The Culting of Brands: Turn Your Customers into True Believers - Brossura

Atkin, Douglas

Brossura

ISBN 10: 1591840961 ISBN 13: 9781591840961

Casa editrice: Penguin Publishing Group, 2005

Riassunto

An analysis of the process of branding offers insight into how companies cultivate near-fanatical customer loyalty, identifying the commonalities between cults and corporations that use cult-branding techniques, and explaining how marketers and business leaders can attract and retain consumer population segments as well as loyal employees. Reprint.

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L'autore

Douglas Atkin is the director of strategy at one of New York’s hottest advertising agencies, Merkley Newman Harty. He has worked with numerous clients to increase their cult appeal, including Mercedes, Pfizer, Smith Barney, Fila, and JetBlue. This is his first book.

Estratto. © Riproduzione autorizzata. Diritti riservati.

INTRODUCTION

That there was a possible connection between cults and brands became more and more apparent to me as I watched people at a research facility on a cold night in New York. Eight customers had been asked to share their feelings about a well-known brand of sneaker. These eight individuals expressed the kind of intense conviction I had only imagined possible at a revivalist meeting or cult gathering. Their language verged on evangelical; their passion was on the brink of zealotry. They were converts.

What I was watching was ironic considering that I had just come from a meeting of anxious marketers who had been fretting that brand loyalty was dead. There were too many products, and they were too much the same. The consumer was king and marketers were servants reduced to begging for a scrap of attention to be paid to their brand before customers moved on to the next. These handwringers clearly hadn't met the consumers I was watching in that research room.

Where did that kind of cultlike devotion come from? How can anyone venerate something as banal as footwear? Can that kind of commitment be reproduced for other brands? Perhaps, I wondered, the answers to these questions could be found by studying the ultimate expression of devotion, the kind that is found in cults. If these people had cultlike devotion, then why not look at the original, cult devotion? How do cults generate such famously intense attachment? How do the few cult brands that exist create strong commitment? Are the dynamics of attraction essentially the same? And if so, are the techniques that create that degree of devotion transferable between the two?

I resolved that night to try and answer these questions by researching organizations that appeared to breed cultlike attraction, whether they existed in the sacred or secular realms. In the years that followed I met members of cults both famous and furtive; I met CEOs of companies and the brand addicts they had nurtured; I met with soldiers, Trekkies, fans, and cult deprogrammers. A Mac user told me that “PC users must be saved” and a young cult member insisted that his religion is a “brand.”

ISN'T THIS EXERCISE FAR-FETCHED, EVEN UNETHICAL?

Aren't cults manipulative, evil organizations intent on exploiting the gullible? Should they be a source of insight for commercial gain? In any case perhaps the insights are not transferable. And isn't it a little implausible to believe that anyone, at least on a large scale, will attach themselves to a brand with the same devotion as a religion? Surely the sacred and the profane should, and really do occupy separate worlds.

Let's look at the last point first. The worlds of the sacred and profane are coming closer together whether we like it or not. And much of this initiative is being taken by religious organizations. So-called Mega-churches (there are over seven hundred in America today with three million members), are building shopping malls so the unbaptised can browse their religion after browsing the clothing rack, or fitness clubs so they can have a spiritual workout after their physical one.1 Some of the flourishing evangelical churches employ classic marketing programs to attract new “customers” using advertising, mailshots, and e-mails. The same type of marketing data that Wal-Mart or Target might use to place stores in underserved neighborhoods is used by some religions to site new churches.

This move to employ secular and commercial tools is perhaps not surprising as the religious world looks jealously at the commitment brands are able to generate. Many religions would envy the “tent-meeting” that Saturn rallied when forty-five thousand owners turned up at the factory for the week long “Homecoming.” The volume of “Amens” and shouts of affirmation during one of Steve Jobs's speeches at Macworld suggests a meeting of evangelists praising the Lord rather than cries of enthusiasm for a new hard drive.

