The culting of brands : when customers become

true believers
1. The culting of brands : when customers become true believers
2. CULTING
3. BRANDS
4. CONTENTS
5. INTRODUCTION
6. THE IMPORTANT TOPICS
7. THE GREAT CULT PARADOX: WHY PEOPLE JOIN
8. YOU’RE DIFFERENT, WE’RE DIFFERENT
9. 3. Demarcate the Cult from the Status Quo
10. 4. Demonize the Other
11. WE LOVE YOU
12. 3. Create opportunities for meeting and interaction
13. 4. Remove Distractions
14. 5. Love Bomb
15. YOU BELONG
16. CUTTING IS A CONTACT SPORT
17. WE’RE IN THIS TOGETHER
18. THIS IS WHAT WE BELIEVE
19. WHAT IS REQUIRED OE A BEL1EE SYSTEM?
20. WHERE DO YOU START?
21. TWO WAYS TO E1ND MEANING
22. Surf and Steal
23. SYMBOLISM
24. COMMITMENT IS A TWO-WAY STREET
25. The Cost of Commitment Is Initially Low
26. The Cost of Lying
27. The Price of Neglect
28. Commitment Is a Lifetime Contract
29. GO FORTH AND MULTIPLY
30. TENSION: THE MANAGEMENT OE DEVIANCE
31. Isolation: Too Much Tension Can Alienate Potential Customers
32. NOT ENOUGH TENSION
33. A ClILT IS BORN
34. THE CULT WAVERS, A CHURCH STRENGTHENS
35. Lack of Mutual Investment
36. Too Much Tension
37. The Vatican Absorbs Its Own Cult
38. The Internal Cult Dies
39. Absorption of Your Own Cult Can Be a Sound Strategy
40. The Cult Lives on-Outside the Mother Church
41. The Long View: The Mother Church Adopted an Effective Defense
42. THREE STRATEGIES TO DEAL WITH COMPETITORS’ CHETS
43. 1. Persecution
44. WHO RONS THE COLT?
45. CONCLUSION
46. Index
47. Index
48. 3 1127 □□□B1135 3
49. Advance praise for THE CULTING OF BRANDS

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 The culting of brands : when
customers become true believers
Atkin, Douglas

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THE

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CULTING
OF

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BRANDS
WHEN CUSTOMERS BECOME TRUE BELIEVERS

DOUGLAS ATKIN

U.S. $24.95 Canada $36.00

In his work as a marketer, Douglas Atkin became fascinated by the way

some people become fiercely loyal to certain brands. Picture a convention
of Harley riders, or an intense conversation between iPod owners, or an
avid eBay user raving about her newest find. Their devotion is almost
cultlike. So to understand these consumers better, Atkin thought, why not
study real cults?

seven years later, Atkin's research into cults has yielded some surprising
conclusions. For example, people usually join cults for good reasons, not
because they’re psychologically flawed, gullible, or desperate. Quite the
contrary—cult members are likely to be intelligent, educated, and socially
adept. Cults provide community and meaning for their members, a place
where they can be themselves and yet also play an important part of a
group. Every great religion and social movement started with bands of
devoted followers chastised for being different.

Atkin argues that people become addicted to “cult brands” like jetBlue,
Apple, eBay, or Mary Kay for more or less the same reasons that people
become committed to cults like Hare Krishna. In The Culting of Brands, he
explains how these and other companies have fueled such unshakable
allegiance through basically the same techniques as those used by the
Moonies.
This doesn’t make these companies unethical. They have simply figured out
how to spread the

THE

CUTTING

OF

BRANDS

fit S i

P> Ot? L

THE CIILT1N G
OF

BRANDS
When Customers

Become

True Believers

Douglas Atkin

PORTFOLIO

PORTFOLIO
Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York
10014, U.S.A.

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

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Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL,

England

First published in 2004 by Portfolio, a member of Penguin Group (USA)

Inc.

10 987654321

Copyright © Douglas Atkin, 2004 All rights reserved

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Atkin, Douglas.

The culting of brands: when customers become true believers / Douglas

Atkin.

p. cm.
Includes index.

ISBN 1-59184-027-9

1. Brand name products—Marketing—Management. 2. Customer loyalty.

3. Identity (Psychology) I. Title.

HF5415.13.A85 2004 658.8'343 — dc22 2004044283

This book is printed on acid-free paper. ©

Printed in the United States of America • Designed by Nancy Resnick

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this
publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic,
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The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or
via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and
punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and
do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted
materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

For Matthew, Annie, David, Nigel, and Mark

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There are many people to blame for this book, but the guiltiest is Lisa
Caputo, president of Women & Co., a division of Citigroup, Inc. It was her
idea to publish this material and she made it happen by introducing me to
the incomparable Joni Evans. Joni is an Agent Celebre whose charm,
intelligence, and reputation make the publishing world her servant. I’ve
certainly become smitten as she doled out encouragement, criticism, and
direction at just the right moments. She made all the difference.
Ryan Barton and Patrick Kayser’s contributions made all of the difference,
too. They’ll be famous one day. Doug Garr’s advice and experience, for
which he is already famous, was invaluable.

What an incredible team at Penguin. Adrian Zackheim is Publisher Celebre

and his group has been magnificent. Stephanie Land, editor, has been tactful
as she gave her wise comments (it’s so easy to be wounded), and Will
Weisser has thrown himself into the project.

Douglas Rushkoff, friend and writer, was inspirational at the early stages of
this project, as was Dr. Bob Deutsch.

The true heroes of this undertaking are all my colleagues at Merkley

Newman Harty. They have uncomplainingly dealt with

Acknowledgments

the distraction that the book has caused. This is especially true of the
Planning Department, the best in the country. Super-planners Margot
Grover, Janet Oak, and Ann Marie Davis helped directly, as did Hamish
Chandra, Jason Cha, and Don Tulanon . . . three highly talented and tail-
waggingly keen interns. But the whole group took up the slack with alacrity
and delivered performances that made me proud.

My fellow partners, Alex Gellert, Steve Harty, Andy Hirsch, Parry Merkley,
Marty Orzio, and Randy Saitta, have been very, very supportive both
emotionally and by providing the actual resources that got this job done.

And finally, I must thank the most uncomplaining, motivating, and

insightful book widow ever: Matthew.

vm

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CONTENTS
Introduction xi

1. THE GREAT CULT PARADOX: WHY PEOPLE JOIN 1

2. YOU’RE DIFFERENT, WE’RE DIFFERENT 17

3. WE LOVE YOU 35

4. YOU BELONG 57

5. CULTING IS A CONTACT SPORT 67

6. WE’RE IN THIS TOGETHER 81

7. THIS IS WHAT WE BELIEVE 95

8. SYMBOLISM 111

9. COMMITMENT IS A TWO-WAY STREET 121

10. GO FORTH AND MULTIPLY 135

11. TENSION: THE MANAGEMENT OF DEVIANCE 145

12. A CULT IS BORN 161

13. THE CULT WAVERS, A CHURCH STRENGTHENS 173

Contents

WHO RUNS THE CULT? 187

CONCLUSION 199
Notes 205

Bibliography 211

Index 221

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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 culdike 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 EAR-EETCHED,

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. Socalled 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.

Lets 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
seventeenthcentury 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.

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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

xvu

Introduction

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

xvin

Introduction

the goals of the groups 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 common to the
brand and cult definitions are the ideas of community and belonging,
ideology, devotion, and advocacy. All these will be explored in great detail
in the following chapters.

xtx

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CUTTING

OF

BRANDS

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THE GREAT CULT PARADOX:
WHY PEOPLE JOIN
W hat compels sane, stable, intelligent individuals to sacrifice virtually
everything? Why do they throw money, time, sometimes their careers, the
regard of their peers, and even their families on the altar of cult belonging?
Commitment—true commitment— is exclusionary. Devotion to one thing
implicitly requires rejection of another. There is an opportunity cost to
everything and joining an unorthodox belief system often demands a very
high expenditure indeed.

Devotion to a cult brand also can require significant cost. Obviously, the
degree of sacrifice is not the same as that of a cult member, but in the
context of consumerism, joining a brand can be pricey, and not just in terms
of cash. Why does a loyal devotee of jetBlue leave his home in New Jersey
to drive past Newark and La Guardia airports, cross two Manhattan bridges
and hack across the endless plains of Queens to take a one hour flight from
the airline’s home base at JFK? (If you don’t live in New York just know
that most residents would be incredulous at such an act.) Why does Sean, a
student, who can’t regularly afford his lunch, feel compelled to upgrade his
Mac computer every time a new model is launched just because he wants
“to support the company”? Why does the

same hungry student buy directly from Apple so that “they get all the
money”?

Cult members are manipulated by brilliant psychopathic leaders. That is the

populist explanation. And it’s as poorly reasoned, and as insulting to its
members, as is the idea that cult brand members have been brainwashed by
cynical corporations. It assumes that consumers of cults and brands alike
are bereft of free will and the powers of discrimination. Perhaps they are
flawed by poor emotional backgrounds and educational and financial
impoverishment. It’s almost inevitable that they’ll join a cult because of
their faulty upbringing and mental instability.
Research contradicts this interpretation—not only my own, but data
collected by scientists and sociologists who have studied cult phenomena
for decades. Included among the cult members I spoke with were a senior
executive in an M&A firm, managers of corporations, homemakers and
students, a clinical biologist, and a financial broker. They were on the whole
smart, sane individuals, often in highly respectable jobs, well aware of the
choice they had made and reasoned defenders of it to detractors. They were
otherwise ordinary in every respect. As Steve Hassan, one of the leading
cult deprogrammers in the United States admits: “Since my departure from
the Moon cult, I have counseled or spoken with more than a thousand
former members of cults of all kinds. These people have come from every
sort of background and ranged in age from twelve to eighty-five. Although
some of them clearly had severe emotional problems before becoming
involved, the great majority were stable, intelligent, idealistic people who
tended to have good educations and come from respectable families .” 1

Studies of the populations of major cults by religious sociologists report

that their memberships generally follow a similar profile. Eileen Barker, a
sociologist from the London School of Economics, undertook a large study
of the membership of the Unification Church (more famously known as the
Moonies) at the

height of its popularity . 2 Her data confirmed that of other academics who
had profiled other groups. The cults recruits tended to come from
“conventional and highly respectable homes in which traditional values of
family life, morality, and decency were upheld. They tended to believe that
their parents’ relationships were happy or very happy.” In terms of
demographics, she found that joiners were largely middle class,
disproportionately more so than the general population and that they had
good academic backgrounds.

So, these people tended not be damaged by broken homes, impoverished, or

rendered gullible by ignorance. But were they sane? Were they ripe meat for
the vultures that preyed on psychologically vulnerable souls? Barker
continues: “[There is a suggestion that] those who become Moonies cannot
really be said to be in their right minds because they are particularly
passive, pathetic, or suggestible people. But the evidence suggests that,
although a few Moonies might fall into this category, the majority do not;
indeed, it seems that, while some such people may be drawn to the
workshop, it is precisely those whom one might have expected to be the
most vulnerable to persuasion who turn out to be non-joiners.”

Ah, but perhaps they were unfortunate enough to have been brainwashed.
Anyone, whatever his or her mental state, can fall victim to the
machinations of the perverted doctors of psychological manipulation. Even
if you have somehow squared your conscience and have opened this book
relishing the opportunity to brainwash your consumers, or potential cult
members, I’m afraid you’re in for a disappointment. The technique has long
been debunked as a credible tactic to generate sustained commitment to
anything, including cults . 3

Mainly, those who join cults do not do so because they are emotionally,
mentally, or intellectually flawed or because failings in their upbringing
have propelled them into the arms of a more loving or supportive
environment. Or because they have been victims of sinister mind control
techniques. They join for reasons that

THE CUTTING OF BRANDS

you or I would recognize, find reasonable, and have acted upon ourselves.

Similarly, near total information, decades of collective experience, and vast

product choice make it very hard to hoodwink the modern consumer even if
you wanted to. Nowadays, it’s not unusual to have your carefully crafted
brand strategy played back to you by consumers in a focus group. Buyers
nowadays tend to be very media and marketing literate (almost 20 percent
of all undergraduates received a business management degree in 2000-
2001). The techniques to “seduce” the consumer are mostly open to scrutiny
by everyone. Even when the marketing techniques are especially clever and
elicit extreme devotion, the seller is often praised by those who have been
seduced. As one loyal consumer of Snapple said admiringly in a group
interview, “We’ve been bamboozled by The Man and we know it.”

Some cult members have undoubtedly been attracted by the charisma of

their leaders, and some brand purchasers are surely a little deluded and
extreme. But the majority buy into their respective belief systems for very
good, very normal reasons and are quite aware of the criteria that informs
those decisions.

THE CRUX OF THE PARADOX

The common belief is that people join cults to conform. Actually, the very
opposite is true. They join to become more individual. At the heart of the
desire to join a cult, in fact any community to which you will become
committed, is a paradox. It’s the central paradox of cult belonging and the
one that destroys this most pervasive of populist myths.

As one cult member unequivocally put it, “Belonging allows the individual
to become more himself. You become more you.” This is an essential
“why” (the central motivation to join and belong) that

we need to understand before we apply the multitude of “whats” (the

techniques to generate attraction and loyalty) that are derived from it.

How can this possibly be? The mass suicides of the Peoples Temple and
Heaven’s Gate cults suggest the destruction of the self, not its development.
Even if we put these two extreme (and rare) examples aside, how can
belonging to anything result in enhanced individuality?

Actually the paradox is something that almost everyone has experienced at

some time. A community of like people implicitly and sometimes explicitly
endorses the individual. It’s a vital ingredient of the sense of belonging that
most crave when they say they are looking for somewhere to “feel at
home.” It can create an uncritical and even celebratory environment in
which the individual can feel confident enough to find and express himself.
There is a “safe space” as one cult member said to me, where the inhibitions
normally felt among strangers are removed and the barriers to being you are
broken with impunity. You may change the company you work for, your
neighborhood, social club, and even your friends, to find a place where it is
more possible to be yourself with people you consider to be more like
yourself.
The Moonies grasped this concept to use as a recruitment tool during their
introductory weekends. They effectively accelerated the paradox. If a
prospect showed any interest in the group during a street encounter or any
other social contact, they were invited to one of the Moonie camps for a
weekend. The focus of the stay was to foster intense interaction between
prospects and church members. They played games, sang, and prepared and
shared meals together. If the recruit achieved anything (like singing a song)
they were praised and complimented. The overwhelming feeling that
participants reported was of unequivocal love, and absolute support in
everything they did.

The cult paradox dynamic can be looked at in terms of these four basic
steps:

1. An individual might have a feeling of difference, even alienation from the

world around them.

2. This leads to openness to or searching for a more compatible

environment.

3. They are likely to feel a sense of security or safety in a place where one’s
difference from the outside world is seen as a virtue, not a handicap.

4. This presents the circumstances for self-actualization within a group of

like-minded others who celebrate the individual for being himself.

The feeling of difference and alienation I’m referring to is not necessarily

extreme. Everyone feels at least some separation from the world around
him. To not would really indicate that you are some kind of herd animal,
perhaps even insane. There can be no sense of self unless you feel
somewhat different from the world in which you live.

For some, the sense of separation can be enough to prompt them to search
for a place where they “feel at home” or where the meaning system is more
in accord with their circumstances at the time. The person may have
experienced some trauma: a bereavement, divorce, or accident that prompts
them to fundamentally reassess their worldview. For others it can simply be
a low-grade dissatisfaction with the status quo. One man explained why he
joined a cult: “I believed that life without some other meaning than the day-
to-day routine wasn’t really worth it, or there just wasn’t enough lasting joy
and meaning there. ... I believed there had to be more.” These less-
distressed people may simply be open to an alternative when it crosses their
path. Active searching or more passive openness are the two circumstances
that create an opportunity for cult recruitment.

A woman I will call Joanna fell more into the latter camp. Joanna joined a
secretive and currently controversial cult called

The Work. She is a successful, attractive, intelligent woman, Catherine

Deneuve-ish in appearance. She was fairly typical of many of her urban
contemporaries: accomplished but dissatisfied. She had significant
responsibility in a major corporation in New York City. However, after
years of striving in her career she had begun to feel disconnected from the
“the things that were important to me.” She had made a series of minor
incremental decisions that had brought her to a point that she had never
intended.

“I really didn’t know how I got where I was,” Joanna explained. “I started
out as an art major. I was going into the textile design world and then I
ended up being a manager of a corporate business. How did I get there? I
was not aware of the sequence of events which I think happened more by
default than anything else, but I ended up in the spot that I was in.”

She realized that she had little in common with her colleagues and she had
lost purpose, which for her was intellectual inquiry, ideas, and art. She was
introduced to The Work by a girlfriend’s boyfriend. The opportunity to
reconnect with herself through a group of similar people was attractive
enough for her to accept his invitation to attend a “class” in a downtown
loft.

It focused on the philosophy of Ouspensky, who taught that most of us

allegedly live in a state of “waking sleep,” and that man should undertake
exercises to force the consciousness to a higher level of awareness. Joanna
found the group and this concept intriguing and eventually joined. She
stayed for sixteen years (at considerable financial cost and time
commitment).
Outside the group was a tolerable but incompatible life. Inside the group,
Joanna found “people who shared the same interests, the same values. That
was important.” She felt a sense of “camaraderie or sense of community.”
This sense of belonging had a very important effect. “So in this group,
although it was structured rather oddly,” Joanna explained, “I felt
understood, validated, supported. That the things that I was truly interested
in were not just poppycock.” The

“true” unexpressed side of her that had been stifled in a stiff corporate
environment was able to flourish within the albeit tight confines of a
secretive group.

Joannas story simply articulates a universal experience. We all have an

awareness of our own uniqueness and difference. We might feel
uncomfortable or dissatisfied in an environment where it is not recognized
and encouraged. Being welcomed into a group where that difference is
validated and encouraged by people who are also different, but like
ourselves, is a relief and even exciting. This process is recognizable as a
human constant, that is, it is common to everyone and is played out daily in
all kinds of circumstances whether at work, at a church, in a social group,
joining the military or a fraternity, or even buying a brand.

THE CHET BRAND PARADOX

The same paradox can be found at the heart of cult brands. A Mac user I
interviewed, a writer, had personal characteristics not unlike those of
Joanna’s. He’s a successful contributor to journals and magazines,
articulate, engaging, and bright. Nor was he a typical nerd. Although
slightly disheveled and a little bookish, some of the women in the group
clearly found him attractive. He told me that “a Mac made me creative. No,
actually I was creative to begin with, and in some ways they made me more
creative.”

This reveals a very intense connection to a brand. Note how his statement
echoes the “you become more you” comment that we saw earlier. His
association with the Mac fraternity has made him “more himself,” he
claims. It has taken that part of his identity that he considers his most
defining characteristic, his creativity, and accelerated it. That’s a pretty
important role he has ascribed to a mere brand.

The community that surrounds Apple is typical of contemporary

neighborhoods. No longer dependent on geographic prox

imity, they tend to be defined by a state of mind, or collective conviction.

The Apple community is not even defined by the product itself anymore
according to one student, Sean, who said, “In a literal sense, it’s based
around this machine, but it’s based around a certain way of thinking.”

Apple has built an enviably strong community based on a “certain way of

thinking.” Apple brand members (and they definitely see themselves as
“members,” not just buyers) would define themselves by their different
attitude to life, and they align that attitude with that of the Apple brand and
the others who buy it. Like Joanna, they have gravitated to a community of
people that think more alike, and less like the rest of the world.

Apple has cleverly leveraged the feelings associated with the cult paradox
described in the steps above to elevate that brand to cult status: alienation
and rejection, followed by validation that in turn sets the stage for self-
actualization.

Others echo the Apple ethos.

“It’s okay to be odd. We’re odd too.”

“Like, there’s nothing wrong with you. . . that you’re not considered an
asshole . . . that people don’t say you’re doing that and we’re all doing this.
It’s okay to march to the beat of a different drummer.”

Apple has long had a large community of consumers who pride themselves
on their nonconformism. They’ve seen themselves as creative people in an
uncreative world and have tended to find what refuge they can in the
businesses of architecture, advertising, music, and film, Apple’s
traditionally strong business base (currently roughly 30 percent of its
customers are graphic designers and artists). To these people, Apple’s call to
challenge the norm has elevated their attachment to the brand beyond the
simple desire to buy a clever box of electronics.

“I spent twenty-six of my years not conforming. Why the hell should I start
now? The Mac has played a big role in helping me not conform.” A loyal
user said this when we were talking about

the “Think Different” campaign running at the time. It celebrated famous

individuals who had gone against the grain, who had been considered
eccentric or even weird. Their ideas and their passion, however, had
changed the world. The TV, poster, and print ads featured Picasso, Gandhi,
Amelia Earhart, Richard Branson, Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, and others. It
was a public declaration that their customers were not alone. In fact, they
were in a community of heroes. It represented a broadcast endorsement of
who they were. As one person said, “It’s okay to be strange . . . it’s okay to
come up with stupid ideas, to be different.”

