Brand Management / Cult Branding

An introduction

Today in the era of modern marketing we must recognize, that brands don't have to belong to marketers anymore. Brands belong to customers. 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. As many companies nowadays understand the necessity of building a high level emotional relationship with target audience, we believe that Cult Branding becomes popular method of achieving this aim. Once your brand becomes a cult, there is no way to compete with it in particular field of interests; cult brand will gain the pedestal of profitability as it meets customer needs in not only rational, but on physiological level.

The author of "Culting of Brands", Douglas Atkin has researched the parallels between religious cults and cult brands.

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As part of his research he talked to brand addicts, including Harley Davidson riders and Apple followers. He distils the marketing strategies behind the making of cult brands. Basically, the author gives a positive meaning of cult: "Healthy societies need cults. Cults are the spores of change in a society. Every major religion in the world was a cult at one time. Christianity was simply one of many mystery cults in the eastern Mediterranean 2,000 years ago. The early Christians, like the Mormons and like many other classic cults, were persecuted and castigated for being too different from the established norms of society, yet it ended up becoming the norm of society. Cults are part of the renewal of culture in society".

As the result, he found out that people become addicted to cult brands like JetBlue, Apple or eBay for more or less the same reasons that...