However the real point about merging the secular and the sacred became clearer the more research I did. The same dynamics are at play behind the attraction to brands and cults. They may vary in degree of strength (although not always), but not in type. When you consider this for a moment, it is not surprising. When research subjects were recounting their reasons for joining and committing, they were describing the profound urges to belong, make meaning, feel secure, have order within chaos, and create identity. This is the stuff of the human condition. When you are dealing with attraction and the act of buying into something you tend to be dealing in universal constants. All of my interviews, whether with a Mormon, a Krishna follower, a Harley rider, or a Marine, surfaced these essential human needs. The sacred and profane are being bound by the essential desires of human nature, which seeks satisfaction wherever it can.

And more and more opportunities for that satisfaction are being presented by the commercial world. We should not be surprised that as the world becomes more consumerist, so do the institutions that supply community, meaning, and identity.

Let's look briefly at the ethics issue. Is writing this book a morally dubious exercise? Should reading it make you feel ethically queasy? I emphatically believe that it is not, and you should not.

The position of this book is that cults are a good thing, that cults are normal, and that people join them for very good reasons. I invite you to suspend any prejudice that may have been derived from vivid pictures of mass suicides and burning compounds on the front pages of Time and Newsweek. The popular image of cults is that they are manipulative, destructive, and evil. Some are, clearly, and these tend to be the ones that dominate the headlines whenever they do something that offends our moral norms and our laws. However, the majority of the thousand or so cults in America today never blip the radar of social opprobrium. They get on with the job of providing community and meaning for their members, albeit in an unorthodox way.

And who's to say that unorthodoxy should be censured? Cults have existed for millennia as vital organisms of social evolution. All great religions were once cults. Christianity was but one of several Mystery Cults in the eastern Mediterranean two thousand years ago. It can be argued that a great founding impulse of this country was provided by a cult. The Pilgrims who stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock (a classically mythologized event) were a splinter group of what was considered a dangerous cult in seventeenth-century England called the Separatists.

All great social and religious movements have started with bands of devoted followers chastised for being different. Who knows what small cult existing in America today will become the dominant cultural force in a few centuries' time? A highly controversial (and consequently persecuted) small community in New York State in the nineteenth century started what is now considered to be the next world religion. The growth rate of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter- day Saints (more commonly known as the Mormons) is roughly equal to that of Christianity in its early centuries—40 percent per decade.

Cults are a normal, in fact an essential feature of a healthy culture, one that would atrophy without them. And normal people populate them. The insights we derive from cult members, and the techniques used to generate devotion amongst them are transferable to a more general context. The people who join cults are most likely to be like you. The popular image of cult members is that they are psychologically flawed individuals, gullible and desperate. While some do conform to this image the majority do not. Demographically they tend to be from stable and financially comfortable homes and are above average in intelligence and education. They are, in fact, a desirable target audience.

A moment's thought will suggest that successful cults (the ones we will study) cannot be populated by the socially inept and emotionally disturbed anyway. To grow their membership devotees will have to be attractive enough and have the social wherewithal to proselytize. People in significant numbers are not going to join an organization populated by social failures. They will be drawn to a religion such as the Mormon Church, and a brand such as Saturn, through word of mouth. That mouth has to belong to someone whom potential recruits will trust and respect.

Suspend your prejudice about cult brands, too. They are not necessarily small, niche, and populated by consumers unrepresentative of the larger market. The focus of this book will be on large or market-leading cult brands such as Harley-Davidson, Saturn, Mary Kay, and eBay. The only exceptions will be those brands and organizations that I believe are on their way to leader status by using cult techniques, such as jetBlue. Yes, you can have a large cult brand. Yes, they can be populated by “normal” consumers; no, they need not consist of just leading-edgers.

THE IMPORTANT TOPICS

This book is not just an exercise in examining the techniques that can be employed to generate extreme loyalty. It is also about the cult and cult brand members' motivations, desires, and attitudes that allow those techniques to work in the first place. Why do cult members sacrifice money, time, sometimes their jobs, and the respect of their peers, even their family, to devote themselves to a castigated organization? What makes someone unreasonably committed to a brand?