The campaign broadcast validation to those who had always felt different
from and uneasy in a world of conformists (as they saw it). It was the mass
media equivalent of love-bombing, the technique the Moonies use to
overwhelmingly endorse the individuals who attended the recruitment
weekends (except perhaps a little more intelligently done). It was a classic
use of the modern means of community building for those groups where
geography is a barrier to bonding.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs and his advertising agency had latched upon the
inherent feelings of difference and alienation of people who had probably
felt separate from the rest of their worlds for most of their lives, simply
because they leaned more toward the creative or the intellectual. They were
the ones picked on at school for not being jocks or cheerleaders, or at least
for not wanting to be. The brand made a siren call to those that felt that way
and offered a virtual community of like-others. Jobs publicly validated his
membership by associating himself and his fans with those heroes of
society originally castigated for zigging when the rest zagged.

THE CHET PARADOX IN SISTERHOOD

Jordana is a Wiccan. It’s a cult that’s enjoyed a resurgence in recent
decades. It’s said to trace its origins back to the Old Religion of pre

Christian Europe that was demonized (literally) by the Church into a

religion of devil worship and malevolent witches. In her midthirties, black-
haired, dark-eyed, and animated as she spoke, Jordana appeared like any
other engaging woman at ease with herself.

Her road to becoming a Wiccan was long and arduous. Jordana had grown
up as a Hasidic Jew, a milieu where there are rarely tighter bonds between
family, cultural, spiritual, racial, and community identity. It was one in
which, as she grew into a conscious adult, she wished to explore her own
identity. Jordana first wanted to become a rabbi. She asked her teachers
questions about the role of women in the Torah and the Bible. She probed
about Lilith. “They considered these to be dangerous questions. I think I
realized that as a woman my participation was [to be] very limited.”

Alienation

Her desire to integrate further into this community and to express her
blooming identity as a woman was eventually blocked with disastrous
results. Jordana said, “You know, as a woman ... all the education is geared
toward being a wife and a mother. And I felt that was too limiting for me.
Ultimately what happened, at fifteenand-a-half, I was excommunicated by a
group of Hasidic rabbis. It was a very painful experience for me.”

Her community could not reconcile her ambitions for her spirituality with
her gender. She interrogated her world and she did not fit. She could not
belong. She could not be herself. The insult was profound enough to propel
her to the edge of self-destructive behavior. Jordana said, “I was in a lot of
trouble at the time. There were many places I could have turned, drugs,
discotheques all night, whatever.”

Openness

Fortunately she didn’t. Nor did she desperately investigate other

worldviews in favor of the one she had left. At just the right time however,
it seemed that Wicca found her. “I wasn’t consciously looking,” she said. “I
wasn’t looking through the Yellow Pages, or flyers saying, ‘what is my new
religion?’ Somehow, this came across my path and I embraced it. Not just
the people, but also the teaching.”

Belonging

When Jordana joined the Sisterhood of Wicca, she progressed through the
four stages of initiation. She described a rite of passage where “it’s
confrontation time, it’s a very difficult phase. There’s a lot of stuff in your
face and having to deal with and conquer your fears.” Jordana’s fellow
witch Cynthia described how being amongst like-others allowed women to
feel secure enough to really expose who they were: “I think there is really
incredible strength with my own sisterhood. I’ve seen a lot of women tear
down walls that have been in place and really get to know who they are
inside. It’s a safe place because they’re among women.”

Self-Actualization

Jordana became a senior member of the community and has even written
books on Wicca. She’s proud of her progress and regrets that her family has
trouble with her belief system. Her words betray her sense of triumph and
vindication at finally being able to have

developed herself. She concluded, “I am a Priestess. I am a Rabbi. I am a

Rabbi Wicca. So its happened for me.”

A SISTERHOOD OF BRAND SALESWOMEN

The Mary Kay Corporation is a classic example of the paradox within a
business, a brand, and some would say, a fully fledged cult (one that
enjoyed $1.2 billion in sales in 2001, with more than 850,000 sales
consultants in thirty-seven countries). Whichever it is, it provided a context
for Paula to flourish. Paula has an open face and an Irish softness about her.
She was neatly turned out for our interview in a business suit that matched
her long, wavy brown hair. She’s in her forties but looks perhaps late
thirties. She was proud of her achievements, but she had a self-effacing
manner that disarmed one’s expectation. I expected a brassy, bullying,
overly made-up cosmetics consultant.

Earlier in her career, Paula had worked for a graphics company where she
ran its sales department. She had built the unit from five to twenty people
and increased its sales from $250,000 to $3 million in two years. She ran
her department “her way,” which coincided with the company’s. Its values
were hers. She said, “I believe that if you keep people happy, they’re going
to work harder, they’re going to want to work for you.” She grew as a
manager within the company as her confidence developed. The company
rewarded her with more responsibility and greater flexibility.

There was an implicit recognition between Paula and the company she
worked for. She belonged within the value system of the company. Her
work community was one in which she felt recognized and endorsed and
she flourished.

THE CULT1NG OF BRANDS

Alienation

Then everything changed. The owner wanted to retire and sell the company.
With an eye to squeezing the juice from the company budget sheet for a
plump bottom line, he became “less flexible with my expense account in
terms of taking care of my guys.” She refused to alter her principles and
undermine the group she had built. She “wouldn’t change, wouldn’t cut
back,” and continued to motivate and reward her staff. “It was successful,
and I didn’t see why I needed to change,” Paula said. She was fired when
she returned from jury duty. “After eight or nine years making a lot of
money for them. I was really heartbroken. I was really crushed emotionally.
My self-esteem was just shattered.”

Openness

She decided to stay home with her two-year-old son. A year later and now
more cynical, a worldview crossed her path that coincided with her own,
and she seized it. An old high school girlfriend called her and invited her
over to sample some Mary Kay products. She was just starting her business
and wanted to get her friend’s opinion. Paula visited her friend with a
“whatever” state of mind. She’d heard Mary Kay was a “nice company” but
she assumed the products were old-fashioned and would not suit her skin.
Her friend’s story about how she could make money while bringing up her
family impressed her and so did the products.

Then she heard a little bit more about the company. “The principles of Mary
Kay’s company were a lot like my own philosophies and principles in
running my department,” Paula said. “We’re ex

The Great Cult Paradox: Why People Join

pected to encourage and praise people. So it was very, very validating for
me. I was a very easy recruit.”

Paula’s language draws magical significance to her encounter with and

entry into the Mary Kay sisterhood. She emphasized that her friend had
unknowingly invited her on her birthday. The language of mysticism
continues as she describes her conversion experience. “When we initially
decide to become Mary Kay consultants, we come into the company,” she
said, “but then after not very long, Mary Kay comes into us. Then were
really there for life.”

This post-rationalization of the encounter as something fated cropped up

during every interview we conducted. The self-story is rewritten and retold
to confer significance on what appeared at the time to be a random event.
It’s as if the meeting must transcend the apparent ordinariness of accident in
order to bear the weight of the significance in the person’s life that the
subsequent events conferred.

Paula described one of the regular meetings among sales consultants to

which a potential recruit is often invited to introduce them to the company.
“She’ll sit in. She’ll be included. She’s not put in an awkward position but
she’s included and her being there is celebrated. So she feels welcome and
important and valuable.”
From the first moment, the operating ethos is a free exchange of ideas and
tips on how to build your individual businesses. The sales consultants are
not competitive with each other. Paula’s story is vindicated through the
ideological fit between her view on how to run a successful business and
that of Mary Kay’s.

Belonging

c_

Overwhelmingly impressed by the annual meeting in Dallas, Paula saw an

unalloyed generosity and celebration of achievement that

made her feel that she was back home. She had finally found a community
that she recognized as like herself, and who recognized her as one of them.
And the success of Mary Kay appears to be an endorsement of her
worldview. She summarizes the experience: “Were not alone. Were
definitely in business for ourselves, but we have an amazing network of
women all over the country. It’s certainly my business but there’s so much
more. You just have this sisterhood and this sorority, this feeling of
belonging and doing, taking care of each other.”

Self-Actualization
And what did this sense of belonging do for Paula? Had it changed her? She
said she had not been changed, she had been allowed to become more
herself. She’d grown into the person she should have been. “All those
things I think were there before, but now they’re empowered to come out.”

Paula’s perception was that she had not conformed. Joining Mary Kay
meant rediscovering her identity and potential for growth.

Why do people join cults? In these stories we’ve seen that the organizations
Jordana and Paula joined conferred two highly motivational benefits: a
community that created a sense of meaning and the possibility to express
their true selves. Paula and Jordana both felt that the groups they joined and
their embedded worldview allowed them to become themselves in a way in
which the outside world did not. The core paradox of cults is that
“belonging means becoming more me.”

OceanofPDF.com
YOU’RE DIFFERENT, WE’RE
DIFFERENT
C ults will flatter you. They will make you feel special and individual in a
way that you are unlikely to have felt before. They will celebrate the very
things that make you feel different from everyone else; the members will
get to know you deep down, and they will love you for what they find.

And you will love them. It will feel good to be recognized for who you
really are. All the little compromises that you may have made to “get along”
in life—the small or large tradeoffs most of us make for social acceptance
—will disappear. You can be yourself.

To generate this response cult organizations need to separate themselves

from the status quo. They must exist outside the norms of the culture to
appeal to those who feel alienated by those norms. The cult will provide a
perfect fit. It does this by both recognizing and celebrating its potential
membership’s difference, and establishing its own. It needs to say “you’re
different, we’re different too.”

Now, face your fear. This means that you can’t please all of the people all of
the time. One of the greatest dreads of marketers is turning off any potential
customers. Sometimes it seems like they have a horror of displeasing any
living being. Well, to generate cultlike devotion to your brand, the kind of
attachment that leads

to large profits and word of mouth, you cannot expect to secure every man,
woman, and child on the planet. Instead of trying not to alienate anyone,
you must target the alienated and simultaneously separate your organization
from the mainstream. HarleyDavidson embraces this fact in its brand
guidelines document: “Harley Truth #1: ‘Harley is not for everyone.’ ”

Remember, creating a clear sense of separation from “the rest,” and

appealing to the alienated has not denied Harley-Davidson a huge business
success. In fact it has pulled off dominant market leadership with a repeat
purchase rate of 95 percent (at an average of $20,000 a bike this is
significant). Removing your organization from the status quo does not
necessarily condemn it to minor status.

Cult brands don’t become successful only by celebrating antisocial values

and behavior, like Harley Davidson. Nor does a cult have to appeal to a
marginal group of social discontents in order to grow and flourish. Within
one of the most conformist institutions on the planet—a bank—lurks a cult
in the making. Citigroup, the world’s largest financial institution, is partway
through a well thought out, carefully crafted effort to nurture a cult brand—
one that focuses on the alienation felt by 51 percent of America’s
population: women. They are generating cultlike attachment to their brand
Women & Co. amongst the well-heeled and the socially connected.

Let’s look at one of the world’s most famous religious cults to illustrate the
dynamics of difference. Neena felt very different from her immediate
surroundings when she joined the Hare Krishna movement in the mid-
1970s. She was looking for people interested in more spiritual lives when
she transferred to UC Santa Barbara and was sorely disappointed by the
prevalence of sex, drugs, and rock and roll among her fellow students.
Having recently become abstinent from such indulgences, she felt she
needed friends to help support her decisions. She found those friends when
she was introduced to the Krishna movement through an acquaintance at an
alternative bookstore. She had found a group that, in stark contrast

to the climate of the times, believed spirituality to be a priority in their

lives. They didn’t drink or eat meat. They followed strict rules of behavior,
and performed rituals in their worship of the divine.

After graduation, she moved to the cult’s compound, gave away all of her
possessions, and wrapped herself into the sari that she was to wear for the
next twelve years: “I always wore my sari, I always followed all the
principles, I went to all the programs, I chanted all my rounds every day. I
mean, I was a really serious follower.”

It is an all or nothing commitment to the Krishnas that forces its members

to give up their former lives. Most members live in Krishna temples and
adopt an ascetic and monastic life. These devotees take on new names and
vow to abstain from intoxication, gambling, illicit sexual behavior, and the
eating of meat, fish, or eggs. They shed their Western clothes to don
traditional Indian robes and carry a set of beads for chanting. The Hare
Krishna mantra must be chanted sixteen times a day and every morning
members apply clay markings to the forehead and nose as a sign that the
body is a temple of the supreme lord. Male devotees shave their heads
except for a small tuft of hair at the back that symbolizes surrender to
Krishna, their spiritual master.

The Krishna movement has never been fully accepted by American society.
The strangeness of its doctrine and the necessity of its devotees to cut off
their connections to the outside world have sparked the ire of the
establishment. The families of Krishna recruits frequently assume that their
children have been kidnapped and brainwashed. In their minds, it is the
only plausible explanation for the defection of their children.

But the Krishna community doesn’t seem to mind society’s scorn. They
have a well-defined sense of group identity that very consciously separates
itself from the establishment. Neena recalls, “There was a real strong thing
about us and them. That, basically, we’re good and they’re bad. We would
talk about how bad the

outside world is and how bad the people are, and how nobody out there
believes in God, how they’re all meat eaters, how they’re all going to Hell.
Before you met your guru, you were a dog, like literally, that’s what they
would say.”

These black-and-white distinctions translated into a common feeling of

superiority among members. A feeling that reached “holier than thou”
proportions and climaxed for Neena one day when she was driving on the
freeway. “I just believed that everyone else in all the other cars were going
to Hell and that I was the only one who knew anything about God on that
whole freeway. I felt so sorry for everyone.”

Alienated individuals are the raw food of cults and cult brands. They feel
different from everyone else. They feel that there is not a “fit” in their
present environment, and that prevents them from expressing their true
identity. Cults are a home for such people by offering “fit” where the
outside world cannot. The individuals are different, and so are the cults.
They are a match for each other.

To attract the Neenas of the world, cults and cult brands need to be
“beacons of difference.” Cults need to cultivate separateness and home in
on those who also feel separate. To create a mutual sense of separation your
organization will need to:

1. determine your potential franchise’s sense of difference,

2. declare your own difference with doctrine and language,

3. demarcate yourself from the outside world, and

4. demonize “the other.”

The Krishna movement declared their difference with a polarizing ideology.

Their movement was clearly demarcated in its doctrine, its members’
behavior, and their appearance. And the cult created an acute sense of the
other by demonizing it as a world of lost souls (a tendency of many cults).

We will now look at these four D’s of difference and examine how some
cult brands have successfully employed them.

1. Determine Your Franchise’s Sense of Difference

Harley-Davidson has capitalized on a feeling of difference felt by enough

people to drive it to market leadership. Here’s how one Harley rider I spoke
to defined it. He said he hated the “rigamarole”: “Everyday things. You
brush your teeth. You put on your underwear, you go outside. You empty
the mailbox. You look through the bills. You go to work, get off at a certain
time. You come home; she’s got dinner on the table. It’s a beautiful night.
Maybe I’ll watch Married . . . with Children, I don’t know. That’s
rigamarole. It’s all definitely not me.”

Harley is a “pied piper” brand. It calls out to discontents with an accurately

pitched song of recognition. It advocates commitment to a community that
is familiar in the most profound way possible, one that is aligned with
characteristics that the prospect considers are the “real me.”

The real me in this case is the individual who feels that he doesn’t quite feel
at home in the so-called rigamarole of traditional society. At heart he
believes he is a rebel. He loves the freedom of the road and the company of
others who also feel trapped by suburbia, job, and family. It’s taboo not to
like those things because they are the sacred cows of society. But that’s the
point. Harley riders are free and individual. They are the Gullivers who
unleash themselves from the bonds of day-to-day-ness.

A Harley rider I spoke with in a focus group described what made them all
different: “The ‘bad boy.’ It’s that part inside you that nobody else knows.
Whether it’s greasing your weezer, or you’re out there taking some girl to
the limit, or taking the bike to the limit.

Because you’ve got a little thing inside you sitting on this shoulder
saying,‘go for it!’ Everyone at this table’s got the same guy, I know.”

It is not quite expressed in these colorful terms in the company’s marketing

plans, but it is a powerful statement nonetheless of what Harley means to its
riders. It’s the unifying manifesto of its brotherhood.

The Harley bad boy was first palpably defined by Life magazine in its July
21, 1947 issue. On page 31, there was a photograph of a drunk, fat man
sitting astride a Harley with two beer bottles in his hands and dozens of
empty ones at his feet. The caption underneath only added to the outrage:

On the Fourth of July weekend four thousand members of a motorcycle

club roared into Hollister, California, for a three-day convention. They
quickly tired of ordinary motorcycle thrills and turned to more exciting
stunts. Racing their vehicles down Main Street and through traffic lights,
they rammed into restaurants and bars, breaking furniture and mirrors.
Some rested on the curb. Others hardly paused. Police arrested many for
drunkenness and indecent exposure but could not restore order. Finally,
after two days, the cyclists left with a brazen explanation. “We like to show
off. It’s just a lot of fun.” But Hollister’s police chief took a different view.
Wailed he, “it’s just one hell of a mess.”
What started at Hollister was reinforced in the public mind by the Hell’s
Angels Motorcycle Club and movies like The Wild One and Easy Rider.
Images of chopped Harleys on the open road and black leather became the
epitome of the new American rebel.

These icons, and the role of the Hells Angels as unappointed High Priests of
the cult (they have never been officially endorsed by the company, but you
can be sure the brand manager covertly

prays to the god of benevolent serendipity for such outstanding ‘product

placement’), have communicated to the cult’s membership its removal from
society.

Here’s how Harley does express how the brand speaks to the members’
sense of separation. The defininition comes from its brand guidebook that’s
given to all of its communication agencies to ensure “consistent marketing
communications . .. that will fit the Company’s global image.” It outlines “.
. . three essential elements to the Harley-Davidson experience, which riders
feel for the first time they ride: the joy of individualism, the chance to be
free, to make choices; the commitment to adventure, the opportunity to
change, to discover new experiences and emotions; the reward of
fulfillment, an intense, personal and consuming bond with the bike that
means a richer fuller life.” I think the rider above expressed it a little more
vividly, but it’s clear all the same.

The last part of the statement is an acknowledgment by the managers of a

large and successful cult brand of the intensity of commitment and the
profound role their brand can play in their customer’s lives. Note also the
commitment to accelerate the sense of each customer’s individualism
within one of the most cohesive “community” brands in the world. It’s an
expression of the cult paradox.

2. Declare its Difference

You’ve identified your franchise’s source of alienation. Now you need to

declare your organization’s removal from the status quo in order to be a
siren for discontents. And declare it clearly. A Declaration of Difference
will be made by your cult’s doctrine, its defining belief system. And it will
also be made by the nature of the communication between the cult and its
members.

THE DOCTRINE OF DIFFERENCE

Declaring what you believe should, by implication, declare what you do

not. An organizations belief system should proclaim what it holds to be
right and true, and equally, either explicitly or implicitly, what it rejects.
There is only one God, Jesus was a space traveler (Heaven’s Gate), you can
baptize the dead (Mormons), God has a feminine and masculine nature
(Moonies). Even the ideology of the embryonic United States was framed
in the language of separation. The Declaration of Independence , both in
name and content, overtly removed itself from prevailing world thinking.
Framing a clear system of ideas that depart from cultural norms provides
the sharpest delineation between the organization and the rest of the world.
And it provides a beacon to the disenfranchised.

Most brand doctrines generate as much excitement as wilted cabbage. They

are often forged by a corporations senior officers during expensive offsite
retreats. This “brain trust” spends days trying to differentiate their brand by
devising their missions, visions, and values. For virtually every example
I’ve seen, the outcome of these retreats has been exactly the same: what
was intended to be a bang ended up as a whimper. In the attempt to please
everyone and offend no one most of the ideas were compromised, their
destiny to be relegated to dusty laminated sheets on cubicle walls and the
odd coffee mug in the company kitchen.

Passionate commitment is often in proportion to the strength of the vision

and ideas contained within the organization’s theology. Members will want
to commit to something, and the less distinct and the more content-free its
belief system, the weaker the buy-in is likely to be.

THE DIALOGUE OF DIFFERENCE

An ideology only gets you so far. It is in the day-to-day interaction between

the cult brand and its members that a true bond of difference can be made.
Much of the communication of difference within the Harley community has
actually been undertaken not by the manufacturers and marketers of the
brand, but by and for its users. The cult brand’s identity has been formed
over decades by its membership. Consider the focus group that we
conducted. Around the table sat an ex-con in need of dental work (he
wouldn’t give his address), a suit (as the ex-con defined him), an African
American (he said he was “sitting around the table with a bunch of white
guys, very relaxed”), and several others from diverse backgrounds.

Whether you are a rider who’s on the lam, or one who’s a lawyer by day
and a rebel on the weekend, the singular thread within the Harley
community is the desire to express the “bad boy.” And where did that bad
boy imagery come from? It started on that day in Hollister, it was sealed by
the behavior of the Hell’s Angels, and reinforced by Easy Rider and The
Wild One and countless media depictions since. The recent management
has been smart enough to exploit what has happened serendipitously. The
history and the values that the membership itself created have been
incorporated into the declaration of difference that the brand now proudly
trumpets.

