Learn why brand communities form and what you can do to support them:
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? Many companies, particularly those in the gaming sector, are targeting international markets by adapting to local preferences. For instance, identifying the beste online casino for norske spillere has become essential for casinos aiming to attract Norwegian players, as catering to specific preferences and regulations can significantly boost engagement. While it’s easy to generate potential strategies that should create growth, it’s remarkably difficult to assess ahead of time which strategies will succeed, especially in a competitive landscape.
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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