One person I interviewed spends his Saturdays at a computer store barging into sales assistants' pitches for PCs to sell the buyers Apple instead (he does not work for the store). What does he get out of it? It's clearly not just enthusiasm based on product features. Something else is driving such devotion (another I interviewed would dust off the Macs, switch them on, and move the PC models to the back of the shelf). There have been plenty of books about the service programs and product features that can generate loyalty to a brand. But there have been few that explain the emotional and psychological dynamics of attraction and commitment, the reasons we are drawn to a brand in the first place—without understanding the why, the what is harder to apply, and so we will study both.

I want to examine the universal needs (to belong, to make meaning, to create identity) satisfied by a large range of groups, and analyze the timeless techniques applied over centuries to satisfy those needs. My source material covers a whole spectrum of committed groups from the secular and social to the religious and commercial. I talked to members of secret cult organizations, established religions, fading cults, growing cults, sororities, fan clubs, current and ex-Marines, Wiccans, members of the Forum, Deadheads, AA members, people working in strong corporate cultures, and brand addicts whether student, senior executive, or homemaker. I interviewed members of Internet brand communities, service, product, packaged goods, and luxury brand cults. I consulted a leading cult deprogrammer (more properly known as an “exit-counselor”), CEOs of successful cult brand companies, and leaders of cult brand movements.

This is not the entire list. And of course the potential list is endless. I continue to interview what seems an infinite rank of candidates even as this book is going to press. Every time I mentioned this study to anyone they would suggest another source, another cult or cult brand that I simply must examine. However, within the first year or so (I started my research in 1997) it became clear that the insights I was uncovering were common across all the forms of devotion I studied, whether it was a community of Phish members or “The Fellowship of Friends” (a controversial cult based in California). After all, they deal with the stuff of the human condition. They are infinitely relevant and universally applicable.

WHAT IS A CULT?

I should start with a working definition of a cult. Although I drew from a large range of groups, a focus here will be cults and cult brands as case histories of extreme belonging.

It's actually helpful to define a cult by comparing it with a phenomenon with which it's often confused.

· A cult is normally a group that embraces new or fundamentally different ideas. Its ideology departs significantly from the prevailing beliefs of the surrounding culture. It is therefore progressive.
· A sect tends to be retrogressive. It has separated from the establishment because of its desire to return to the fundamentals of the established religion. It believes the established religion has compromised its ideology. Hence most fundamentalist groups are sects.

It's worth noting that sociologists of religion have taken to calling cults New Religious Movements (NRMs) in an attempt to distance what they see as perfectly legitimate social phenomena from the popular image that the word cult now conjures.

The University of Virginia, a leading academic source of information on new religions has a New Religious Movement homepage. This is from its mission statement:

Religions and human cultures are constantly being renewed and invigorated.... At some point, every religion was new. There are no exceptions. And every vital religion is more or less constantly experiencing movement from within and pressures from the outside to change and adapt.

If we are defining cults it would be an oversight not to include a leading anticult group's description. The AFF (the American Family Foundation) has a long history of anticult activity and was originally founded by parents concerned by their children's (often adult children's) membership of NRMs. Not surprisingly, it's a little negative. It corresponds pretty closely to that held by the general population, and reflects the view that these groups are dangerously aberrant (some obviously are):

Cult: a group or movement exhibiting a great or excessive devotion or dedication to some person, idea or thing, and employing unethically manipulative techniques of persuasion and control designed to advance the goals of the group's leaders, to the actual or possible detriment of members, their families or the community. (my emphasis)

For our purposes, and perhaps a little cheekily, I will take this definition and adapt it to define the more typical cult, ones not associated in the popular mind with psychotic leaders and damaged members:

Cult: a group or movement exhibiting a great devotion or dedication to some person, idea, or thing. Its ideology is distinctive and it has a well-defined and committed community. It enjoys exclusive devotion (that is, not shared with another group), and its members often become voluntary advocates.

By extension the same would define a cult brand:

Cult Brand: a brand for which a group of customers exhibit a great devotion or dedication. Its ideology is distinctive and it has a well-defined and committed community. It enjoys exclusive devotion (that is, not shared with another brand in the same category), and its members often become voluntary advocates.

There are as many definitions as there are interested parties, but this will serve us well enough. You'll note that some key distinctions c...

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Penguin Publishing Group
• Data di pubblicazione: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1591840961
• ISBN 13: 9781591840961
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 256