Harley-Davidson has built a huge business on the bad boy. Harley had a
dominant market share of 36 percent and sales of $3.3 billion in 2001. In
the same year, its market value increased 40 percent while the S&P fell 15
percent. It has an owner’s group numbering 640,000. Harley executives
have become the envy of many other business people in the United States.
They’ve leveraged their potential and existing customers’ sense of
alienation and in the process pulled off the creation of a market leader, a
mass cult.

THE CLILTING OF BRANDS

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3. Demarcate the Cult from the
Status Quo
Another crucial element in the demonstration of the community’s removal
are the actions it takes to draw a line in the earth between itself and the rest
of the world. They are the daily acts of demarcation. Moonies get married at
mass weddings. Jehovah’s Witnesses won’t accept blood transfusions and
refuse to salute the flag. Christian Scientists avoid medicine. Mormons
don’t drink coffee, tea, or alcohol, or smoke, they wear strange underwear,
and really do give 10 percent of their income to the church. Krishna
followers are vegetarian, chant a lot, wear saris, and the men shave their
heads.

These are the things that immediately separate the cult and its followers
from the rest of society. The rituals, appearance, doctrine, and behavior of
its members draw a boundary between the cult and the norm.

Simply declaring that “we’re different” is obviously not enough for a cult or
cult brand. It needs to be different. It needs to look and feel distinct for it to
be credible to those outside who seek difference and for it to function
convincingly for those inside who want to experience difference. In
everything it or its membership does the cult needs to demarcate itself by its
actions and appearance. The cult needs to separate itself from its
surroundings by “living its difference.”

How is this done? Many of the tools available have several functions within
the cult, of which creating difference is but one. The proper use of ritual,
iconography and symbols, rules and regulations, sacred texts, language, and
appearance will simultaneously reinforce the memberships’ feelings of
solidarity, create group identity, communicate its ideology, and encourage
advocacy, among other roles, and these will be covered later in the book.
But we will
look at just a few of these available tools and in this context, examine how
they serve to demarcate the cult from the status quo.

An important point is that these tools serve to emphasize the cult’s

otherness not just by the strangeness of the acts or things themselves, but
also by the foreignness of the meaning they carry. They are nearly always
manifestations in one form or another of the doctrine of the cult. For
example, Krishnas don’t eat meat because they believe that such physical
indulgences could taint their spiritual quest for Krishna consciousness.
Further, the congregational chanting of the Hare Krishna mantra is more
than just a community-building exercise. It is believed to be the most
effective means of self-purification. Only Mormons can enter some parts of
the Temples and only “endowed” members (those who have been qualified
as “worthy” and undertaken a ceremony of acceptance) can enter those
places where marriages and other vital rituals are performed.

EXCLUSIVITY — NOT EVERYONE QUALIFIES

Limited access draws the most definitive boundaries between a cult and the
other. At Harley rallies, certain bars are effectively for members only. In a
vivid example of “you’re not welcome,” Tom, a young and enthusiastic
employee of Harley-Davidson, had been fraternizing with the membership
earlier in the day, riding his own bike and wearing the distinctive Harley
leathers. However, he was rejected by the membership when he walked into
a watering hole to relax with what he thought were his fellow bad boys. He
had made a critical mistake that night. In some moment of lunacy he chose
to wear khakis and a polo for the evening. He walked up to the bar to order
a drink and the salty bartender refused to serve him. He said that the whole
bar suspected that he was “a cop or something.” There was a gap between
him and the membership as wide as the Grand Canyon in that bar. It was a
replay of those classic scenes in

the movies when the bar goes silent and its occupants turn around to look at
the outsider with hostile mutterings as he makes the walk of death to the
counter in the futile hope he’ll be accepted. Tom confessed that, “I think I
know, pardon the expression, what it feels like to be a black man at a Klan
rally. It was the most uncomfortable experience I’d ever had.” Among the
three hundred or so people there he even spotted some Hells Angels he’d
helped earlier that day. “Here I was. I was not in uniform, and I was not
comfortable.”

APPEARANCES AREN’T DECEIVING

Tom’s demarcation experience also identifies another important delineator:

appearance. The Marines, Krishnas, Mormon missionaries, Deadheads, and
Trekkies—all, in one way or another, demarcate themselves by their
distinctive appearance. Not all cults employ a uniform to separate
themselves from the other; some often employ more subtle cues. Garrett, a
young Mormon I talked to from Salt Lake City claimed that members of the
Church distinguish themselves from the rest of the population by their
“countenance.” He said,“We consider ourselves to be a happy people.”
Some wear a “CTR” ring (short for “Choose the Right,” a daily caution to
the wearer whenever temptation crosses their path). And if members know
where to look, it is possible to detect the sacred undergarments bestowed at
the endowment ceremony, that are designed to preserve the wearer’s
modesty. Some cult brands can be more blatant in their members’
declarations of allegiance via appearance. Some tattoo brand logos onto
their heads, arms, necks, and ankles (Nike and Apple logos are often the
most pervasive). Others wear brand T-shirts or have logos stickered on
bags, clothing, and cars. An Apple user I spoke to wore an emblazoned
bomber jacket with Apple logos plastered everywhere. “I wear that damn
thing proudly,” he claimed, almost daring me to condemn him for it.

The Harley cult membership has its own distinctive markings. Tattoos,
leather, bandannas, beards, and ripped and dirty jeans.

Tom, the employee who was not decked out in the requisite garb that night,
described the uniform, and its significance to the wearer. He said, “First of
all, it’s almost like a school uniform, blue jeans, black leather jacket. It has
some individuality, but there’s safety and there’s comfort in seeing that
everyone else is dressed like each other.”

The Harley uniform is a flag that declares the cult’s outlook on life, and its
separateness from the polite society. According to one Harley rider that I
talked to, “What we wear is essentially a ‘fuck off’ to the outside world. It
says ‘stay away from me’ and it does keep people away.” In fact, in a
moment of startling literalness, he told me that his favorite shirt says, “Fuck
off” in huge letters across the entire front. He also intends to buy another
shirt that says, “Fuck off, I have enough friends.”

Iconography is a critical delineator. Iconography also plays a dual role in

separating a cult from the norm. It is a visible mark of distinguishability,
whether for a product, or a religion. But it also connotes difference as a
carrier of meaning. The cross, the apple, the Harley roar (iconography can
also be aural) all infer the cults’ various belief systems that distinguish them
from those of their environments.

The famous Bar and Shield, according to the Harley Brand Guidelines, is
equated to a “design on a knight’s battle shield, it is the Harley-Davidson
coat of arms.” This is the official cult iconography and it certainly connotes
the status of being mythic warriors of the road.

But Harley has a wealth of unofficial iconography created by the

membership itself. Much of it is specifically designed to distance the cult
from society. It repels^outsiders by fetishizing society’s taboos. Most of it is
borrowed from that inner circle of members, the High Priesthood of the
cult: the Hells Angels. The ubiquitous skulls and wings that adorn biker’s
jackets are imitations of the

Hells Angels “Death’s Head” (their official symbol of a skull with wings).
It’s within this upper level of the hierarchy that much of the real meaning
system has been created and its associated iconography of the outlaw
removes the cult from the culture at large.

Without a doubt, however, Harley’s greatest icon is not the bar and shield or
the skulls, it is the great Harley roar. According to Graham, another biker
that I interviewed, “Everyone knows that sound. You can hear it from three
blocks away. People who can’t see the difference between bikes can tell
which one is a Harley just from the sound.” He went on to explain that the
Harley sound acts in a very similar manner to the clothes of the Harley
rider. “You can ride a Harley quietly or you can ride one loud. I was riding
through town last Sunday morning and decided to make some noise and
wake some people up. It was great, it was a great ‘fuck you.’ ”
THE SPECIAL ARGOT OF CULTS

Language can provide a sense of solidarity to members and exclusion to

outsiders. Just as marketing jargon or “consultant speak” can serve to
distance and intimidate those not in the fraternity, cults will have a language
which only members will tend to get. To bikers, all of us who drive cars are
called “cagers.” According to Harley-speak, a “yard shark” is a pet that
barrels into the street and tries to take a bike down. An “iron butt” is
someone who has ridden a thousand miles in twenty-four hours, and within
the Harley community, “pipes and slippers” are bikers who demand respect
because of their age.

Krishnas believe in the “samsara” (the eternal cycle of reincarnation) and

inherit the “karma” (positive or negative consequences) from the religious
works or “dharma” one has or has not performed. The goal of a Krishna’s
life is to break away from eternal reincarnation and achieve “mukti,” or
liberation, allowing them to return to the natural state of Krishna
consciousness. The only way

to achieve mukti is through “bhakti,” a state of active worship, service, and

devotion to Krishna, the Supreme Being.

Cults such as Harley-Davidson and the Krishnas use language as a means of

bonding, conveying meaning and separation. Much like some ethnicities
develop distinct dialects that are incomprehensible to foreigners, the
language of cults is a tool that serves to delineate the boundaries between
those who belong and those who do not.

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4. Demonize the Other
Pagans, IBM, Islam, Microsoft, the West, Communism and Capitalism,
Axes of Evil. They have all been identified as an enemy by communities
large and small, whether countries, companies, terrorist groups, or brand
communities. Demonization is a highly effective means of creating
separation and a distinctive group identity. A threat from an enemy, real or
artfully crafted by the community’s leadership, will generate solidarity and
a potent sense of difference.

Steve Jobs has identified, variously, IBM, Microsoft, Dell, and other PC
manufactures as malignant, threatening forces bent on destroying freedom
of choice (the choice to buy his computer). Richard Branson has painted
“No way BA/A A” on the side of his Virgin Atlantic planes in a swipe at the
big carriers’ attempts to dominate the skies at the expense of entrepreneurial
challenges to their hegemony.

Here is part of a famous speech given by Jobs at Macworld in 1984 to

launch the Macintosh. It’s an astonishing performance in the art of
demonization. He wa^introducing the commercial that has since been
sanctified by the Apple community as defining what Apple is all about.
You’ve seen it, it’s the one where a young woman

throws a hammer at a screen on which a Big Brother figure is ranting at his

oppressed followers. I’ve reproduced some of the audience’s responses to
Jobs’s Churchillian invocations to fight on the beaches of computer
freedom. Their amens recall those heard at an Evangelical church rather
than an audience’s response to the launch of a box of electronics.

“It is now 1984. It appears IBM wants it all. Apple is perceived to be the
only hope to offer IBM a run for its money. Dealers, initially welcoming
IBM with open arms now fear an IBM dominated and controlled future.
They are increasingly and desperately turning back to Apple as the only
force that can ensure their future freedom. IBM wants it all and is aiming its
guns on its last obstacle to industry control: Apple. Will Big Blue dominate
the entire computer industry? [Shouts of “no!”] The entire information age?
[“Never!”] Was George Orwell right about 1984? [More exclamations and
cheers].”

The sense of group identity and separation was palpable in the hall that day.
Maybe Steve Jobs tilted at windmills during his leadership at Apple. Was
IBM really out to get his company? It doesn’t matter whether it was or not.
Real or imaginary, identifying an enemy and dramatizing a threat will
galvanize the community’s sense of separation, unity, and identity.

A second very efficient outcome of antagonism is that by defining the other,

the cult defines itself. If IBM is characterized as huge, lumbering, dull, and
intent on gaining a monopoly, then Apple is agile, creative, and fighting for
freedom. If British Airways and American are also huge, unimaginative,
malevolent institutions, then Virgin is piratical, fun, and also fighting for
freedom. Demonization allows the cult to define itself (and its essential
difference) by condemning the other as a photographic negative of itself.

And demonization is versatile. The more usual object of denigration is a

thing: a competitive religion or a company such as IBM. But you can also
demonize an intangible. You can demonize a

You’re Different, We’re Different

state of mind or action. The Christian Church has persecuted other religions
in its history of demonization, but it has also created a sense of identity and
solidarity by castigating intangibles, such as “worldliness.”

Brands can do this, too. Apple has not just demonized Microsoft, but the
intangibles of dullness and bullying. Circumstances change, and when
Apple realized it was time to form a crucial alliance with Microsoft, its
former archenemy, it had to revise its demon. It put its negative emphasis
on conformity, which it very effectively dramatized in the “Think Different”
campaign.

Intangible demons can allow a cult or brand to dramatize threats that have
no time limit on them (conformity will always exist). Intangibles also have
no size limit. If Apple ever grew to be the size of Microsoft or IBM, those
organizations would lose their credibility as threats to the Mac community.
But intangible demons are as large as the human race. Nike can invoke a
collective sense of identity as the brand of self-achievement even from its
position as market leader by demonizing “not doing it,” a fear for millions
of fitness conscious consumers.

A cult or cult brand needs to be a siren to those who are discontented with
the status quo. To do this well, it needs to identify the source of its potential
franchise’s sense of separation. This feeling is not limited to the socially or
psychologically damaged. Harley-Davidson calls to those trapped by the
claustrophobia of the everyday—a feeling we can all identify with at some
time. It needs to plumb our deep wells of alienation. To call to the
discontented, an organization must remove itself from norms of the culture
and declare and demonstrate its separation to those who feel separate.

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WE LOVE YOU
T rue and lasting commitment to brands and cults is effected through
people. It’s all about the “primacy of the person.” What do I mean by
primacy of the person? The conventional wisdom is that people buy ideas or
things. The transaction is between the individual and the object or idea. The
religious and political world holds this to be true and so does business. Ask
a priest what converts a recruit, and he will say the ideology, “The truth of
Gods Word.” Ask a marketing or advertising executive what a consumer
buys and they will claim that it is the carefully crafted ideology of the
brand, its essence, its DNA, its brand values, its image. If it’s compelling
enough the crowds will flock. Or they will gather for the tangible things, the
product or service features.

It’s easy not to question this conventional wisdom, because the objects of
the pitch agree. Ask a convert what converted him and he is likely to say
that it was the religion’s doctrine. Ask a consumer and he will respond in
kind, even passing over the brand ideology to claim that it was the brand’s
tangible features that seduced him (rarely will anyone claim they buy
“image”).

In other words, we who are responsible for creating commitment to our

brand or religion believe that the content is more

important than medium, in this case, the agency of human relationships. It’s
the idea or the object that seduces, not the people or community that brings
it to them.

But we will be handicapping our attempt to build a successful business (or

religion) if we settle for these answers or accept the received wisdom of our
community. People buy people. Of course, they buy into belief systems,
whether religious, political, or those devised for brands. It would be
ridiculous to underestimate their importance . . . and I don’t. (See chapter
7.) And, of course, they consider and enjoy the temporal benefits of each,
too. But for real commitment, the recruit and existing members need to feel
that they have a relationship with “an other” or “others.” The buy-in to the
ideology and tangible benefits comes later.

What’s the support for this assertion? From the world of cults and religion,
my research and others’ suggests that the ideology comes later as the object
of commitment. Two sociologists made a startling discovery in the Moonie
recruitment process: Individuals bought into the group before they bought
into the ideology, not the other way around. They found that the most
successful recruits were the ones who had social relationships with
members of the group before they joined. The first members of the famous
and successful San Francisco branch were friends of the leader, Miss Kim.
These friends brought their husbands and wives, who in turn brought their
colleagues and friends. When, at a later date, they were asked why they had
joined, the recruits predictably claimed that they were convinced by the
truths of the cult’s ideology. At the time of their first contact with the
community, however, the researchers noted that “most of them regarded the
religious beliefs of their new friends as quite odd.” 1 This person before
ideology thesis was confirmed by my own research: “I started going there
and I liked it. I liked it a lot because I liked the people,” said Neena, a
member of the Krishna movement. It was the community that she had
initially bought into: “There were all those things, everything

that goes with bonding. You have the friendship, you have the common
activity, and you feel reinforced and supported.”

And it’s the brands that are recognizing the power of human interaction that
are becoming the heroes of business.

IT’S THE PEOPLE, NOT THE PLANES

You can be part of a well funded startup, have all new planes, a cool
product, leather seats, live TV, cool snacks. But none of it matters. The
people are the brand ... you are the brand as a person.

—Dave Barger, president and chief operation officer, jetBlue

JetBlue is one of only two airlines making money in the post-9/11 recession
and war-dominated world. From nowhere, it has become the wunderkind of
an industry convulsing with chronic businessmodel failure. Its market
value, at $1.7 billion, is nearly as large as that of United, American, and
Delta combined. Its costs are the lowest in the industry, even lower than
those of Southwest. By the end of 2002, its load factor reached an industry
high of 83 percent (the average is 71 percent) and its profits leaped 43
percent to $55 million. 2

Fortunately, the people running the company realize that as important as the
substance of the customer experience is (the TV, the comfortable planes, the
low prices), it’s the core members of this rapidly growing cult brand, and
their interactions with customers, that are making the difference. It!s not the
stuff. It’s the staff that is driving these results.

PRINCIPLES OF TOE PRIMACY OE TOE

PERSON
Five important principles comprise the primacy of the person.

1. Recognize and gear your organization to focus on the person.

2. Get the right membership. There is such a thing as a good and a bad
member. A cult or cult brand must discriminate between well-socialized
individuals who will engage new prospects, and those who will be
unproductive because they are not.

3. Create opportunities for meeting and interaction between members and

nonmembers. More interactions will lead to more recruits to the brand or
cult.

4. Liberate your representatives to focus on interaction. Remove

distractions. The idea is simply to engage the prospect and make him or her
feel good.

5. Love-bomb. Overwhelm them with welcome. “Lovebomb” is the epithet

given to the technique used by the Moonies at their recruitment weekends.
Make a potential recruit feel that he or she is the only important person in
the room. Their well-being is the source of yours. It’s not about you; it’s
about them.

Let s examine this in more detail.

1. Focus on the Person.

The jetBlue story is all the more remarkable because the airline industry is a
poisoned category. Its people are poison and its be

haviors are poison. Even Congress, roused by passengers close to

revolution, threatened legislation to enforce change. It was the cavalier
attitude of the airline management that decreed that it was all right to let
passengers sit on the tarmac for six hours without food or drink. It was the
“it’s not my fault, now sit down” attitude of the staff that sparked
indignation from fare-payers. In other words, it was the failure of the person
that sowed a growing hatred between customer and service deliverer.

“New Air” (the working name for jetBlue in its prelaunch days) believed it
should remove itself from the category. “Don’t be an airline” was an early
suggestion from its first communications agency, Merkley and Partners.
The agency reasoned that “New Air” should make the most of its different
posture, that it should be a customer advocate in an industry that appeared
not to care.

CEO David Neeleman’s business model was brilliant in its heresy. Don’t
follow the route of other low-price carriers and launch with cheap old
planes. Be the best-funded start-up in the history of the industry and use the
capital to lease brand new aircraft with low running costs and thus
competitive price per seat mile. He imitated Southwest’s strategy in using
underserved airports, and underserved populations, creating markets that
competitors could not afford to service.

But the real heresy of the business model was the focus on the person.
Neeleman has claimed that he is trying to “put the Humanity back into air
travel.” Once the fundamentals of the product and pricing were sorted out,
the early management team fixated on how jetBlue personnel would bond
with the consumer. Interactions with the brand via gate-agents, check in
personnel, the 1 -800-number staff, and flight attendants would all fail if the
personnel were as cavalier as the rest of the industry. The strategy for hiring
and training had to be as radical as the functional aspects of the business
model.

The management at jetBlue maniacally believe that good employees create

good customers, who become as committed as the staff,

THE CLILTING OF BRANDS

who feel ownership and even a responsibility to sell the airline to others. In
other words, populate the internal cult with the right kind of membership
and motivate them to perform, and you will recruit the right kind of
membership externally and turn them into advocates.

JetBlue, above all, believes that its airline is a brand. (As David Barger
noted of his previous experience at Continental, “I don’t think I ever heard
the term in the eighteen years that I was there”) Management’s constant
chorus was that “the jetBlue Brand is its people.” Staff interactions were
defined by the brand values of “safety, caring, integrity, fun and passion.”
The concept that an airline is all about humanity, and that humans are the
prime vehicle for delivering it—not just comfortable planes—is
indoctrinated into the recruit within the very first minutes of their
employment.

I was invited to an induction seminar in Miami in early 2002. One of an

average of roughly ninety that year, it formed the first day of training for all
the flight attendants, ground crew, pilots, head office personnel, and
engineers and flight ops. The primacy of the person was made abundantly
clear.

Members of the various disciplines were in the same room, a message in

itself. The professions are normally rigorously segregated. This is especially
true for the pilots, the aristocracy of an airline. Their perception of superior
status is expected to be indulged. I could detect their discomfort especially
when asked, like everyone else, to stand up and introduce themselves. They
clearly felt as if they were in some self-help group and not in the equivalent
of “up-front,” dealing with higher things. A1 Spain, head pilot and head of
operations, deliberately punctured this prospect with stories of how he and
others crossed the imaginary class barriers in the interest of the customers,
such as going down below and retrieving a baby carriage for harassed
parents waiting on the jetway at arrival.

