is the feeling of family.

Cult customers feel like they are part of the collective. Cult Brands make their Brand Lovers feel included, important, special.

Higher Needs: The Key to Everlasting Loyalty

Now we jump to the top of Maslow’s hierarchy. Above, we listed all of the basic human needs. But Maslow’s real brilliance was in how he articulated that humans have needs beyond the basics.

We have higher needs, or spiritual needs.

Higher needs include:

• Cognitive (meaning, knowledge, and self-awareness)
• Aesthetic (beauty, form, balance)
• Self-actualization (personal growth and development)
• Transcendence (spiritual values)

All of these needs are human too. Everyone has them, but only a small minority of companies seek to help their customers meet them. Those that do tend to create legendary businesses.

These higher needs motivate and inspire humans to grow and reach their fullest potential. The more time we invest meeting these needs, the happier, mentally healthy, and creative we become.

Want to link positive emotions and associations between your customers and your brand? Help them reach their higher needs.

There are many ways to do this:

• You can help them express themselves like Apple does.
• You can help them achieve their most important goals as Google does.
• You can help them celebrate a sense of aliveness and playfulness like Jimmy Buffett and Star Trek do.
• You can inspire them with the call for freedom like Harley-Davidson and Oprah do.  

How can you elevate your customers? How can you help them become greater versions of themselves? How can you help them reach their highest goals?

This is the gift you can offer your customers. Loyalty and higher profitability is what they give you in return.

The relationship between Cult Brands and their Brand Lovers is mutually beneficial.

Brand Lovers enjoy a real sense of satisfaction, accomplishment, and belonging from the relationship. Their self-image is enhanced significantly: these customers feel better about themselves—and they feel strongly that others view them more positively—because of the brands they openly embrace.

Continue Reading

When Aeschines spoke, they said,”How well he speaks.” But when Demosthene spoke, they said, “Let us march against Philip.”David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising

“Damn, Daniel! Back at it again with the white Vans.”

Remember that meme? It took the internet by storm in February 2016. What started on February 15th as a video on Twitter of Josh Holtz commenting on his friend Daniel Lara’s clothing skyrocketed Josh and Daniel to recognition, landing them on Ellen DeGeneres and being crowned one of the 30 most influential people on the internet by Time Magazine.¹

Seeing its popularity and its ability to break through the clutter, many brands started appropriating the meme: Clorox suggested to “get back at it with Clorox” and Axe attempted to link its popularity to their #findyourmagic hashtag.

As in the case with the Damn Daniel memes, companies often try to hijack memes in an effort to gain borrowed visibility. But, all too often they release their memes after popularity has peaked or they misunderstand the meme.^{2 3}

Continue Reading

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.

______________

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.