Brands fail for one primary reason: instead of building a brand some people love, companies build brands no one hates.
Most marketers live in a world where they are constantly searching for the flashy, the instant—in short, the trivial.
We must recognize that brands don’t belong to marketers. Brands belong to the customer. The customer’s embrace is the only vote that counts, yet it is constantly ignored by strategies that place our products and services as the “goal” rather than the means to satisfy our customer’s needs, wishes, and fantasies.
Successful brands embrace their customers by anticipating basic and spiritual human needs.
Success creates magnetic brands—Cult Brands.
Why Cult Branding Works
Cult Brands aren’t just companies with products or services to sell. To many of their followers, they are a living, breathing surrogate family filled with like-minded individuals. They are a support group that just happens to sell products and services. Picture a Cult Brand in this context, and you’ll have a much better understanding of why these brands all have such high customer loyalty and devoted followers.
That’s how Cult Branding works.
Society only helps to accelerate the drivers behind its success.
Normally, when we talk about watching paint dry, we’re referring to something tedious or boring. But for the leadership at Ace Hardware, paint is pretty exciting. According to this New York Times article, a new product line (coupled with an insightful marketing approach) may be what it takes to allow the 4,300+ hardware and home improvement store chain to double their share of the domestic paint market.
Brand Modeling and the Search for a New Growth Strategy
Dominant organizations are engaged in a continual search for growth opportunities. What are the best ways to increase market share, raise a brand’s visibility, and connect more effectively with their customers? It’s easy to generate potential strategies that should create growth, but it’s remarkably difficult to assess ahead of time which strategies are going to succeed. It’s even tougher to tell which campaigns will be the most successful and deliver the highest return on investment.
Which brings us to Ace Hardware. This well-established brand has numerous options available to it. Ace Hardware has the resources and ability to pursue growth in any of several directions. We think that Ace’s leadership team has made a smart decision by focusing on the paint portion of their business. Their approach shows that there’s been a concerted effort to understand and better serve their customer.
Know Your Customer To Build Your Brand
What is the power of paint? Some analysts have compared painting the house to the famous lipstick effect—a quick and affordable way to lift the spirits when it’s not economically feasible to make larger, more indulgent purchases. Ace Hardware’s customers may not be in a position to renovate the entire kitchen or do over the bathroom. Yet they’re still driven by the need to make positive changes in their environment.
Painting a room delivers a powerful visual and emotional impact for a relatively small financial investment. Ace is demonstrating superior customer knowledge by providing a way to fill a significant emotional need while being sensitive to the current economic tensions and challenges their customer base is facing.
At the same time, Ace has used a very gender-specific, romance-oriented approach to marketing their new line of paint. Color choices are overwhelmingly made by women, according to Dana Larsen, an Ace Brand manager. The new campaign is based around the need for strong, satisfying, loving relationships—finding the perfect shade, color, or hue is referred to as finding your “soul paint.”
This recognizes and capitalizes on the biological driver that urges us to form lasting bonds. Couple it with some visual humor (after all, there’s something inherently funny about a line-up of 8 purple people) and you have a message that appeals to Ace’s customers on a number of levels.
Will Ace be able to meet their goal of doubling their market share by 2015? Appealing to their customers through multiple psychologically-appealing channels is not a bad start. Understanding the tensions and pressures facing their customer base, providing an economical means to satisfying compelling emotional needs, and honoring the underlying unconscious drivers of customer behavior are all steps dominant organizations use when they want to grow. That’s the value of putting customers first.
Business leaders instinctively know that customer loyalty is important, but many feel it is a fruitless endeavor to try to truly win the hearts and minds of their customers. Instead, the “merchant mind” takes over and the focus becomes on the next transaction instead of building a long-term relationship with your customer.
When executives first hear about the notion of building a Cult Brand, they often wonder, “Can we really do it? Can our brand achieve “cult” status? And if so, what would that look like?”
The answer, of course, is, “Yes, you can.” To see what a Cult Brand looks like, watch this brief video of an IKEA store grand opening.
How does IKEA do it?
Knowingly or not, they follow the Seven Rules of Cult Brands.