This gathering was a symbolic moment meant to reinforce the

collective responsibility to the customer. It was an expression of

egalitarianism in the face of the Great Leveler, the customer, that was truly
reinforced when management announced that the name given to all jetBlue
personnel was Crew, whether office worker, flight attendant, gate agent,
cleaner, pilot, or chairman.

David Barger, president and COO kicked off the first session saying, “Hey,
listen. Were building a brand.” Then, he rammed home the preeminence of
the person to jetBlue in that formula. “A brand is how you feel, and were
making people feel better by putting humanity back into air travel,” he said.

Then pilot guru A1 Spain stood up. He is a big, genial guy with several
airlines and many years of flying experience. He took the recruits through
the development of the name and the design of the brand identity. It’s
unusual for a company to bother to take its operating staff through a logo
and name design process at all, and significant that a pilot was doing it.

The whole morning was an induction into the values of the company, its
business model (“designed for recession”), and the focus on the crew
(“chasing the experience, not the statistics”). Vincent Stabile, VP of the
People Department ran a session that, not surprisingly, focused on the
importance of jetBlue personnel. The company may be characterized as a
low-fare airline, but that is not what will get repeat customers, he said. It’s a
trial device, not a retention model: “Low fares will get customers once. Our
people will get them again and again.”

Finally, Neeleman quietly entered the room as one of the presenters

finished. His attempt to be low-key failed, as a chorus of hallelujas
trumpeted the arrival of a savior. Cheers, applause, and one or two shouts of
“We love you!” rang out. Soft-spoken, shy in his delivery, he described the
robustness of the business model. Again, perhaps unusual for an audience of
flight attendants, baggage handlers, and cleaners, he gave the kind of
detailed presentation

normally reserved for analysts, with the same kind of respect for his
audience. He finished with a description of what was, in essence, the
service profit chain. “Work hard at all points of contact and get repeat
customers. You’ll make more money; there’ll be more profit sharing. You’ll
feel better with more work satisfaction which means you’ll please more
customers.”

MYTHOLOGIZING THE IMPORTANCE OF THE PERSON

How can you communicate to the organization the importance of the person
beyond simply saying that it’s important? You can create myths and stories
that carry the moral for you. Myths are potent communicators of ideology.
They are viral cells that communicate their DNA into the body of the
organization effectively because their narrative structure make them
compelling. Myths are stories, like any other, but they have a fantastical
character to them, transcending beyond the everyday to make a point about
the everyday. They are equal measure true event and elaboration,
embellished as they are shared and passed along. Just like any story they
require a narrative, one that will follow a timeless structure whether told by
Homer or Hollywood. There will be a hero or heroine, a challenge, a risk
taken to overcome the challenge, and a happy ending. There will be a
discovery, or enlightenment, or increased knowledge gained by the hero,
and vicariously, by the audience, as he overcomes the challenge; and that
will be the substance of the moral.

This may sound intimidating. Does a myth demand a highly dramatic event
to make a significant lesson? No, even the smallest things may qualify if
they adhere to the structure above. And of course, if they enact a moral
within an organization predisposed by the ideology already disseminated by
the leadership.

Take the following example. There was a flight delay of four hours at JFK
for a trip that should have only taken fifty-five minutes. There was the
skulking ogre of heavy fog at the airport, and

the queue of airplanes competing for a take-off slot once the weather
cleared. Our hero was A1 Spain who had a population of restless customers
behind him who in any crisis, fairly or not, are likely to blame the airline
even if the villain is out of the realm for mortals to control. They were the
equivalent of the angry mob with lit torches ready to lynch our hero.

In a small but significant action, A1 made his announcements not from the
temple of the flight deck but in the cabin, where he took the attendants’
microphone and explained the situation in front of the passengers. After
several announcements about the persistently bad weather, he finally asked
the customers what they would like to do—go back to the gate, or stay in
line for a couple more hours and not miss their departure slot. They voted to
stay. Back in the cockpit, a flight attendant came forward and said a lady
was worried about the people she was meeting in Buffalo. The pilot reached
into his bag and pulled out his personal cell phone. He told the attendant to
hand it to anyone who needed to make a call. She returned and “laughed as
she handed the phone back and said ‘you got six calls to Buffalo, two to
Beijing, and one to Frankfurt.’And he said, ‘Are they happy?’ She said
‘they’re happy,’ and I said ‘Well that’s what matters, right? What’s a phone
call!”

When they finally arrived in Buffalo the pilot stood at the door and “people
just came up to say ‘you guys are great, absolutely great, you’re wonderful.’
” Despite a horribly long trip a bond had been made to the brand that was
stronger than anything that the satellite TV at every seat could have
achieved. His actions, and that of the crew, had defused the angry mob and
created a small community in that plane. And the event became elevated to
the level of a myth because a member of the leadership demonstrated the
power of human interaction to resolve a difficult challenge.

One point about the hero. The most potent myths-makers tend to be
someone of significance within the organization. They could be the cult
leader or one of the disciples or High Priests. They are

potent because they create the doctrine by their actions, and because of their
status, bless similar actions by its members. They are living ideology
makers whose media include their mythologized deeds.

Having said that, potent myths are not the exclusive province of the gods.
Ordinary mortals can and do create myths if their actions are extraordinary
enough, or the challenge extreme enough, and the moral is consistent
enough with the ideology. And of course the leadership will have blessed
their actions anyway for it to be a candidate for the culture’s mythology.

As the leader of an organization, you cannot guarantee that an event will

gain repeatable status within an organization, but you can set up the right
conditions for it to occur. And an important first step is to get the right
membership of your organization to turn potentially ordinary events into
significant ones.

2. Get the Right Membership

Socially successful people populate successful cults. The popular

perception is quite the opposite. Cults are a refuge for social misfits. Sad,
lonely individuals, their fate is to become one of three things: a serial killer
(“he was quiet, always kept himself to himself”), an obsessive watcher of
Avengers and Doctor Who episodes, or a cult member.

If cults were really populated by people like this, they would be condemned
to be small and inconsequential. They would be hobbled by a membership
so shy or socially inadequate that they could not engage others to
proselytize their beliefs. What’s more, they would be poor representatives
of the benefits of belonging. They would not whet the appetite of the
prospect.

Successful cults must recruit socially successful people. They must recruit
socially attractive people, individuals with whom others

would want to engage. This kind of membership will be productive in two

important ways. They will already have many existing social connections
(friends, colleagues, family) to be employed as avenues for recruitment.
And they will be socially confident and attractive enough to create new
connections easily.
It was summer and Chris was walking down a street in New York when he
was approached by “a very attractive girl in a sundress.” He had a job in the
media and had just finished his masters at a prestigious New York
university. An attractive and intelligent man, he was reestablishing his life
in New York, having spent some time in Asia following his passion for
taking photographs. This woman engaged him in conversation on the street
and then invited him to meet some other people in a local bar. He said “why
not?” and followed her. The group of people at the bar were “the same kind
of people” as he, interested in talking about the same kind of subjects:
ideas, philosophy, meaning. To Chris, they were “people I could be friends
with, they didn’t seem weird in any way. Just completely accommodating.”

She intimated that she was part of a larger group of people who studied the
kind of issues they had been discussing, but more formally. He was invited
to the next group meeting at a loft. “The girl said that if you’re not
interested you don’t have to come.”

Note the self-assurance of the girl who approached him. Hardly the actions
of a social misfit. She was engaging enough to persuade a complete stranger
to come to a bar and meet other strangers. They in turn were immediately
attractive to Chris as like-minded, intellectually discriminating individuals
who predisposed him to attend his first meeting. At his first few classes he
found that he warmed to the group, and despite some of the strangeness of
the ideas, felt at home. Accordingly, he related, “I started to have a
tremendous amount of fun. I found a community. We talked about many
things. People seemed talented and intelligent. There was a whole new
system of ideas to get to learn. Some of it sounded

preposterous, but I didn’t care because there was enough else that made
sense. I didn’t think you had to buy the whole package to learn something
and experiment a little bit. It quickly became a very intimate experience in a
matter of months .”

The profile of the cult members I met was absolutely consistent with
quantitative studies conducted by sociologists who have also found that cult
populations are dominated by well educated, pleasant, and socially
engaging individuals. 3
Joanna was more explicit about the recruitment strategy of the cult. Also a
member of The Work, she claimed that the cult “didn’t want losers.” In fact
it preselected people of high social status and who were good “connectors”:
“Very intelligent people. A lot of Ivy league graduates, a lot of
professionals, a lot of people who were successful in their field.”

LIKE-GET-LIKE

How can you find the right membership, one that is engaging and socially
confident? An obvious way, seldom tried by most companies, but one
institutionalized by jetBlue and other successful cults, is to get the best staff
to recruit others like themselves: like-get-like. Called Peer-Recruiting,
pilots find and interview the right kind of pilots, flight attendants look out
for people they think could make the grade. JetBlue’s agency designed a
card to be carried at all times by the crew and handed out to people whom
they spotted as likely prospects. They could be a great coffee shop waitress,
a checkout clerk at Whole Foods, or just someone they met on a plane or
train who was engaging and fun.

THE RIGHT KIND OF CUSTOMER MEMBERSHIP

We’ve talked about finding the right kind of company membership: highly
personable, strong representatives of the brand values, good recruiters of
people like themselves. What about finding the right

kind of customer membership? They also need to qualify. They should also
be recruited by the same standards as the internal membership: quality
interactors, reputable representatives of the brand, and good recruiters if the
cult is to really grow rapidly. At the end of the day they will become the
engines of growth and prime embodiment of the brand. Mary Kay is good
at this. Its growth depends on the sociability of its consultants and their
customers.

A productive consultant will find highly socially competent prospects.

These people will of course have a lively network of friends, family, or
colleagues to be exploited as profitable avenues of distribution. The most
fruitful way to kick this network into full throttle is to enlist these prospects
as hosts for a Mary Kay party. These events turn into highly interactive and
fun occasions where existing relationships are fortified, but done so in an
environment sponsored by Mary Kay. New relationships are also formed as
the participants try out colors and products on each other, also in this
sponsored context. These parties are not only an effective venue for selling
product, but are also a measure of a customer s interactive value.

The consultant will also be looking out for those who can become
consultants themselves. Do they have the potential to create their own
profitable transactions on the back of existing social relationships? Do they
have the social wherewithal to form new relationships as potential avenues
for the brand? And do they fit the profile of the membership, one that buys
into the ideology of the brand?

This idea of putting an interactive value on the quality of a cult brand s

customer membership is taken literally by eBay. This business model only
works throughjthe medium of trust. Both buyer and seller are taking
financial and even personal relationship risks by the exchanges they make.
The blind auction system of bidding

for items that cannot be thoroughly inspected, from people you don’t know,
and trusting the seller will refund your money if you aren’t happy demands
a “republic of trust.”

EBay clearly lays out its expectations of the nature of its membership, and
their interactions, with this doctrine:

eBay is a community that encourages open and honest communication

among all its members. Our community is guided by five fundamental
values:

• We believe people are basically good.

• We believe everyone has something to contribute.

• We believe that an honest, open environment can bring out the best in
people.

• We recognize and respect everyone as a unique individual.

• We encourage you to treat others the way you want to be treated.

eBay is firmly committed to these principles. And we believe that

community members should also honor them—whether buying, selling, or
chatting with eBay friends.

The company has lubricated its transactional model by establishing a rating

system for each participant, based on the number of satisfactory exchanges
that have taken place. Next to any eBay member’s user ID, there is a
Feedback Rating in parentheses. For example: Skippy (125) means that this
member’s User ID is Skippy and he/she has received positive feedback
comments from at least 125 other eBay members.

There is also a colored star rating system will tell you how many people
have left comments. Feedback from ten to forty-nine people

and you get a gold star. Comments from one hundred thousand people or
more and you’re awarded a red shooting star. Buyers and sellers have a
horror of losing their rating. Four counts and you’re out. Four bad reviews
and you literally have no currency in this market. In effect you are ejected
from the city gates if you offend the community’s ethical norms.

Like any good cult, eBay has created hierarchies. In this case they are based
on abidance to the culture’s moral conventions. They also represent one’s
status as a high volume seller; of course, one is not achievable without the
other. The real high performers have been glorified with the term
“PowerSellers.” As Brian Swette, senior VP of marketing has said, those
within this “Merchant Group” are “our strongest evangelists, promoting the
company with a vengeance, because eBay’s success means their success.”
EBay has also celebrated them as true representatives of the community’s
doctrine.

“As the pillars of our community, PowerSellers are committed to upholding

and embracing the core community values that are the very foundation of
eBay. They are exemplary members who are held to the highest standards
of professionalism, having achieved and maintained a 98 percent positive
feedback rating and an excellent sales performance record.”
The eBay moral code, the glorification of its strongest adherents, the
calibration of its membership base against a measure of quality interactive
ability, all encourage the right kind of customer membership. Several of the
eBay-ers I interviewed even viewed their rating within the eBay community
as a badge of rectitude within the larger culture. There’s no reason not to—
its code mirrors Judeo-Christian doctrine. And seldom does one get a
published measure of one’s moral standing, one that’s indisputable,

THE CTILTING OF BRANDS

based on actual events, rated by participants with no ax to grind. Not until

Saint Peter does a tally of our earthly transactions will we get such an
accurate reading of moral standards!

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3. Create opportunities for meeting
and interaction
Only Connect!

—E. M. Forster, Howards End

The power of the person cannot be overemphasized. It leads conversion,

fuels conviction, and modifies behavior. Logic suggests then that we should
increase opportunities for people to meet and engage. We should create
forums, geographic or virtual, where people can socialize and mix.
Members need to interact with each other, but more important, nonmembers
need to interact with those already involved. We should encourage, sponsor,
and support social ties. These are the bonds that will evolve into strong
yokes to the cult or brand. The ties between its members and the recruit will
mediate the relationship to the cult or brand. How strongly the member will
be fastened to the cult is largely dependent on how strong their relationship
is to others within it.

A. Marie Cornwall, while at the University of Minnesota, conducted a

breakthrough study on the effects of socialization on bonding to an
organization. Her focus (using the Mormon Church as the object of her
study) was to examine whether the degree of interaction affected the degree
of commitment to the religious belief. And what’s more, did all this lead to
increased religiously informed behavior? In other words, if you turn up the
dial of interaction, will it increase the amount of buy-in? If you increase the
amount of buy-in or conviction, will that have a positive effect on behavior?

The responses of 1,874 individuals demonstrated a positive correlation

between socialization and belief, and belief and behavior. More
socialization leads to more conviction or buy-in. More conviction leads to
more behavior that is in line with the belief system. The stronger the “in-
group” ties as she called them (the relationships formed within the cult) the
stronger the bond to the cult.
Throughout the rest of this book, you will see examples of cults and brands
that have created opportunities for interaction, in all its forms, whether
actual or virtual.

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4. Remove Distractions
Not only should venues for assembly be provided to enable connections,
but also distractions should be removed to allow the congregants to form
more effective bonds. Liberate the members of your cult to become
interactors. Let them become the most effective growth generators of your
cult. Let them fulfill the promise of the power of the person.

It’s hard to overcome habits of a lifetime. But the wont of thinking linearly
is the curse of contemporary business and is too often manifested in the
belief that the existing membership are there to do one or both of two
things: sell, and/or fulfill functional tasks. Just let go. Don’t force your cult
members to sell the cult or brand. Don’t burden your staff with too many
functional tasks. Let your cult members interact. The link to the cult will
come later. The Mary Kay consultants we talked to told us that they
expressly avoided pushing the sale—because it does not necessarily lead to
more sales. The intent of the contact is to form a relationship.

v.

LIBERATION FROM THE SALE

When Saturn was launched, its architects made a major change to the way
cars were sold. The industry considered it heresy, and

pundits doomed it to failure. One of the most radical moves was that
retailers did not pay their salesmen (sorry,“consultants”) commission. They
received a salary instead, removing the pressure to close the sale at all costs.
The consultant was liberated to listen to the customer. They could offer
advice, sometimes recommending a cheaper model if it was in the best
interest of the buyer (as happened to one customer I interviewed who was
eyeing a more expensive car). In other words they could form a relationship
without the venal urgency of making a sale stalking a critical interaction
that is the bonding moment between brand and consumer.
Does liberating the member from making the sale work? Saturn enjoyed
record sales to become the fastest selling small car in the United States two
years after launch, overtaking Ford’s Escort in 1995. Was this because the
customers were delighted with innovative product features? Were they
enraptured by the car’s superior design? Customers were highly satisfied.
But the source of the satisfaction did not lay entirely in functional benefits,
but in relationships. A survey by GM showed that in 1992 Saturn had the
highest customer satisfaction rating of any domestic nameplate. Seventyfive
percent of that satisfaction had nothing to do with the car, but with the
customer attitudes toward the dealer. This positive interaction turned the
customers into advocates. By 1993, nearly half of the first-time visitors to a
Saturn showroom had been referred by a friend or family member. By 1996
Saturn surpassed all other brands in sales experience satisfaction, including
luxury names such as Lexus. Not unlike the airline industry, with so much
metal around the temptation is to think that product features are the source
of devotion between customer and brand. Ultimately, people buy the person
not the thing.

LIBERATION FROM THE FUNCTIONAL TASK

JetBlue has structured its business model to liberate its crew from many of
the functional tasks of their jobs in order to engage

with customers. For example, those on the frontline of customer interaction

—flight attendants—do not serve food. They hand out a limited selection of
beverages and snacks (blue chips). Thus they are free to talk and joke with
passengers, help them master the inflight cable TV monitors on the back of
each seat, and find pillows and blankets. As the flight approaches its
destination, the passengers are asked to share the task of helping clean the
plane so that the turn-around time for the next set of customers is reduced.

This last idea is interaction at its best. Customers and staff are all joined in a
common and virtuous outcome—the comfort and convenience of the next
customer. Being asked to clean a plane, something that would be regarded
with astonishment if it were asked by other airlines, has been transformed
into a game played with the crew and passengers that can only make the
consumer feel good, and part of something bigger. Polls of customers have
revealed an immense feeling of goodwill for the airline, in part because of a
desire to see something good succeed in a depressing industry landscape.
Cleaning the plane becomes an interaction that makes the customer feel part
of a joint mission to look after all customers’ interests in an industry where
indifference or abuse has become the norm. And of course, from the
perspective of shareholders, customers are being happily engaged in
delivering the business plan. They are keeping planes in the air, helping
reduce costs, and simultaneously improving service.

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5. Love Bomb
How did the Moonies (more correctly, members of the Unification Church)
seduce recruits at their famous weekends? They employed a technique that
came to be called “love-bombing.” Love-bombing consisted of a
continuous, often exhausting series of exercises that made the potential
recruit feel that they belonged to the happiest,

most welcome group they had ever tripped over. It was an environment
where all judgement was suspended and criticism banned. 4

The Moonies were in a sense “hot-housing” the same technique the

Mormons use in recruitment. They were making fast-sealing bonds of
attachment between the visitors and the cult by forcing the lines of social
interaction with their community. The ideology of the cult, new and strange
as it was to many, was cushioned within the comfort of unconditional love.
The technique formed social bonds, especially to those already in the cult,
so that “Final conversion was coming to accept the opinion of one’s [new]
friends.” 5 The power of overwhelming welcome was the Moonie’s prime
recruitment methodology.

Mary Kay love bombs on a scale that would make the Moonies green with
envy. It also has significantly more members than the Unification Church
has ever enjoyed. Of course, many consider Mary Kay a full-blown cult, or
at least a relatively harmless and somewhat amusing one, and assume its
perky members are victims of the transfixing voodoo typical of such
manipulative organizations. However, the reality is more sensible than
sensational. The strategy for recruitment of both sales consultants and
customers (many of whom become sales consultants) is to coddle the
prospect, to support and love them, to make them feel they are the most
important people on earth. The consultants I spoke to were quite adamant
that they will never go into a selling situation and sell. The rhetoric they
used eschewed this concept entirely. Instead they will present themselves as
a catalyst for a party, or, if one on one, the handmaiden to the
transformation of a women into her more confident self. They consider that
it is the relationships that are formed and the attention fostered that make
the sale, not a naked pitch.

Business and religion alike have overlooked the power of the person. The
currency of the term “cult of the individual” is an indica

We Love You

tion of the value given by our society to self-determinism. In other words,

decisions are considered to be made on the basis of facts, and ideas are
believed to be assessed on their merits and not necessarily with reference to
others. The assumption that is often made in the marketing of brands and
religions is that indeed, all men are islands. The opportunity of utilizing the
power of social connections and interaction is frequently missed. However,
in the world of conversion, whether to a brand or religion, love conquers
all.

Next, we’ll look at the power of community and its capacity to influence
everything, including the purchase of things and ideas. It examines our
undeniable urge to form groups, and the tools that are used to create potent
communities. Recognizing the importance of community is to accept the
effectiveness of the power of the person multiplied.

