Purple sneakers. White robes. Secret handshakes. Mysterious symbols.
An apple. A green mermaid. A swoosh.
There has been a lot of discussion recently around how you can create your own brand 'cult of personality': creating polarity in your market position, tracking Net Promoter Scores, developing initiation processes, implying secret knowledge and getting your brand to the ultimate aspiration in brand maturity, the "essential" brand. That's a lot of market-ese. And just like the recent articles and blogs I've read - with titles like 10 Steps to Create Your Own Cult-like Following and Developing Your Cult Brand in 12 Step - we marketers tend to over-complicate some pretty simple concepts.
In quest of cult-like status, we develop complex, layered messaging, find controversy with competition, create abstract and sometimes befuddling campaigns... all to get the audience to buy-in to our brand. In the process of trying to establish that cult clientele, that oh-so-reliable base of fans who readily, even happily, open their wallets and their goodwill, we forget the other audience that makes the kernel of your cult even possible - your internal fan base, the company employees.
The simple truth is that cults are based on a singular, common belief. That belief may very well be polarizing, it may be controversial, it may even be abstract higher thinking that's meaning is obfuscated to the 'average' consumer. It could be all those things, but at the core, it's still a single theme that binds.
And marketers can't create cults. We want to. We truly do. And we will continue to try. But cults are built from the inside out. Cults - of any kind, religious, business, personal - are birthed through a single person's vision... a compelling personality who pulls others into his vision... and those others adopt the vision as their own. This creates a team that starts to live and breathe and act according to the vision. This is more than understanding the potential of a product, seeing the opportunity in a market or trusting an executive leader.
This is faith.
The leader believes so powerfully in his or her singular vision, that he/she takes whatever path necessary to see it through. The employees then drive the vision, the powerful feelings associated with that vision, through to the new recruits. They push it through sales and marketing channels so that their customers feel it. Believes it. And buys it. The personality of the brand is tied deeply to that singular leader, but it's driven by the employees. Without them, there is no cult. The personality is not cultivated, not communicated.
Think about the brands that do this well... every interaction with every employee, regardless of their position within the organization, has a consistency. It feels like you're dealing with the same set of core values, the same belief system, that had you buying into the product or service in the first place. That's not just good employee training. It's not just a simple, scripted interaction. It's faith.
If you're looking for that cult-like feeling for your business, you need to look within. What is the vision of your company that your employees rally around? Not just the sales and marketing teams, but everyone, from the developers and engineering teams, the customer service team, all the way through to the administrative support teams and up to the executives. If you can clearly identify that, then your job as a marketer is to amp it up - focus on that single theme and drive your internal culture around it. If you're company is living and breathing this internally, it unavoidably becomes part of your canon - part of the ongoing dialogue that is both internal and external. And thus, your customers start hearing, seeing and believing the same singular theme. And buying.
So you can read the articles, you can follow the 10 steps... or 12... but none of those will get you any closer to creating that cult-like customer base you're looking for. You might create an interesting brand personality. You might launch some marvelously creative campaigns. And that can all be good for business. But if that singular vision isn't clear to you, if there is no focused rallying cry, your job as the marketer is to go find it. Not create it, but find it. Every company has one - and often it's just buried under layers of data - market analysis, customers surveys, historical buying patterns, product roadmaps, analyst reports and more. We bury our business with too much data and mislay that initial intention that we got into business for in the first place.
Go find your intention. Find the faith. Then you can have your cult.
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