Learn why brand communities form and what you can do to support them:
The Cult Branding Company has been studying the unique qualities of Cult Brands for over ten years. The initial research introducing the concept of Cult Branding and profiling 9 magnetic brands including Apple, Oprah, and Harley-Davidson was published in The Power of Cult Branding (Random House) co-authored by BJ Bueno in 2002. The Cult Branding Company’s research team continues to study the factors behind true customer loyalty.
We don’t take this certification lightly. A panel of reviewers including Cult Brand expert BJ Bueno evaluate each potential brand, analyzing it from the perspective of the Seven Rules of Cult Brands.
Do you think you know a brand that qualifies for Cult Brand status?
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Abraham Maslow, one of the founding fathers of humanistic psychology, taught us that human beings have a higher, transcendent nature, which he visualized most eloquently in his Hierarchy of Human Needs. This simple pyramid gives us a framework from which to understand the essence of Cult Brands and how they inspire their most loyal and devoted followers.
The bottom four layers of the pyramid are what Maslow called Deficiency needs or D-needs. Nothing is felt if these needs are met, but in their absence, anxiety ensues.
The Answer: To Be
When the top level of self-actualization is reached, D-needs are transcended, and Being values (or B-values) are realized. These “intrinsic values of Being” when fulfilled, motivate and inspire humans to grow and reach their fullest potential.
The complete list of B-values includes:
- Truth
- Goodness
- Beauty
- Wholeness
- Aliveness
- Uniqueness
- Perfection
- Completion
- Justice
- Simplicity
- Richness
- Effortlessness
- Playfulness
- Self-Sufficiency
Simply stated, individuals who are more self-actualized tend to embrace more B-values than those suspended at lower levels.
Just like self-actualized individuals, Cult Brands are those self-realized companies that encompass more B-values than Iconic Brands, Average Joe Brands, and all other brands that fall under their shadow. These brands galvanize others towards greater fulfillment, wholeness, and integrity.
Let’s see how Cult Brands actually do it.
The Golden Rule of Social Groups tells us that consumers want to be part of a group that’s different. Here, Star Trek, Apple, and Volkswagen lead the pack, in their wholehearted embrace of the B-value of Uniqueness. These brands are not afraid to go against conventional wisdom, and celebrate their differences. Cult Brand loyalists happily congregate and revel together on common ground, proudly declaring their “be weird together, be weird no more” mantra.
When Cult Brands listen to the choirs, and take consumer feedback to heart, they uphold the B-values of Truth and Perfection. Apple’s commitment to their Mac User Groups serves as the perfect example. By interacting with these groups and constantly integrating their feedback, Apple honors and ultimately relies on their Brand Lover. Through this dynamic process of uncovering the truth about consumers’ experiences, they continually strive for perfection in their offerings.
What other Cult Brand than Jimmy Buffet, the King of Fun, and his loyal following of Parrot Heads could better personify the B-values of Aliveness and Playfulness? Cult Brands like Star Trek and Harley Davidson are also aligned with these B-values, in that they create consumer communities that celebrate lifestyles filled with youthful fantasy and adventure.
In the Golden Rule of Freedom, Cult Brands promote personal freedom and draw power from their enemies. No other Cult Brand has accomplished this with more grace, style, and ease than Oprah. Oprah drew power from her backwater competitors and aligned herself with more positive, uplifting stories rather than succumb to the ubiquitous drama of catfights and bar brawls.
Oprah wanted to showcase people at their best, unlike other talk show hosts who exposed the darkest sides of human behavior. Her intention to do good in the world is magnetic and irresistible, as evidenced by her loyal fans and ever-expanding media companies. Cult Brands like Oprah, through their devotion to charitable causes, their mission to improve people’s lives, and their commitment to promote freedom personify the B-values of Goodness, Beauty, and Justice.
In more simple terms, Cult Brands want to improve the lives of others. By harnessing the power and magnetism of B-values, these brands tap into our innate reservoirs of self-actualization.
We are drawn to Cult Brands because they make us feel good about ourselves, but on a deeper level, they lift us higher up the hierarchy to illuminate our Being needs. This drive towards self-actualization is intrinsic to our nature. Maslow understood it, and Cult Brands do too.