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YOU BELONG
People live in groups. Every human being enters the world as a member.
From the earliest known history, people have lived together in families,
clans and tribes, have assembled in neighborhoods, communities, villages,
towns and cities and have operated in gangs, clubs, unions, associations,
and congregations and innumerable other groups.

The person and the group are not separable phenomena, but are simply the
individual and collective aspects of the same thing.

Dr. Loren Osborn and Dr. Martin Neumeyer, Community and Society

he idea of belonging is such an underestimated principle in

I marketing that I will not only lay out the techniques that allow it to
happen, but make the argument why you should bother. Habits are slow to
change. The marketing community has only just heaved itself, reluctantly,
away from the belief that its consumer is a mass and homogeneous market.
It’s moved from the broadcast “Yell and Sell” to the extreme opposite point
of view—seeing its

THE CLILTING OF BRANDS

customers as isolated individuals to whom one conducts “one-toone

marketing.” The pendulum has swung too far and entirely missed an insight
on how to market effectively.

Marketers should also be engaged in community marketing: cultivating,

serving, and infusing brands into communities. Marketers should be
obsessed with communities, not just fret about how to market to an
impossible number of individuals. This will take a tectonic shift of attitude
and practice. Hence, there’s a need to outline why it’s so important to
reorient marketing departments. Because community marketing is going to
be the next big thing.

There is one very compelling reason why marketers should focus on

developing communities. The human race demands them. In fact, not just
demands them, but needs them. Belonging is a fundamental dictate of the
human condition. We can’t help but want to belong. Not to provide
communities is not to satisfy a basic need. And not satisfying a basic need
with a commercial answer would be the shame of most business people. It’s
one that would qualify them to be cast into the business hall of infamy.

We Belong to Survive
The great American Myth of Individualism is so pervasive that it requires
countering with the more powerful idea of man as a group animal. The
rugged frontiersman and heroic entrepreneur are icons of individuality that
have informed the driving cultural belief of survival of the fittest. However,
those who quote Darwin to prove how elemental solitariness is to the
human condition would be dismayed to know that he actually regarded man
as an animal whose survival depended on the group. The moment a lone
and hungry man with a sharp stick faced a woolly mammoth and realized he
needed his friends, human evolution took a lurch forward.

Those who acted in groups stood a better chance of living than those who
didn’t. And the compulsion to form groups to survive has not gone away,
just underground.

Despite the disappearance of woolly mammoths, belonging in social

networks still has an impact on man’s survival rates, even in our modern
and sophisticated society. This has been demonstrated by many studies in
the medical world, including an especially vivid piece of research run by
Yale University. 1 Researchers documented the social networks, marital
status, membership in religious organizations, membership in voluntary
groups, friends, and relatives of 194 patients who had been hospitalized by
a heart attack. They monitored their recovery rates while making every
attempt to isolate other factors from that of social connectedness. The
results were dramatic. By the end of the year, 55 percent of those reporting
no support had died compared with 27 percent of those with some social
network.

Lisa Berkman of the Harvard Public School of Health, one of many medical
sociologists and physicians who have studied the effect of social support on
cure and recovery rates among their patients, said, “The degree to which we
feel a part of our community or have deep abiding social and psychological
resources help to determine how protected we are against biological,
environmental or interpersonal assaults .” Deep within our psyche is the
need to belong, deep enough for it to have a material effect on our
longevity. Evolutionary psychologists would claim that we are genetically
programmed as a race to form groups.

We don’t just need to belong in order to survive. We also need to belong in

order to create a sense of reality and to make meaning— pretty fundamental
demands of the human condition.

We Belong in Order to Determine What’s Real

We belong in order to judge what’s real. This seems strange to those of us
who have always believed that we individually and intimately interpret the
world around us, that we alone decide what’s true or false; we perceive the
world through the lens of our own personality and form views about how
the world works.

Actually, collective agreement on reality strongly influences individual

perceptions of what is what. Peter Berger, a renowned sociologist claims,
“The subjective reality of the world hangs on the thin thread of
conversation.” 2 A demonstration that we all make collective agreements on
what is real was made in a famous laboratory experiment in the 1930s. The
exercise showed the triumph of collective belief over fact and collective
will over the individual. 3

The first stage of the experiment required that individual subjects sit alone
in a totally dark room. They were instructed to focus on a single point of
light projected onto the wall. The light was shut off and on sporadically.
Each research subject was asked to estimate how far the light moved each
time that it returned. The light, in fact, did not move. But in the absence of
any visual reference points, the light could seem to travel anywhere
between an inch and several feet, depending on the individual. And indeed
individual estimates varied dramatically.

Participants were then invited to return to the lab in groups of three. Once
again, the light was turned off and on sporadically and the group was asked
to estimate how far the light had moved. The researcher noted that “As they
heard one another’s estimates of the light’s movement, group members’
responses began to converge until they were nearly identical. In coming to
this collective opinion or consensus, group members established social
norms about

the movement of the light.” The group’s perspective was the most powerful
agent in the individual’s decision of what was real.

We Belong in Order to Make Meaning

If communities help us create a sense of reality, then they can be even more
depended upon to interpret the metaphysical. Peter Berger also created the
notion of “plausibility structures”—social constructs that support agreement
on the most intangible and yet the most important issues of life beyond
survival: what it all means. In the face of terrifying chaos and the cruelty of
randomness, humankind has a craving need to make sense of it all and to
create order. It is through the agency of the group that meaning is made,
each member reinforcing the believability of an interpretation to the other,
each institution asserting the plausibility of its belief system by the evidence
of the collective buy-in of its membership.

A. Marie Cornwall, the sociologist who conducted the study on the effect of
the group on belief and commitment, said the following: “Individuals come
to adopt a particular worldview through some form of socialization . .. their
religious worldview is sustained by conversations with others who are also
religious.” She found in her exhaustive quantitative study that both the
strength and frequency of “in group ties” (those within the Church versus
those outside) “have the strongest influence on belief and commitment.” In
other words, there is a high correlation between belonging to a group and
belief in its worldview.

All of this is not to say that the notion of the individual is irrelevant or
unimportant. But it is an attempt to reassert the role and importance of
community. Morgover, as we saw in chapter 1, I’m also asserting that a
community is actually instrumental in the development of the individual.
Far from denying individuality, community enables it. “Belonging makes
me more me” according to a

cult member I interviewed. This paradox was consistently confirmed

whether I talked to members of a cult, social group, or brand community,
whether Krishna, Marine, sorority, Trekkie, or Apple addict.

But aren’t communities dying? Politicians, the media, church leaders, and
the chattering classes are all ruing the loss of community and blaming most
social ills on its disappearance. The modern age of tract housing with no
definable borders and the increased mobility of Americans who move
location on an average of every seven years are all putting pressure on our
notions of community. The stressed out, profoundly tired, time-starved
average American simply hasn’t got time to join anything. Indeed, research
figures confirm the typical person’s desire to be involved in the community
has increased as their opportunity to do so has decreased. In 2002,65
percent of Americans see more and more of an advantage in being part of a
community. 4

“Community” Has not Disappeared

Community has not gone away. It cannot because it’s too fundamental to
the human condition. It’s just changed its appearance. Like any successful
organism that survives a change, it has evolved. And it has evolved in a way
that lends itself to brands becoming a locus of belonging. The time has
arrived for brands to take their place among others as new iterations of
community in contemporary society.

Robert Wuthnow in his book Loose Connections documents how the new
shapes of social interaction are less formal, demand shorter periods of
commitment, and are more focused on specific goals in response to the new
demands of modern citizens. For example, traditional social groupings such
as the Elks and Rotary Clubs are experiencing a decline in attendance and
membership. This is not necessarily because there are fewer businesses or
that

people want to network less, or that they have less of a social conscience.
But it is because people have less time to spare, are relocating more often,
and if they have time available do not wish to commit themselves to
organizations that have large obscure objectives with significant time
commitment. Belonging to a group that works to build a new gym for the
school or protest the building of a local power plant is more likely to get a
membership than the older institutions that had officers and lifetime
memberships and sought to remedy everything from poverty to litter.
Wuthnow argues that Americans are “experimenting with looser, more
sporadic ad hoc connections in place of the long term memberships in
hierarchical organizations of the past.” 5

As the railways, highways, airways, telephone, mass media, and the Internet
erode the concept of the traditional community, they also create new ones.
Unanchored and imagined communities of others that share a state of mind
rather than physical proximity have joined the geographic neighborhood.
Gradually, a businessman in Columbus, Ohio, has realized that he shares,
and feels more strongly, a community of interest with other businessmen
and women in San Francisco, or New York, or Sao Paulo rather than with
his neighbor down the street who fixes cars.

As the nostalgic icons of community (the bucolic images of rural small

towns, Main streets, and garden fences where physical proximity enabled
people to interact) has slipped away, they’ve been replaced by communities
of ideas and mutual interest. And the electronic age has enabled this
evolution in ways that few imagined even a few decades ago. Political
leaders can extend their “church” and gather funds on the Internet rather
than door-todoor. Groups of collectors can meet on eBay rather than travel
to exhibition halls. Friendster has catapulted friendship, dating, and
straightforward networking beyond anything that was possible when the
world was trapped by traditional geographically based contact.
Brands Are Becoming Legitimate Centers of
Community
Into this reformation of community slips the notion of brand community.
Mediated by modern forms of communication, brand communities have
become a modern belonging phenomena, appropriate to contemporary
demands. They can be ideological. They can provide venues for social
interactivity that demand lower levels of commitment than their parents or
grandparents felt compelled to when they subscribed to the traditional
forms of social interaction. They may not fulfill the demands created by
nostalgic notions of community (although some do), but they can and do
provide venues for association that are more relevant to contemporary
conditions.

A recent study of brand communities by Albert Muniz and Thomas

O’Guinn found that specialized, non-geographically bound communities of
admirers are gathering around brands. 6 They found that communities that
had formed around the Ford Bronco, Saab, and Macintosh computer brands
exhibited all the traditional markers of sociologically defined groups. These
minisocieties, which supercede traditional communal boundaries of county,
state, and nation, all foster an intrinsic sense of connection between their
members and a collective sense of difference from those not within the
community. They all have conventions, rituals, and traditions that set up
visible public definitions. And they exhibit a sense of obligation on the part
of members to the community as a whole and to other individuals in the
group.

Perhaps you’re feeling a little superior at the moment. You don’t belong to a
brand community. Your commitment to a brand would never go to those
absurd lengths. You just buy brands for their usevalue. Yet don’t deny that
you’ve looked at the driver of the same

You Belong

model of car as yours when you’ve pulled alongside them at a stoplight.

Haven’t you felt indignant if they are not like you? You might take one look
at them and decide that they should forfeit their car immediately at the
nearest dealership. And if they are like you, you might offer a slight nod of
recognition. In other words you’ve imagined that owners of that brand
should be like you, share your interests, that you’d probably get along if
you met at a party. In other words, you are part of an “imagined
community.”

It is impossible not to notice a palpable sense of community around the

Apple brand. There is a commonwealth of people who feel complicit with
each other whenever they see the Mac icon. I sometimes go to a cafe near
my office to escape the hurly burly and have space to think. It’s the kind of
place where you can mull over a cup of coffee and be left undisturbed for
hours while you contemplate big issues or problems in your work. Most
people are writing and reading. The clientele tend to be professional writers,
professors, and some journalists, and we all use Macs. We never mention it
because it’s kind of a given. This unspoken brand community becomes even
more apparent if someone walks in with a PC. There is an observable shiver
throughout the room, almost like the moment when Tom wore the wrong
clothes at the Harley bar. This person does not belong, what are they doing
here? Being polite we say nothing but there must be a discernable sense of
groupness, and its partner, exclusion, because these benighted individuals
never come back. Since I bought my Titanium G4, the people who dash in
for a take-out coffee have looked at my laptop on the way out, looked up at
me, and nodded with a smile.

Forty-five thousand Saturn owners and their cars turned up at the Saturn
plant—in Tennessee. They were average people from all over America who,
when others might have gone to Disneyworld, Yellowstone, or the Grand
Canyon for their vacation that year, brought their families instead to a car
plant—in Tennessee. Why? Why would their kids let them? Because they
wanted to meet

THE CLILTING OF BRANDS

the people who made their car, and the makers wanted to meet them. They
wanted to meet other Saturn owners and their families. Saturn retailers
wanted to meet other retailers, other customers, and rekindle relationships
with friends at the plant. They all wanted to share barbecue together, listen
to some country music and rock and roll, play sports, and have their
pictures taken with other owners.

Saturns are well made but otherwise very ordinary cars. A nerdy and
obsessive interest in the cunningly crafted carburetor (to be honest, I don’t
know whether it is or not, but I suspect not) was not the reason for these
people to get together. The car had become the locus for one of the largest
brand communities the country has ever seen. The “Homecoming” as it was
called, was the first of many events that brought that community together in
a traditional form. It was an old-fashioned tent meeting for a new kind of
religion.

The Homecoming took place three years after the brand was launched. By
that time the cult was thriving, having used a mixture of traditional and
modern community-building tools. It used both bricks and mortar in the
form of its dealerships and media to create real and virtual town halls for
the group. It united millions of people with a common belief system and
sense of mutual interest that transcended barriers of geography and
background. And it used actual and surrogate contact between members to
create a sense of belonging. The Saturn phenomenon is one example of
many brand communities that have eclipsed many traditional forms of
connectedness.

Let’s look now at how this was done by also comparing it and other cult
brands with some more traditional communities. Whether car-focused or
god-focused, these groups have been built with tools that have forever
stimulated the age-old desire to belong and have used the same perennial
techniques for creating communities.

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CUTTING IS A CONTACT
SPORT
he more cult members are around each other, the stickier the

I bond. Interaction, contact, and frequent engagement between members are

the surest means to develop unbreakable connections to each other, to the
group as a whole, and to its doctrine.

The Mormon Church has over eleven million members in 162 countries.
Size, rapid growth, and huge geographic spread are normally the death of
committed and cohesive communities. Yet the church has reconciled the
mutually exclusive. Smaller commercial or religious organizations that
cover less territory should be jealous of its achievement.

How has it done it? It has a very impressive contact strategy and program.
As we examine its strategies in this and subsequent chapters we’ll look at
the church as if it were also a corporation with eleven million devoted
employees (several leading pundits and publications have claimed as much)
or a worldwide brand with eleven million loyal customers. Could you also
grow a brand to leadership status while maintaining such intense consumer
loyalty?

A. Marie Cornwall’s study of the Mormon Church found that the greater the
degree of interaction among members and the larger the number of
relationships within the church, the more the individual’s

behavior showed signs of commitment (as indicated by their adherence to

the cult’s doctrine).

Indeed, Latter-day Saints are more involved than members of other large
churches. They express a stronger affiliation with the church, 1 and they
also contribute more annually (Mormon men— $1,846, Mormon women—
$1,562 versus the U.S. average: men— $421, and women—$403). The
originators of this data claim “there are substantial differences between
Latter-day Saints and other Americans. Latter-day Saints people are more
likely to be highly religious, to believe oneself to be a strong member of
one’s church, to believe in life after death, and to make greater financial
contributions to the church.” 2

My own interviews confirmed an extraordinary commitment and revealed

what appeared to me an arduous amount of energy devoted to the church
given modern demands on time. Most of that energy was spent engaging
with other members.

One such church member, Peggy Fugal, straddles the two worlds of cults
and marketing. A feisty businesswoman she is both a Mormon and a
marketing expert (she has a successful advertising agency in Salt Lake
City). She has made it a personal hobby to look at the church through the
lens of her business. She enthused several times during our conversation
that “the church is just brilliant at marketing!” She pointed out that its
contact strategy is essentially a retention program. It’s the glue of the
community; it’s the source of the cohesion of the group. Fugal, while proud
of the success of her own marketing company, is in awe of the church’s
“marketing savvy” in terms of creating a strong community and member
loyalty.

How does the church create this glue? Through a combination of the
following three strategies. First, they have established a rigorously applied
program of contact forcing “high content” engagement between members.
They don’t just meet at church on Sunday. It’s a contact program that occurs
during the other six days of the

week, and is replicated worldwide. You’ll see the same program in force
whether you’re in Manchester, England, or Manchester, New Hampshire.

Second, they keep tabs on their membership and prospects, placing

particular focus on recent recruits. They view the latter as those most
vulnerable to leaving, knowing that weak contact with existing members
will lead to a weakened commitment to the church and its theology as a
whole. They use the membership at the local level as informants to feed and
monitor the database. They collate information for a local, regional,
national, and international database where it is interrogated at every stage to
check on the members’ location and degree of involvement. Third, the
membership runs the program themselves, with direction from the cult
leaders. It’s contact by the people for the people. This creates a high degree
of involvement in the community and a sense of responsibility among
members for the welfare of each other and the group as a whole.

The Contact Strategy

Like that other successful religion that grew fast with a devoted
membership in its first three hundred years, Christianity, the Mormon
Church has institutionalized a rigorous program of contact that caters to
both members’ temporal and spiritual needs. Followers really have no need
to call on anyone but the church for its secular or spiritual demands. It has
created a self-sufficient world of contact and care.

Home visits take place a minimum of every four weeks. They are conducted
by the males of the church who “bear the priesthood” (normally acquired at
the age of twelve by men only). The purpose is to “visit members regularly,
showing love for them, teaching them the gospel, and inviting them to come
unto Christ.

Home teachers should encourage fathers to pray and take proper care of
their families. Home teachers help members in times of illness, loss,
loneliness, unemployment, and at times of other special needs.” 3 They
normally discuss the “First Presidency Message” (a doctrinal lesson issued
by the leadership once a month) with the family or individual.

The womens organization, known as the Relief Society, is dedicated to

providing welfare to members. This can range from meeting fellow ward
members’ families at the airport to cooking and delivering meals during
periods of sickness. The 10 percent tithe goes to the building of chapels and
temples, but it also helps finance this and other care programs. Peggy Fugal
says, “There isn’t a Mormon on the planet on welfare.” Women fulfill the
role of “Visit Teaching,” which also takes place a minimum of every four
weeks. Two “sisters” visit another sister and deliver a message, and concern
themselves with more of the temporal needs of the family or individual.
“When you are assigned to be a visiting teacher, an important part of your
responsibility is to learn of the spiritual and temporal needs of the sister and
her family and to give spiritual instruction through a monthly message. You
are a teacher of the gospel.” 4

The family unit is essential and sacred. Every week there is a Family Home
Evening, normally on a Monday night. Family bonding is institutionalized
on Mondays, with some form of reading or lesson given by the male head
of household. When family members are not there, surrogates take their
place. Garrett, a young church member in New York, whose family is in
Utah, explained “family units among singles.”

The night before our interview he had met with friends in a park where
“someone shared a message.” They then went to McDonald’s and ate ice
cream. Sometimes they meet at someone’s apartment and make cookies.
This formalized replication of family interaction can be a very good
substitute. He confessed, “I don’t feel like I’m far

away from my family. In fact, I hate to admit it, but I don’t really miss my
family when I’m here because I have so many friends who are like my
family, you know?” As A. Marie Cornwall claims, the more frequent these
moments, the more committed individuals become to the group.

Peggy Fugal, in demonstrating the compassionate, relentless contact

strategy, says, “If you’re not in church on Sunday, your home teacher is
going to notice, your visiting teacher is going to notice, the bishop is going
to notice, and somebody’s going to call you, and somebody’s going to visit
with you. And if they discover you’re sick, they’re going to bring meals in.
And if they discover your marriage is in trouble, they’re going to find you a
counselor. And if they discover you’re out of a job, they’re going to refer
the church employment specialist to you, and get you a job. And if they
discover you’re out of groceries, they’re going to write you a welfare slip to
go to the bishop’s storehouse to get groceries. This church is brilliant.”

Keeping Tabs-Nobody Disappears

The church’s membership database is vast, comprehensive, and constantly
updated. Its accuracy, currency, and completeness are pursued with unusual
energy. Garrett’s main function at his ward is “membership clerk.” He is
one of tens of thousands of worldwide collectors, compilers, updaters, and
pursuers who maintain the engine of contact at its most effective level—
locally. He saw his role as “fostering communication by making sure that
I’m up to date on who’s here and who isn’t.” He maintains an online
membership directory that only members of the ward can access. He
compiles records of a member’s phone numbers, addresses, e-mail, and
takes their photographs.

How does he follow the comings and goings of people leaving

the area or arriving, of those who may need help or those who have slipped
into nonattendance? Every Sunday after the spiritual meetings of the day, he
sits down with the bishop and his attendees and they share information
about the members and their needs. This is followed by a Ward Council,
which consists of the heads of all of the committees. Grant describes them
as his “informants” who tell him who’s moved, who’s changed their phone
number, and who’s showing signs of drifting away.

If people have plainly disappeared he’ll send a letter to their old address,
and if that fails, call their parents to see if they know where their children
have gone. He’ll then forward the data to the officials of the person’s new
ward. If the parents don’t know where they’ve moved he sends the data to
headquarters “and they try and figure it out.”

Fugal proudly points out, “The church never loses track of its members,
even if they’re totally inactive. They always know where you’re living.
They always know what ward you’re in. They always know who your
bishop is. And if you have succeeded in disappearing, they will assign a
missionary to find you.”

New recruits are also subject to a formal program of contact at the moment
that they are most vulnerable to disappearing. Immediately following
conversion, the missionaries will keep visiting the individual or family to
introduce and teach the church doctrine and its programs of contact, and
involve them in those programs. An existing member family is assigned to
the recruit to ensure that he or she comes to church, to answer questions and
to make sure competitive religions or earthly temptations are not
“distracting them from their new choice, their new life.” “Brilliant stuff,”
Fugal continues, “the church knows with a great deal of marketing savvy
how to convert and hold onto a convert.”

The Members Run the Program

The Church of Latter-day Saints has no paid clergy. 5 Its lay membership
fulfills all the obligations of spiritual leadership, teaching, organization, and
welfare. The bishops can also be lawyers, doctors, or entrepreneurs by day.
A Stake president can own his own restaurant. Apart from freeing up large
amounts of the church’s income from supporting an otherwise expensive
full-time clergy, lay leadership forces intimate involvement between
member and institution, and between members and each other. In a sense,
the membership runs its own cult.

Ryan, a mergers and acquisition consultant, not only holds down his
demanding and stressful job as a senior managing director at his
consultancy, but also serves as Stake president. He is responsible for a large
number of wards or parishes in a wide geographic area. Within the very
clear and multilevel hierarchy of the organization he is responsible for
coordinating the spiritual and temporal work with the local managers of
each ward. He shares his work with the Stake High Council, which also
consists of others in demanding day jobs. “Across the spectrum they are
lawyers, doctors, a partner at Deloitte and Touche.”

Every member I interviewed, from David Neeleman, the founder and

chairman of jetBlue, to young Garrett who’s not long out of college, had
fulfilled some role in the church normally performed by paid clergy in other
organizations. The result? Intimacy with others and the institution. There’s a
degree of involvement here seldom seen in other organizations, except
perhaps in the early Christian church prior to the formation of a priesthood
in the fourth century.

The Church of Latter-day Saints is, of course, a religion, and some of its
activities are only appropriate to a religious organization.
THE CUTTING OF BRANDS

But not all. Could you not encourage programs of welfare and doctrinal
teaching within your organization? Can you involve your consumers in the
running of the cult? How good is your database and can your franchise help
update it?

How might the Mormons contact strategy be replicated in a commercial

context? Isn’t it an impossible task to have that much contact and that much
“good” data? Most CRM programs (Customer Relationship Management,
the direct mail and sales calls to homes, as the general population might
better know it) are notoriously inefficient at updating and record keeping
and have a relatively low response rate (to achieve upper single digit
percentages is cause for celebration).

The key to the Mormons’ approach is that first, it is a program for the
membership run by the membership. It is not corporation to customer, but
customer to customer, a big difference. The faceless marketing corporation
disturbing your dinner for another few bucks is sidestepped here. It’s a
fellow member, possibly a friend, disturbing you for something of mutual
interest. Second, the database is run by the membership. This makes it both
current and accurate. Accurate information is more likely to be divulged to
a fellow member or worshipper than it is to a corporation. It also is very
cheap to run because the members donate their time.

Finally, the nature of the contact is high content. The pretext for the
frequent engagement between members is to offer something highly
valuable—spiritual or temporal. Knowing that someone is always thinking
about you and checking on your welfare creates strong emotional bonds.
The Mormon visits provide a service, whether to offer something tangible,
like hot meals if you are sick, or doctrinal, like a bible reading. Finally, they
provide social contact that can simply be fun, like ice cream in the park.

The BMW motorcycle community doesn’t think it is a community. Whereas

the Harley-Davidson cult members view belonging as a quintessential part
of the experience, BMW riders like to think
of themselves as the lone wolves of the road. It’s their territory and all
others are pretenders to its ownership. They are the independent survivalists
of the road. They are in it for the experience of the ride, and that’s it. Even
Harley riders talk about them with respect as the “real riders.” As one said,
“You just have to look at his odometer to tell he’s a BMW rider.” These are
the guys crazy enough to ride from the icy tip of Alaska to the tip of South
America (one rider I spoke with just completed a ten-thousand-mile ride
with his son). If BMW riders organize a rally, the point of it is to ride there.
Harley riders tend to put their machines on a trailer and offload them in
front of the bar to admire each other’s impeccably clean chrome over a beer.

But they’re kidding themselves. The BMW cult is lesser known than its
flashier chrome-bedecked brother, but it is a cult nonetheless. As we’ll see,
they have their own strong community. Riders have a very acute sense of
responsibility toward each other (a critical indicator of the strength of a
community) they meet both virtually on Web sites and literally for rides and
increasingly at rallies. They have codes of behavior, and an unwritten
doctrine. They believe they are different from everyone else, and most
believe that they are only truly being whom they are when they are on their
machine with other BMW riders. And they have a sense of holierthan-thou
often targeted toward the Japanese-manufactured bikeriders.

The BMW cult, like the Mormons, is decentralized. It wants very little to do
with the BMW corporation—all it wants is for the company to keep
producing high-quality machines. BMW has very smartly respected the
independent nature of its clientele. It keeps its distance, and when it does
communicate directly with its membership via advertising, its Web site,
sales materials, and mail shots it’s done in the tone and manner of rider-to-
rider, not corporation to rider. Everything is written as if one gritty warrior
of the road is talking to another, and often they are. Most of the marketers

and personnel on the account at the advertising agency are BMW riders
themselves and are equally obsessed with the experience.

The equivalent of the Mormon contact strategy in this decentralized cult is

executed though the BMW MOA (Motorcycle Owners Association). It’s an
organization numbering 35,000 members and is run totally independent
from the corporation (independent but not hostile). It describes its aim as
“communication based on mutual sharing of ideas, talents, concepts and
experiences, so the knowledge and enjoyment of our sport will substantially
increase through collective education and participation .” That last phrase
(my emphasis) could describe the Mormon contact strategy. It has elected
officers who are drawn from the general population of rider-members.

How do they execute their stated objective? They have a highly effective
database of members “recruited through the Web site, from other members,
and from the dealers and local chapters,” said an MOA spokesman. It’s run
by the membership, informed by the membership and local “churches,” and
information is compiled at a central point. “Welfare” and instruction is
given by local chapters who meet each month and the national yearly rally
where there is a “family atmosphere” as the spokesperson described it.
Seminars are given by volunteers on a whole range of issues from technical
problems to the best and most stimulating rides. The only paid staff are the
office workers.

The MOA is one of several rider organizations that operate with similar
contact strategies and have a similar sense of rider ownership of the
community and involvement in running it. For example, the IBMWR
(International BMW Rider Association) refers to all members as presidents
in recognition that they “own” the brand. There are two publications that
are published by rider communities (the OTL —On The Level, and BMW
ON).

What if you want more direct involvement in the contact strategy of your
cult or brand community? Supposing you don’t want to

leave it entirely to the membership. Don Hudler, ex-CEO of Saturn and now
the owner of six Saturn retail outlets in Texas, was one of the instigators of
many of the famous community building and contact creating strategies at
the car company.

The Saturn community was a Holy Trinity. The manufacturers, whether

management or line workers, the retailers, and the customers saw no
division between each other in their commitment to the brand, to each other,
and to the brand community of Saturn as a whole. With that in mind the
nature of the contact included all three elements of the Trinity from the
start.

Every month most Saturn dealers hold car clinics to explain the
fundamentals of maintenance and basic emergency procedures like
changing a tire. These typically take place on an evening and the retailer
will provide entertainment and a barbecue. The invitations are made within
thirty to ninety days of the purchase of the car (like the Mormons, creating
contact with recent recruits) or their last attendance at an event. The
response rate is high: typically between 35 to 50 percent. These events
“reinforce the decision the customer has made for our brand, and maintains
a relationship over their lifetime.” And it is a relationship that has depth.
These events involve everyone in the retail outlet from receptionist to
technicians to sales consultants, not just the customer relationship people.
Everyone manages the relationship, and all are part of the community.

This is an example of a high-content form of contact. The customers are

receiving practical information, food, entertainment, and even friendship
between customers and between customers and employees. One of the high-
content moments enjoyed by customers is when their car is raised up on the
lift and the technicians point out things that they need to know. This breaks
down the ageold wariness of mechanics by demystifying the car and
building trust.

Other scheduled contact is made by phoning the customer after

every form of engagement with the retailer—service, repair, purchase, or

recall—and checking if everything is satisfactory. If a recall is necessary,
it’s turned from a potentially negative blemish on the brand into another
opportunity for contact. The dealer hosts a barbecue, gift certificates might
be handed out for local restaurants, and the personnel at the retailer are on
hand to answer questions and generally reassure the customer.

One centrally organized and locally applied activity to create contact was
the construction of playgrounds in local neighborhoods. Members of the
Saturn plant—often the people who built the cars—the local retailers and
customers donated their time to build playgrounds in impoverished areas
with financing made available by the company. It represented a high contact
and highly rewarding content-based interaction among all members of the
Trinity. Over a hundred playgrounds were built across the country at
between $50,000 to $100,000 each.

The retailers will often undertake contact activities that might otherwise be
run by owners groups. They will invite drivers on rallies around the
countryside, sometimes 100- to 150-mile trips with refreshments and
entertainment. Saturn hosts days at theme parks. For example, a regional
group of retailers will take over a Six Flags Park for the day and invite
owners to play and socialize together. At one organized at Carrowinds near
Charlotte, North Carolina, last year, Hudler reported that approximately ten
thousand customers turned up.

At the first Flomecoming event customers traveled from as far as Alaska

and Taiwan. Others caravaned from the West Coast. Winona Judd
performed, there was face painting, and washable Saturn tattoos were
handed out. The most popular event according to Don was a tour of the
plant. When he first suggested it the line workers were concerned that it
would reduce productivity by slowing the line down (not a concern often
heard by the average car worker—an indication of the sense of
responsibility felt toward the

Cubing Is a Contact Sport

community of the brand). In fact, they set a productivity record each of the
two days of the event. The owners took pictures of the makers of their cars;
the makers took pictures of the owners. The line workers made banners and
kids helped them.

Whether your organization participates overtly in the contact program or

distances itself from one that already exists and is run by the membership,
there must be one for the community to be robust. The Mormon
organization does both. Its program (and the Church) is centrally controlled
from Salt Lake City via an extremely well-defined hierarchy and a
legislated program of contact, but the members run it themselves. Both the
content and the database is conducted and furnished by those who benefit
from it.
The BMW corporation is also becoming more involved with the
membership community. But it’s doing it in a fashion that renders it
acceptable to a fiercely independent population. Real everyday riders give
the seminars it sponsors with a few guest appearances by celebrated
designers and other notables within the corporation. All of its advertising
and communications feature real riders who then also appear at these events
to give instruction and advice. The language and subject matter of the
communication betray an intimate knowledge of what it is like to be a real
rider (in fact that is the communication strategy: “BMW is the indisputable
mark of the real rider”). In short, it is supporting and sponsoring an existing
brand community and not blundering in and attempting to control it. It
recognizes that the cult has its own very effective program of contact and its
role is nurturer not controller. The last thing that Lawrence Kuyrendall
wants to do is upset “the tight-knit group” that he has working for him,
albeit remotely, as a community builder.

'L

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WE’RE IN THIS TOGETHER
C ult members must engage with each other, that we know. Now what must
happen for bonds to become unbreakably strong? There are two critical and
related characteristics of cohesive communities: shared experience between
members, and a sense of responsibility and mutual dependence. Strong
communities develop as intimacy between members grows. The
membership must share experiences, remember them together, compare
their interpretations, and tell stories about them. Strong bonds are created
once members feel an obligation to each other and the group as a whole.
That members have a sense of mutual dependence is perhaps the clearest
indicator that their community is becoming a cult.

Shared Experience
Being in the same school, town, generation, country, or era forms
attachments based on common experience and shared meaning. Shared
experience is vital to the cohesion of a cult. In fact, cults are the masters of
creating community based on mutual experience and the collective memory
of that experience. Let’s look at a

cult where shared experience is hothoused amongst its members. It is the

kind of experience created by close contact and defined by immediacy

Mike, a young, recently graduated second lieutenant in the Marines, dared

me to call him a cult member. It didn’t take too long to convince him it was
true. He could not deny that his calling had all of the classic characteristics
of a radical belonging organization. It had a clear and rigorously applied
ideology. It had rules and regulations, ritual, traditions, mythology and
storytelling, hierarchies, an acute sense of difference from the world around
it, and an unashamed sense of moral superiority. He agreed that he had
“become himself” to a degree which civilian life could never provide, and
that it had happened through the agency of a brotherhood like no other.
There was uniformity of appearance and language. There were common
symbols and potent iconography. There were enemies, both actual and
internalized (such as fear of failure).

I interviewed two second lieutenants, a graduate (Mike) and another still in

training (Jon). I also talked to an old salty ex-Marine (Steve, who will be
furious at this description. He claims, as they all do, that “there are no ex-
Marines, just old Marines”). And I interviewed retired Lieutenant General
Martin Steele on an aircraft carrier in New York harbor. His new job is
running the Sea-Air-Space Museum on the Intrepid. Both elder Marines
served in Vietnam and the two lieutenants have subsequently served in Iraq.

Martin Steele claimed that, “We don’t care about you as an individual,”
words he’d said in reference to a recruit’s identity when they crossed the
threshold of the training camp. In truth, his stories betrayed a profound
concern for those individuals for whom he had been responsible.

The induction process is a “breaking down and building up experience.” It

is one that crystallizes the individual through a group experience. They are
rigorously trained physically and in the craft of their job over a twelve-
week period. And the single most impor

tant idea branded into them over that intense period is that they are totally
dependent on the group for their survival. The climactic event over the three
month ordeal is called “the Crucible.” By then any baggage from civilian
world outside has been atomized and any doubts about their own personal
ability and the rightness of the institution’s ideas have been eradicated. As
Jon said, “It’s good because there is no doubt about anything.”

By the time you reach the Crucible, Steele said you’ve “got an aura of self-
confidence .. . you have been transformed, you believe you are somebody.”
He stressed that these recruits’ sense of self— far from being eliminated by
the process—had been developed and enhanced the moment the recruit
crossed the threshold. But, the whole point of the training and this ultimate
exercise was to “realize that you have very little capability unless you
become part of this team,” a principle at the heart of the Marine culture.

The Crucible is daunting. It is a grueling event where the recruit is wakened

in the middle of the night by a cacophony of noise and screamed orders.
The purpose is to instill disorientation and confusion into the group. The
recruits are marched into the night to an unknown destination, separated
from their normal unit, and assigned to another, much in the way they
would replace a casualty in the course of a battle. It’s forty hours of no
sleep, no food, and long hauls on foot with full kit.

The event takes place on Parris Island, South Carolina, and outside San
Diego. Steele described the Crucible’s emotional climax, when six hundred
recruits come down the mountain in California with the sun at their back
and the ocean at their front. As the recruits approached “For the first time
the senior enlisted Marine calls them ‘Marine,’ and the recruit cries and all
the drill instructors cry.”

The Crucible is a rite of passage by which an individual is transformed

through the agency of a shared experience. Steele makes this point by
recalling a young man who had been a wrestler at the

University of Michigan. He was “extremely strong, he probably had a

twenty-one- or twenty-two-inch neck and fifty-five- or fifty-sixinch chest.
He was just a mammoth man of tremendous strength.” Steele watched as
“tears were running down his muddy face when they handed him our
emblem, the eagle, globe, and anchor.” He went up to the new Marine after
the ceremony and asked why the former champion wrestler had cried. He
asked what’s the difference between being a wrestler at the top of your
league and going through this experience. The new Marine replied, “As a
wrestler, it’s one-to-one. I’m now part of an organization for eternity. And
it’s so different. Did I have more physically demanding things in the
wrestling room at Michigan? Generally, I did. But I never had anything
where I had to be part of a team. And you can never take this away from
me.”

The Marines, of course, are an example of perhaps the strongest shared

experience community in the world. As Steele puts it, “It’s a team that
transcends sports teams and the civilian community to this life team.
Because the business ... in this elite organization is life and death. It’s not a
touchdown or a home run. It totally transcends all of that.”
Jon, the recent officer recruit, gave his perspective on how that bond is
created. Being in lockstep with your compatriots at every single moment
“brought everyone together. It kept everyone on the same page. And your
sense of collective unity was enhanced that much more. Everyone goes
through the exact same thing and I can’t underscore enough that everyone is
dealing with the exact same problem you are dealing with. You are dealing
with it together. You’re put in that situation of chaos and everyone knows
what you’re going through.”

Experience can be shared literally, as in the case of the Marines. And it can
be experienced metaphorically. The WWF brand (World Wrestling
Federation) offers more of the latter to its membership. I interviewed two
friends who had met at a bar where the

patrons watched the latest episode. They were in their mid-to-late twenties.
Kevin handled East Coast sales for a press clipping agency and Gary was a
PR consultant. Their choice of careers is relevant. Their jobs are in the
media, they know about the art of storytelling, and they know how well
emotions can be manipulated with an artful narrative. They’re part of the
so-called media machine.

They happily admit that they are the willing victims of skillful storytelling
by the WWF. They confessed that this sport “is not a sport, it’s a masculine
ballet. Everything is orchestrated and well choreographed.” It’s a “good
Hollywood movie,” Kevin admitted, and they were totally engrossed. They
both have had to defend their obsession in the face of derision from
colleagues and friends who saw it as a juvenile drama that duped a gullible
audience. Kevin and Gary were at pains to prove that they knew it was all
fabrication, “that they have script-writers,” and that it was just “wholesome
entertainment, just entertainment.”

But was it? As Kevin later confessed in the interview, “It’s strange too,
because I’m actually noticing a disconnect in what I’ve been saying today.”
He explained that while he enjoyed the fantasy of the weekly dramas, he
had also just “highlighted my love of the realism of it, which is strange to
me.”
What could be realistic about a pantheon of cartoonlike characters that
perform weekly to scripts with plot lines that they both described as
“preposterous”? During the course of the interview it became apparent that
the two men were bonded to others in the bar, and to millions in their homes
across the nation, by the dramatization of a Master Narrative. That is, they
were all watching a drama that spoke to millions, which referenced the
common experience of average men and women.

The identification with the characters and the story lines, as preposterous as
they might be, was intense. Kevin gave The Rock as an example: “he’s a
wise guy, and I consider myself to be a wise guy, almost to a fault as my
boss will attest.” He admitted that he saw

himself in The Rock in “vivid Technicolor... I have the feeling that the guy
who plays the character of The Rock is probably just like me and he just
takes it to the next level.” I asked him if he would like to take it to the next
level in real life: “In my dream world, but in the real world you just can’t. ..
you can’t speak to people that way. There are ramifications to it.”

It was evident that these were dramas in which everyone’s proxy played out
their daily dilemmas and concerns, and like every good story, the bad guys
got their just desserts. The story line at the time was Stone Cold Steve
Austin versus Vince McMahon, the president of the WWF. Real life was
part of the drama. Vince has been induced to wet himself onstage to
demonstrate his fear of his own employees, and he has suffered being hit
with a bedpan. Gary believed that what he saw on screen was a universal
story. Every week the stories include “people who are hurting their boss,
smacking their boss around” and it’s, he confessed, “everything every man
in America would love to do, and they [the characters] get to do it every
week, and they get the crowd cheering for it.”

Gary described the brand as a never-ending story of “revenge and

redemption.” It was reduced to good versus evil. Of the evil guys, Kevin
revealed that “we got them” in the office and that “I don’t want to deal with
them any more.” Instead he lets “Kurt Angle handle it in the ring. And I
know it seems silly, but on a subconscious level it kind of helps out a little
bit.”
The WWF brand cult creates shared experience by storytelling. It
dramatizes stories that millions share and relate to their own personal
narratives. It speaks to their own dialogues they have with themselves about
how the world works, what people are like, what they as individuals are
like, and where they fit in the order of things. And it is played out profitably
to the satisfaction of millions of average Americans, even to cynical media
manipulators like Kevin and Gary. It has cleverly picked the shared
experience of a majority and co-opted it as its brand content.

Storytelling is a classic form of experience sharing. And it is not limited to

brands that make it their product benefit. At jetBlue, mythologies have a
currency among staff and customers alike as ways of creating common
meaning. Steve Jobs is a story creator for a company that sells boxes of
electronics. His master story of iconoclast who became rich and changed
the world is a narrative vicariously shared by the millions. It is the classic
American Dream. A mass finger at faceless monopolistic empire builders is
what most ticket buyers are gesturing, to some degree, when they fly on
Virgin.

A Saturn buyer I talked to bought the brand in part because it was a

statement from a little guy to abusive car manufacturers: the small, timid
car buyers can be treated with respect. A VW Beetle driver I interviewed
(he had owned six in succession since his student days in the sixties)
admitted that he was buying into the collective story of rejection of
materialist values every time he bought one of those “rickety little cars and
flashed my headlights at other owners who felt the same way as we passed
each other.”

Group events offer another opportunity for members to share experience.

Followers can exchange stories, testify, hear sermons from the leaders,
make friends, and establish networks of support. Organizations employ
them to create a sense of solidarity through mass action. Wal-Mart starts
every morning with a group cheer; Mary Kay has a mammoth annual
meeting in Dallas that is almost evangelistic; Macworld draws thousands of
the faithful every year; owners clubs, from Miata to Harley, organize rallies
where people share stories, food, and ride together.
We Look after Each Other
V.

A sure indicator of a cults vigor is the strength of the sense of responsibility

that exists within it. Do cult members feel a personal concern for the
welfare of their compatriots? Do they look after

each other in times of duress? Will they train, financially support, and
morally sustain each other? As well as looking out for each other, members
should also have a sense of personal investment in the fortunes of the cult
itself. Will they make sacrifices to ensure its well being? And critically
important is whether the cult feels an equal sense of responsibility toward
its members. Is their investment reciprocated? This mutuality is the defining
doctrine of any strong culture.

Mutual responsibility is, of course, an outcome of the sense of belonging

that exists within the group. It’s generally an indicator of the cohesiveness
of the cult. The stronger the sense of mutual responsibility, the stronger the
cult. And the more successfully the programs that have been put in place to
create a sense of belonging, the more likely will you see a strong sense of
mutuality.

But you can also predispose a culture towards mutuality, even legislate for
it. Responsibility can be embedded as an idea within the cult’s doctrine and
its codes of behavior. This is something to be seriously considered.
Mutualism is both a great bonding device and growth strategy. Encouraging
your cult toward it is likely to yield the often unreconcileable benefits of
growth and loyalty.

Let’s look at two cults, one religious and one military, that have codified
mutual responsibility with dramatic effect. Then we’ll look at two brand
cults, one with a centrally militated doctrine of care, the other with an
unwritten code that emerged spontaneously from its membership without
any involvement from the center.
Christianity might have remained one of many minor cults in the Eastern
Mediterranean in the first three centuries had it not been for two devastating
plagues and its doctrine of mutualism. In 165 a.d. and again in 251 a.d.
plagues of similar ferocity and lethalness as those in medieval Europe
spread across the Empire, scything down between a quarter and a third of
the population. By that time, Rodney Stark in The Rise of Christianity
asserts, the Christian values of “love and charity had .. . been translated into

the norms of social service and community solidarity. When disaster struck,
Christians were better able to cope because of their doctrine of mutual love
and care, and this resulted in substantially higher rates of survival.”

Modern medical experts, according to Stark, have calculated that

conscientious nursing care, without any medications, could cut mortality
rates by two-thirds or more. And ministering to the sick is what the
Christians did, staying in the cities, looking after their own and other
communities. In contrast, their pagan neighbors’ routine response to such
calamities was to abandon their families and friends and flee. Dionysus,
Bishop of Alexandria, noted that “ . . they pushed the sufferers away and
fled from their dearest, throwing them into the roads before they were dead
and treated unburied corpses as dirt.”

The ratio of Christians to pagans after the two plagues dramatically

increased. Prior to the first, Stark estimates that the Empires Christian
population was approximately 0.4 percent. Following the second, he
estimates the ratio had ballooned to be roughly one Christian to four
pagans. 1 Now the religion had become a major influence in the Empire.
Contributing to its status was of course what could only have been
interpreted as a miraculous survival rate amongst Christians. But even more
important to the religions subsequent dominance was the greatly increased
number of social bonds between Christian and heathen. Remembering the
effect of “the power of the person” in conversion, interaction between the
pagan who replaced his or her friends and family with Christian members
had now greatly increased. Survival rates, evidence of the benefits of
mutuality within the cult, and the increased social routes for conversion all
contributed to the acceleration of Christianity from minor cult to state
religion.
The Marines are famous for the cohesiveness of their units, too. They’re
also famous for their fiercely upheld and self-defining idea of “never leave
a fellow Marine behind.” In basic training, for

example: “We have a ritual in the Marine Corps early on that if a person
falls out of a run, you just circle until the guy captures his wind, and he
becomes ready to go back in. They don’t leave him behind,” Mike told me.
This is seared into every recruit so that it becomes a reflexive action. It has
to be because it’s a matter of life or death. Knowing that your fellow
members will always come back for you spurs members to greater feats. “In
combat, we are notoriously famous for never leaving a Marine on the
battlefield. We are the only service that does that. Others say they do, but
they don’t. But we will do whatever it takes to go back and carry our
wounded and dead off of a battlefield. That ethos, if you will, is bred in you
from the outset,” as Martin Steele told me.

It’s in the little things that this code is institutionalized. Jon, another marine,
echoed what Steele said: “He’s your brother [any other Marine]. And the
first few weeks show you that more than anything else. You have to work as
a team. If you are done with your gear, every candidate—if he’s worth
anything—would say Tm done, who needs help?’ ” Both of these examples
demonstrate the power of codified mutual responsibility as a community
builder and, in the case of Christianity, growth strategy.

Mutuality has been codified in the brand world too. A sales organization is
normally one that breeds competition and a culture of dog-eat-dog.
Especially if it is based on commission. And direct sales companies (the
Amways and Avons of this world) are normally characterized by relentless,
hardened, and competitive salespeople. Not so at Mary Kay. The culture of
support and “praise,” as the founder put it, is driven by her founding
principle of giving women the confidence and opportunity to reach their
potential, which they don’t find in the male-dominated world of business
(even nowadays). The binding group culture unified against the hostile
world out there fosters a compassion and ethos of support between sales
consultants rarely seen in other sales organizations

(not even at the highly principled P&G where I was a sales representative
for a while).
This is manifested in the doctrine handed down by the founder Mary Kay in
the “Mary Kay Values.” “Then and now, everything anyone in our sales
organization does to succeed is based upon helping others. As beauty
consultants we must help customers; and as sales directors we must help
our people to succeed. The company structure requires each person to help
others in order to climb the ladder of success. The individual who thinks,
‘Whats in it for me?’ will never make it in our company. We truly believe
that if you help enough other people get what they want—you will get what
you want! The people who are the most successful in our company are
those who have helped the most people grow.” 2

The mantra that “Teamwork allows each person to be valued and

appreciated by others” is palpably felt at such events as the Dallas Seminar,
where consultants come together to celebrate one another’s achievements.
The sense of mutual responsibility is manifested not just in the seminars run
by consultants that teach skills, but in one to one counseling that happens in
the bars and over coffee breaks between enthusiastic members.

BMW bikers have a strong and complex ideology and code of practice. It
has spontaneously institutionalized the idea of looking out for the safety of
others without any involvement by the corporation. They are gritty, ride-
obsessed warriors of the road. But when it comes to the safety of their
compatriots, they are as solicitous as nurses. Teddy, a shaved-head, mid-
thirties rider in the media business told me: “Riders exchange greetings to
each other when they are sitting at that rest stop having a cigarette.. .
admiring each other’s bike ... but when they leave they’ll all say ‘ride safe.’
Because they know there’s a shared risk.” He somewhat guiltily leaves his
wife and two young kids and joins a group of BMW riders at six on a
Sunday morning for a day ride in the country. (He

gets over the guilt quickly, however.) He explained that within this and any
group of BMW riders the best would always follow the last rider to ensure
that if anyone gets into trouble, someone can take care of him. Much like
the Marines. As Teddy said, “You know there’s always someone looking out
for your back.”

One unique manifestation of mutual responsibility is the BMW Owners

Anonymous book. It is compiled by the cult membership and updated
yearly. It lists the phone numbers of 12,000 riders across America and
identifies the help they can give to a stranded, injured, hungry, or lost
fellow rider. There are no names beside the numbers, just codes that
indicate what kind of support they can offer. If they have a garage for your
bike, if they have a pickup truck, if they have an extra room, it will be listed
whether you’re in Alabama or L.A. As Teddy puts it, “In contrast to the
Harley’s Owner’s Group which essentially takes people on rides, this is an
organization that says,‘I know you want to go on a ride, and I want to
support you on a ride.’ ”

Teddy contrasted the feeling he had within this group with his life outside:
“It really makes you feel a humanity that you don’t get in many areas
anymore. It’s not charity per se, but you want to help someone, and it’s a
nice feeling of being connected and being human that I don’t get much
living in New York City where everyone is competitive.”

The BMW Motorcycle cult is an example where the membership created its
own culture of reciprocity. The language, the book, the institution of
stopping to help another rider when “his helmet is off by the side of the
road” was created by the cult members as a manifestation of the bond they
felt through a common interest, common values about motorcycling, and a
fellowship with others who face the same risks of the road. The BMW
Motorcycle cult is a decentralized one, run essentially by the membership.
There is a sense that no one on the outside really knows what the pleasures

We’re in This Together

and risks of riding are and therefore only the membership really know what
it takes to belong and look after each other.

Mutualism is a crucial ingredient for strong communities. If you can

encourage it by legislating for it then do so. EBay has done so within its
ideology ... its business model would fail without the commitment from
buyer and seller to honor each others pledges. Mutualism is the glue of
community. Without it the group is fragile. With it the community is bound
by common interest and connections rooted in a shared sense of obligation.

c.
'

OceanofPDF.com
THIS IS WHAT WE BELIEVE
Because things are so crazy out there, people like to find out if they see the
world the same way as other people. People will believe in anything— from
a chocolate bar to a political view—if it makes them feel that they belong to
something bigger than themselves.

—Charlene, loyal Snapple drinker

P eople today pay for meaning more than they pray for it. In contemporary
culture we seek and find answers not only through traditional channels, like
religions (and new religions) but also in such places as rock groups,
sororities, companies, and brands. If were managing these kinds of
organizations then we have to accept that we’re providing venues for
making meaning, and that we must therefore devise belief systems,
worldviews, and ideologies to enable that fundamental process.

A cult, a company, a brand, a military organization, a fraternity, or a

political party must have a meaning system. Its part of what people buy
into, a unifying idea structure for the community. It’s part of what separates
them from others. It’s the system that

enables members to make sense of the world. And the craving need to make
meaning is part of the human condition. And again, if you don’t satisfy a
craving need with a commercial answer, you should be thrown into the
business hall of infamy.

Commercial enterprises need to provide meaning as much as individuals

want to buy it. It’s a craving need of the commercial world, too. They must
produce content beyond the product benefits. Products are cheap, and they
increasingly have little or no unique value of their own. Almost every
category has been—at least to some degree—commoditized. Many
completely. And even if something should flash in the pan—a breakthrough
in R&D, an FDA approval that recalibrates the market—it’s unlikely it will
mean anything for long. As Dave Barger says of the cheap prices, leather
seats, and satellite TV on jetBlue planes: “Our competitors will have those
in one or two years. It’s not what’s going to keep people coming back and
back again.”

Fast-followers circle like vultures on the doorsteps of eureka companies.

Product innovations are mimicked almost immediately by the competition,
usually cheaper. (Delta’s Song is a direct rip-off of jetBlue and launched
within three years of the original.) Providing a meaning system that people
can buy into is harder to imitate and easier to charge a premium for. No car
manufacturer has really matched Mercedes’ ability to confer a meaning
system of status and achievement to a global audience, despite Lexus and
others’ best efforts to imitate the products (and sell at a discount). Whether
it’s good news or not for cultural history, corporations are arguably the most
powerful meaning engines today. We spend the majority of our waking
hours at work within the confines of a corporate culture. We adopt the
language of our business and, often unconsciously, we measure ourselves
and our life’s value against the values and purposes of the corporate entity
that employs us.

The moment we leave the doors of our employers, we walk into a brand-
dominated milieu where Diesel Bags flash across the

screen on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and Austin Powers ostentatiously
drinks from a Heineken bottle. We can’t avoid brands. As social scientist
Alf Linderman observes in Rethinking Media, Religion and Culture, “The
mass media [has] become an important site for the development of social
meaning, an important point of reference as the individual develops
worldviews, and the values embedded in them.”

Today’s most successful brands don’t just provide marks of distinction

(identity) for products. Cult brands are beliefs. They have morals—embody
values. Cult brands stand up for things. They work hard; fight for what is
right. Cult brands supply our modern metaphysics, imbuing the world with
significance. We wear their meaning when we buy Benetton. We eat their
meaning when we spoon Ben & Jerry’s into our mouths. We get inside a
company’s worldview and fly their meaning when we step onto a Virgin
plane, we shop their meaning when we check out at Whole Foods. Driving
a Mini is becoming as political as fighting gas-guzzling SUVs via the Sierra
Club. Brands function as complete meaning systems. They are venues for
the consumer (and employee) to publicly enact a distinctive set of beliefs
and values.

If we are going to understand how to make an effective ideology, we should

examine why, how, what, and where people make meaning. What are the
essential requirements for a functioning belief system that you can apply to
your organization?

Let’s look at how Anita Roddick of The Body Shop did it. She created a
meaning-based brand. Scents, emulsions, and detergents were all things that
could be copied (and were). But what she did was build a worldwide empire
on a belief system. It was one that millions readily grasped and happily
spent billions buying into, from Japan to Jaipur, from Paris to Peoria. (She
killed one too, with some equally useful lessons for us to digest on the
construction of a meaning-based enterprise.)

BODY SHOP: A MEANING-DRIVEN BRAND

Anita Roddick founded the first Body Shop in the hopes that she would
provide just enough revenue to support herself and her two children while
her husband was taking a two-year horseback trip from Buenos Aires to
New York City. She did. And by tapping into the dynamic of cult brands—
by explicitly and consciously providing meaning for her customers—she
did a little bit more. At the height of its power in the 1980s, Roddicks Body
Shop rose to global conglomerate status—spanning forty-eight countries, at
one point, with more than 1,800 outlets in twelve time zones.

How did she do it?

As folklore has it, Roddick “decided to open a small shop in England

selling the kind of simple, natural skin and hair care preparations she had
seen being used by women of other cultures on her travels around the
world.” 1 Her patchouli-scented boutique in Brighton, on the south coast of
England, opened its dark green interior to longhaired customers in 1976.
That dark green continues to color Body Shop retail stores throughout the
world—only now it is a top-of-mind attribution cue for a globally
recognized brand. Twenty-some odd years ago it was “the only color that
would cover the damp patches” in boggy Brighton. 2

The original Body Shop offered one-stop shopping for a thriving local
hippie community. She started with fifteen hand-mixed concoctions, which
Roddick packaged in “five different sizes so at least it looked like I had at
least 100.” Roddick was a hippie herself, an authentic member of an
established community. Her business was her passion, a way for her to
publicly express her community’s values. She wanted her products to mean
something, to transcend the canonical messages of beauty and vanity
implicit in her competitor’s messages.

Roddick brewed up natural concoctions in her garage with “cosmetic

ingredients gathered during world treks as a young hippie.” Roddick hand-
labeled each reusable urine sample bottle, the myth goes, detailing the
origin of key ingredients. The Shop’s innovative antipackaging gave the
raw contents in every vessel an authentic connection to the values of an
identifiable meaning system. In a matter of months, peace-lovers
throughout Brighton had come to strongly identify with Roddick’s eco-
friendly free-spirit myths. And the products that carried them. So they kept
coming back to refill their bottles with belief and tea-tree soap—at a 15
percent discount for saving the planet.

The next decade was a whirlwind for The Body Shop. A second shop was
opened in Chichester within a year of the Brighton shop’s premiere. In two
years, Anita’s husband, Gordon, had structured a franchising scheme to
expand the original concept with a minimal capital investment. The first
international franchise opened in a Brussels kiosk in 1978. By 1979,
Sweden and Greece would be graced with their own Body Shop franchises.
“By appointing a head franchisee in each major national market, Roddick
was able to concentrate on the development of new product lines and the
company’s global vision, rather than worry about the complexities of
administration or personnel management.” 3

What Roddick was freed up to concentrate on really amounts to one thing

not two: The Body Shop’s new product lines were completely inseparable
from the company’s global vision. The product carries the message and then
becomes it. From Nepalese paper to Brazilian nut conditioner and all the
Indian foot rollers in between, Roddick’s personal stories provided the
meaning that made The Body Shop, The Body Shop. “From the very
beginning we wanted to be able to tell stories,” Roddick preaches, “We
wanted to be honest about the product we sold and the benefits they
promised. I... see storytelling as a major component of communication
within The Body Shop, both stories about products and stories about the

organization. Stories about how and where we find ingredients bring

meaning to our essentially meaningless products, while stories about the
company bind and preserve our history and our sense of common purpose.”
4

And it worked. Roddick created meaning in a category normally

condemned as superficial. She practically invented the idea of “natural” in
an industry that never imagined the body could be natural, that what you
put on it could have significance. “Body Shop products offer an unusual
alignment of physical hedonism with spiritual nobility,” writes Adam
Morgan in Eating the Big Fish , “You can sit in your bubble bath and feel as
clean inside as you do out. Classically, these two have been opposites: One
could either wave placards at a foreign consulate in the driving rain and do
the world good, or recline in a scented, foaming bath and do yourself good.
Roddick’s brilliance has been to reconcile these, to make virtue luxurious,
creating an issue brand that requires no social effort on the part of the
purchaser except to make the purchase, and then enjoy the effects.” 5

The Body Shop is a meaning-based brand. It encapsulated its core values in

what was called The Body Shop Charter, which took eighteen months to
complete, because true to its cultural ideology, it involved “grassroots
participation in management.” It would be as flaccid and useless as most
other corporation’s values statements if it had remained at that point.
Knowing the company was meaning based, that couldn’t be allowed to
happen, and values were socialized within the organization by “eight
working groups ... to make sure the they penetrated every nook and cranny
of the company’s operations.” 6

Meaning-based brands make money. Even ones that do not make profit
their sole focus (in this Henry Ford agreed with Anita Roddick): “The
business of business should not just be about money, it should be about
responsibility. It should be about public good, not private greed.” 7

The IPO was red-hot, a legend on London Stock Exchange in 1984, earning
BSI (Body Shop International) the nickname “the stock that defies gravity.”
The ticker displayed 95 pence at first call. It closed at 480 pence, making
Anita the fifth wealthiest woman in the United Kingdom in less than a day.
8

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WHAT IS REQUIRED OE A
BEL1EE SYSTEM?
We’ll look at this question through the eyes of Mark who was “definitely
searching for something. . . you know, like an answer to life’s questions:
‘what’s it all about? Who am I? Where am I going?’ ” He is an actor and he
felt that he was getting some of all of that from the Landmark Forum’s
worldview of “get control of your life and take charge of your destiny.”

He is a straightforward young man, in his late twenties, dressed in the

ubiquitous Dockers pants and an open-necked blue shirt. He’s had jobs in
the media, finance, and the odd role in plays, very Off-Broadway. From an
Italian-American family, he is a nononsense, average guy who aspires to the
American Dream of a good career, a bit of fame, and personal satisfaction.

There has been an enormous growth of the phenomenon known as Large

Group Awareness Training represented by such companies as Landmark
Forum. Its former iteration was EST, begun by the famous and infamous
Werner Erhard. He retired it in 1985 and started The Forum. One of several
cults categorized as examples of the human potential movement that started
in the 1970s, it focused on exploring and actualizing the self. It has gained
great traction in recent decades with professionals working within highly
demanding occupations—entrepreneurs, business managers, the fields of
acting, advertising, and marketing. EST and The Landmark Forum have had
over a million customers. The latter has forty-three offices worldwide, 420
staff members, and 7,500

THE CLILTING OF BRANDS

volunteers assisting the company. 9 And it has had to defend itself against
the suspicion that it is a cultlike organization. Mark said that one of the
teachers confessed “Yeah, we’re a cult. We’re a cult of the most happy
people you’ll see.”
Interpretation, Purpose, and Control
These are the building blocks of a strong meaning system. Interpreting the
chaos of the world into some kind of coherent story, creating a goal for
one’s existence, and a sense of control in the face of the apparent
randomness of life are the key roles of a highly functioning meaning
system.

Mark’s experience as an actor, where the whim of casting agents appeared

not just to govern his life, but symbolize on a broader scale all of its
frightening unpredictability drove him to find some master story. He needed
the structure and order communicated by a coherent doctrine. He needed
something that allowed the comforting perception of cause and effect. He
wanted something that gave him a larger goal than dealing with the day to
day.

The Forum provides its own interpretation of how life works, and should
work, as any good meaning system should: “People live their lives to avoid
repeating or re-experiencing the problems of their past. In doing so, they
put their past into their future, and it drives their lives. Our curriculum is
designed to allow people to overcome such barriers.” A sense of certainty
and the control that it gives is in the “promise of the Forum.” It will
“empower you in the face of the risk that life is.” 10 Students of these
programs are offered conceptual and practical frameworks that claim to
channel an individual’s energy into a more productive and happier life. Four
programs are included in what is called “The Curriculum for Living” (its
title has a reassuring ring of order) each at an escalating degree of
involvement and cost to the subject.

A colleague of Marks, also in the program, sought purpose: “I believe that

life without some other meaning than the day to day routine isn’t worth it,
or there’s just not enough lasting joy and meaning there ... but I believe
there’s got to be more and that’s what I was looking for.” He was expressing
a dawning horror of the potential inconsequence of a life lived
unconsciously from day to day. According to Mark, The Forum offered
purpose. It enabled him to have a more rewarding life by “taking more
responsibility over your personal life and future ... it was kind of
empowering.”

A cult’s, brand’s, or any organization’s meaning system should also paint a

picture of how the world should be. It should be aspirational, whether it’s a
world populated with self-actualized people or one that’s ecologically
stable.

If we return to The Body Shop for a moment, we can see some of this in
Roddick’s vision. In a corporate-run world rife with greed and dishonesty,
The Body Shop offered customers and employees alike a vision of how
things could be. The Body Shop’s founding interpretive principle was Total
Inegrity implemented all the way down the value chain. Honesty and
integrity in the way products are sourced, manufactured, marketed, sold,
and even consumed. The Body Shop, according to Roddick “is about total
honesty ... the precious First Amendment, the right to publicly debate the
performance of any publicly held corporation, and the obligation that we
who would measure social costs and benefits have to continue that process,
holding ourselves accountable to the standards we set for ourselves.” 11

Roddick’s vision gave millions of customers and employees an alternative

vocabulary through which to navigate the world. Body Shop employees
were not so much salespeople as evangelists spreading their company’s
purpose. Employees acted as animal-right and hemp activists, as
Greenpeace and fair-trade agitators, as communitywelfare organizers.
Roddick’s interpretation of the world allowed customers to feel that purpose
with every purchase: support whales,

marijuana, a clean ocean, and the third world for a few extra premium cents
or dollars with each exchange.

Interpretation, control, and purpose. Satisfy these basic requirements in a

worldview for your organization. It should sort and repaint the world into a
picture of how it should be (one without pollution and exploitation, or
without sin, or a society with equality for everyone, or one where being
different can change the world).

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WHERE DO YOU START?
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TWO WAYS TO E1ND MEANING
You’re faced with the task of creating a belief system for your cult or cult
brand. Where do you start? Maybe you are developing a cult from scratch.
Perhaps you’ve inherited one and are dissatisfied with the quality of the
system already in place. Where do you begin to find a motivating and
satisfying worldview?

It’s easier than you think. Some of the work will have already been done for
you. Some of the best belief systems, religious or commercial, build on
ideas already prevalent in the culture. In fact, there are very few entirely
new theologies. Most build on prevailing worldviews, adding some new
theology here and there to create enough difference from their
surroundings.

Christianity was built upon Judaism; Mormonism was built upon

Christianity. Each added their unique ideas to a base of existing culturally
acceptable dogma. As such, their ideology was more able to be bought by
that culture, but it was different enough to be distinguishable from it.

Another source of an ideology is to take existing beliefs within the

community that might have already formed around your brand or cult and
simply articulate them (as Harley-Davidson did). We

will examine an extremely effective technique used to determine what those

beliefs are and how to give them voice. First, some examples of brand cults
that took existing cultural beliefs, even subcultural beliefs, and made
meaning-driven businesses out of them.

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Surf and Steal
The easiest way to get a meaning system for your brand is to tack it onto an
existing community’s value system. Your brand or cult should become a
public symbol for the meaning of this group. They should feel that it stands
for them. We touched on how Anita Roddick did it for the hippies she lived
with in Brighton. She wrote a master story that gave them a voice. Anita
found meaning, but didn’t invent it.

Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield started a “values-led business” (a term they
borrowed from Anita Roddick). Their product, ice cream, was packaged
with the same kind of political agenda that appealed to the community
Roddick found milling around Brighton.

Ben & Jerry’s maintained three integral missions: high-quality product, fair
profit, and community service. The last of these, serving a community,
entails a political agenda—which targets a community—the anticorporate
left. As such, the milk used to make the ice cream comes from local
(Vermont) dairy farms (at a higher price than other milk); the brownies for
Chocolate Fudge Brownie were produced by a bakery that trains
economically disenfranchised people and reformed criminals; the nuts for
Rainforest Crunch come from local Brazilians in an effort to maintain the
rainforest via its economic viability.

While Ben & Jerry’s ice cream enjoys great loyalty and can demand a
premium, it’s the political meaning that moves the brand. “Consumers are
accustomed to buying products despite how they feel about the companies
that sell them. But a values-led company

earns the kind of customer loyalty most corporations only dream of—
because it appeals to its customers on the basis of more than a product. It
offers them a way to connect with kindred spirits, to express their most
deeply held values when they spend their money. Unlike most commercial
transactions, buying a product from a company you believe in transcends
the purchase. Our customers don’t like just our ice cream—they like what
our company stands for.”

As Ben & Jerry’s actively promote this meaning, their brand carries these
connotations as well. A Peace Pop somehow buys you peace. Where other
companies keep their values and politics hidden from consumers, Ben &
Jerry’s stances are overt. They act as a flagstaff for a uniquely observable
community. This strategy, while alienating some, serves to attract many
more strongly. Ben and Jerry surfed on existing communities’ belief
systems and appropriated them. In the process they appropriated the loyalty
of those communities.

Observe and Give Voice

Flavored sugar water. Can something as inert and banal as a soft drink have
the capacity to carry meaning? Can it create a worldview in which a person
can place him or herself and gain a sense of their own identity? Can
communities form around such a twodimensional product? At face value,
soft drinks do not have the depth of product interaction and complexity as,
say, a motorbike or computer within which such existential needs might be
played out. They are packaged goods sold for a few dollars yielding an
experience of moments.

To try and elicit any meaning that drinkers may attach to their purchases
Merkley and Partners conducted what they call Conflict Analysis research.
This research starts from the assumption that

beliefs can run deep and may not be easily surfaced by normal focus group
research that generally asks such banal questions as “How do you feel about
this brand?” In order to force individuals to articulate what they feel deep
down, they’re put into a position where they are under attack. They are
impelled to defend what they believe. In this situation they can become
amazingly articulate, even about sugar water.

In Conflict Analysis, two groups are run simultaneously in adjacent rooms.

Each group in this case represented drinkers recruited on the basis of
frequency of consumption. The brands that they said they preferred the
most were Snapple, SoBe, and Arizona Rx.
Each group eventually learned that there was another next door that drank a
different beverage from their own. The group meetings were long: three
hours (sometimes longer at the respondents’ request). They were told that
after the first hour-and-a-half, they would have to write a manifesto for their
group, and present that declaration in a Death Match (named after the
popular MTV animated show where celebrities fight to the finish) to the
group next door. They would have to defend their manifestos against attack
from members of a competitive brand community.

During the first half of the session they were given various exercises to help
them articulate any potential commonalities of the group beyond their soft
drink purchase habits and see whether there was any alignment between the
group values and those of the brand. The groups were very lightly
moderated (there was no discussion guide). The moderator was there simply
to explain the exercises and goad them into beating the group next door.

The idea was to find out if the respondents could discover the hidden
meaning behind their solidarity and beyond their purchase habits. Could the
brand hold anf higher meaning for them other than it “tastes great”? How
would the group dynamics play out in ninety minutes? Would the group
form into a cohesive community, would they be able to articulate what they
believed, or would

everyone splinter off into their individual interests or solitary boredom?

Would the respondents not play the game, would they think it a silly
exercise?

In the end the manifestos clearly articulated a well-differentiated worldview

for the brands. For example, the SoBe drinkers described a value system of
tolerance and open-mindedness. For them the brand (and themselves) could
juggle an apparent paradox of high energy with Zenlike meditation. One
young DJ from Seattle said SoBe’s belief system was somewhere between
“Yoko Ono and snowboarding.” SoBeings (their self-description) felt no
pressure to conform to one idea of themselves or another: they could safely
“meditate and play extreme sports.” Their manifesto read:

Life is too short to be narrow-minded.

Not limit ourselves to any one reality.

Adventure, spontaneity and fun.

Embrace all cultures and all living things and all people. Energize the body,
uplift the spirit and enlighten the mind.

Snapple drinkers thought SoBe advocates had been hoodwinked, that they
were the unconscious and foolish victims of marketing. Do they really think
the drink makes them freer? In a complex relationship between the brand’s
image of authenticity and their own, Snapple drinkers knew they were
being sold to by marketers and because they knew, that made it all right.

We the drinkers of Snapple Elements declare ourselves to be diverse

individuals, bamboozled by the man and aware of it.

Arizona drinkers in all of the groups saw themselves as pragmatic and self-
aware (everyone else thought they were a little pe

This Is What We Believe

dantic), especially when it came to what they put in their bodies. They took
the health claims on the bottles branded Rx seriously, examining and
choosing them for their desired effect. Their manifesto read:

Were healthy and active... educated especially on health issues ... we think
about our actions before we do them.

We know what we need and don’t need ... but were responsible for what we
put in our bodies.

The definition of the brands and the drinkers’ group identity were well
developed. Respondents gave clear articulations of their brand’s meaning
system, especially when their manifestos came under attack. Some
manifestos were even written in the form of the Declaration of
Independence.

This technique flushes out any meaning that may be lurking unconsciously
within buyers of the brand. To be sure, the Snapple drinkers’ alignment with
the idea of authenticity is likely to have been informed by the advertising
that communicated the product’s realness. But the other two brands offered
little marketing communication from which they could have taken a lead.
The Conflict Analysis methodology works especially well in parity
categories. The meaning-based differences may not be readily apparent and
are unlikely to be mined by conventional focus group research. It’s a lab-
based technique to observe community creation and belief articulation in
real time (respondents often make arrangements to meet each other after the
group, although previous to the session they were complete strangers) and
from which you could get a head start in creating your brand’s or cult’s
belief system.

Cults and cult brands must have meaning systems. For brands, they can be
the source of differentiation, and in turn an opportunity to

THE CUTTING OF BRANDS

charge a premium without relying on the vicissitudes of product superiority.

You can pluck meaning systems from the culture around you and adapt
them for your own organization. You can surf on and steal existing beliefs
held by various subcultures and appropriate those groups. Or you can give
voice to a buried belief system within existing members of your
community. Meaning systems should provide interpretation, give purpose,
and create a sense of control or certainty.

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SYMBOLISM
B rands are symbols. We live in a world dominated by commercial icons,
total design initiatives, and completely integrated marketing efforts, where
products are consumed less for what they are (materially) and more for
what they represent (spiritually, or at least socially). We operate in a
symbolic economy. It’s one where crass products and their meaningless
material benefits can be transformed into living vessels of meaning.

What are symbols and why are they so important? Symbols literally make
meaning possible; they allow a given worldview to come alive in any and in
every community. Symbols are the very stuff of culture, whether they are
written, verbal, aural, or pictorial. They are the diverse media by which
humans actively and outwardly communicate, celebrate, and protect their
beliefs and values. Communities make meaning through public, symbolic
expression: They sing it. Dance it. Burn it. Eat it. Wear it. Tattoo it on their
face, and shave on their heads. “The unity of a group, like all its cultural
values, must find symbolic expression,” writes sociologist R. M.
Maclver,“the symbol is at once a... means of communication and a common
ground of understanding. All communication whether

through language or other means, makes use of symbols. Society could

scarcely exist without them.” 1

Symbols aren’t just simple one-off icons—the cross, the star, the big-bellied
Buddha. They’re more like a network of signs that tie together an entire set
of meaning. Clothes can be symbolic, so can music, food, and behaviors.
Historically, these symbolic systems have been generated by cults and
religions. From the first human societies onward, cults actively and
consciously created distinct cultures through the orchestrated and integrated
use of symbolic codes.

Beliefs are well and good in theory—scriptural truths, mission statements,

enduring values and beliefs. In the end, however, ideas fade and only action
remains. We are what we do, not what we think. For example, for Hare
Krishnas, abstaining from alcohol and drugs, gambling, illicit sexual
behaviors, and the eating of meat, fish, or eggs aren’t just pie-in-the-sky
moral dictates from a fivethousand-year-old God. They’re symbolic
behaviors, lived day in and day out by over tens of thousands of Krishna
devotees worldwide. Chanting, singing, dressing, bathing, shaving,
everything a Krishna does and says, everything he touches, wears, eats, or
looks at is strictly designed to remind and inspire the devotee’s loyalty to
Krishna-consciousness. Those who fully buy into the Krishna way become
totally saturated with symbols of the choice they’ve made.

Up until the 1960s, cults like the Hare Krishnas and established religions
like Catholicism provided the lion’s share of symbols and cultures for
communities around the world. The fact that brands, and specifically cult-
brands supply symbolic meaning to a vast majority of today’s global
citizens is a relatively late, although extremely important, historical
development. Over the last hundred or so years, brands more or less
functioned as they did from their inception. Marks of authenticity for
services and goods. Trademarks for corporate property. Certainly not as
symbolic systems for culture. What happened? It’s important to answer that
question

if we want to truly exploit the opportunity it presents to us as marketers,

communication companies, and commercial designers of all sorts.

The American Marketing Association defines the word “brand” as “a name,

term, symbol, or design or a combination of these, which is intended to
identify goods or services of one seller or group of sellers and to
differentiate them from those of competitors.” 2

The AMA’s definition of a brand is roughly one hundred or so years too old.
Its origins reach back to beer and life in British pubs. Up until the middle of
the nineteenth century, beer drinkers in England had been accustomed to
getting their ale from their own local brewery. The Industrial Revolution
changed all that: technology caused products to proliferate, and the railroad
increased the range of distribution for those products. Meaning more
products everywhere. These products had no local connection to consumers.
There was no innkeeper to complain to if the beer was soapy, and no way of
ensuring in the traditional manner (watching the man you trust brew your
beer) that this was the same delicious brew that youd enjoyed for years.

Breweries, isolated from their drinkers, began to mark their products with a
signature of “origin” and “authenticity” in an attempt to make their pint
special, local, and knowable. 3 In 1875, the United Kingdom passed the
first TradeMark Bill, a piece of legislation designed to protect “genuine”
symbols of authenticity The Bass Red Triangle registered itself that same
year, becoming, for all intents and purposes, the first symbol to legally
signify a products legitimacy in an increasingly impersonal world. The first
brand.

A brand still functions as a symbol of authenticity and legitimacy just as it

did in height of the Industrial Revolution. However, things have
revolutionized even more since the time steam engines hauled beer and a
consumer could only choose from four soaps, two or three car brands, and
several different beers. Following the Second World War, and particularly
around the 1960s, historical

patterns of consumption changed irrevocably. For the first time in American

economic history, supply outstripped demand.

Oscar winning producer and one time copywriter, Lord David Putnam, put
it like this: “When I started my career in 1958, the components of
advertising were really very simple, very unsophisticated— a product, a
logo, a price, a stock list, and a claim. Things had changed by the mid-
sixties. I guess it was around then that ads began to set out to convince
human beings that their ‘lifestyle’ required certain products which they’d
possibly never heard of, let alone thought about, and that, for the most part,
they almost certainly didn’t need. This was the beginning of what I’d now
term ‘consumer advertising,’ and it involved a completely different
approach.” 4

One of the most famous symbols in the commercial world that referenced a
whole lifestyle was started with a campaign launched in 1959 by a now
famous Madison Avenue shop called Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB). The
business objective seems unbelievable in retrospect. Turn a technically
outdated, air-cooled, rear-engined Nazi car into a viable competitor in a
market where consumers measured satisfaction by the size of a tail fin and
the yardage of chrome.

DDB’s Volkswagen Beetle campaign changed the game. Bill Bernbach

eschewed obvious product-inspired marketing and instead turned to the
power of social psychology and humor. Bernbach transformed what
appeared to be a serious material disadvantage (the car’s seemingly puny
stature and lack of gizmos) into a symbol of an alternative American
lifestyle. He told the disaffected and the disenchanted that it was okay to
“Think Small.” “By stressing humor, irony, truth, and simplicity, the ad
agency targeted an informal coalition of environmentalists, ecologists,
intellectuals, radicals, rebels, and free thinkers that DeSoto, Hudson,
Packard, and Edsel had never imagined existed.” 5

Four decades later, in a research facility in the advertising capi

tal of the world I’m listening to a professor, a house painter, a social worker,
and third grade teacher named Simone play back Bernbach’s marketing
strategy almost exactly. It was as if it was some kind of grassroots
movement they had invented themselves. The irony here is startling and
important. It speaks to the degree that cult brand symbols can be perfectly
embedded into the “self” of a community. “It was ours. When we saw
someone else driving a VW, we knew what they stood for. And when you
saw one of the tanks they called Cadillacs, you knew who was probably
driving that car, and what they stood for.”

From the Bernbach era onward, commercial messaging pressure has grown
at an ungodly rate, creating a consumer culture arguably more Catholic than
the symbolical world of organized religion (a cultural force uncontested for
millennia). As the economy shifts from supply-side to demand-side, so too
does the social importance of the brand. A mere half a century ago, it was
the producer that the brand legitimized—the origin and authenticity of the
product. Today a brand legitimizes the consumer—the individual’s and
community’s origin and authenticity. A brand is no longer a flat sign for
corporate identification, a two-dimensional logo plastered on the outside of
a bottle. Brands are distinctive markers of human identity. They have
become so important as cultural representations that people even brand
them on their own body much as our predecessors tattooed symbols of
social spiritual status. Why? Lee Clow, Chairman of TBWA Worldwide and
creative developer of Apple’s “Think Different” campaign explains:

“Brands aren’t just a way of remembering what you want to buy any more.
They’ve become part of the fabric of our society. Brands are part of our
system of ordering things—they even create context about who we are and
how we live... . They articulate who you are and what your values are.” 6

Of course the original Beetle is a primitive vehicle of meaning when

compared to the integrated symbolic systems companies are

now devising for their brands. The market is more complicated and
crowded than it was a half-decade ago, and its customers are more symbol-
literate. Companies must offer more than a stand-alone product that
conveys meaning like some solitary crucifix. Cultbrand marketers know
that they must colonize every single moment of everyday life. Their mission
is to brand a living experience, to create a unified meaning system that
transforms every possible touch-point between the company and the
customer into symbol that refers back to a single idea or belief. Like a Hare
Krishna temple.

On a crisp blue day in the early summer months of 2003, I walked past the
Apple store on Prince Street in New York and saw a crowd of people
spilling onto the street. It must be a fantastic sale, I thought, and eased my
way in. In the store hundreds of faces were uplifted in rapture. Not at the
prospect of a good deal, (despite being New Yorkers) they were actually
looking at a gigantic screen. On it Steve Jobs was being beamed live
delivering a sermon about his newest products, especially the G5, and how
it fitted into the Macintosh family. Some people were transcribing his words
in their BlackBerrys and e-mailing their friends as he spoke. Others just
watched and listened, engrossed. You may think these were sad little geeks.
They weren’t. In the congregation was a mixture of people from the Tri-
State area, ranging from older New York women in black with expensive
haircuts to children, scrubbed executives, and the odd hippie.

The Prince Street venue is a temple of symbolic integration not unlike the
amazing storefront of the Krishna Ashram on the Bowery not far away.
Every sign and signal, every product and employee in the “store” is
integrated into the larger system of Apple symbolism.

As you enter, you are faced with a stunning but simple glass staircase. On
the first floor there are side chapels dedicated to the worship of digital
photography, MP3s, and sleek laptops. Upstairs

is the confessional—the Apple bar—where past mistakes are corrected and

absolved on software misuse and hardware abuse. Worshippers’ doubts are
heard and some truths and answers are given here too. Along the galleries
are the ecclesiastical libraries of software, and the sacred texts—the
manuals and user guides. And everywhere, ministering quietly and
reverentially, are the black clad acolytes, always on hand to explain the
doctrine of loading software or give instruction on downloading music. At
the top of the stairs you enter an inner sanctum. Congregants quietly gather
there on slick pews facing a pulpit to the left of a giant flat screen exploding
with color and life. The pastor of the day (the sermons are advertised on
handouts given to you as you leave the store) will preach on the doctrine of
OS X, the uses of Adobe Photoshop, the salvation of FinalCut.

Off to the right of the entrance is the altar, the last stop for a member’s hour
of supplication. A long smooth plinth of light colored wood, cash registers
accept offerings from the dedicated, mediated by the smiling deacons.

The importance of Prince Street is that it is a representation, an experiential

nexus of the corporation’s, and community’s beliefs— not just a playground
or entertainment complex. It’s a Mecca for customers to bathe in a
completely integrated symbolic world. It’s just one part of Apple’s highly
integrated symbolic system for a distinct community. What makes the iPod
so successful, for instance, isn’t just the way it perfectly fits into OS X, or
into iTunes. It’s how the sleek instrument intuitively plugs into a
community’s distinct meaning system and corollary symbolic code (the
intuitive simplicity, the love of beauty, and the belief in creative power).
The iPod, the iMac, iBook, all work together seamlessly with the
advertising, the events, the Web site, and the temple on Prince Street. That
is how a cult-brand works.
For the community, the symbolic system is a binding system. It beacons a
group identity through a shared difference. Patrick put it

this way: When you see a Mac, he said, “right away you get the image of
the whole eccentric, outside-of-the-norm thing . . . things a lot of Mac users
pride themselves on. And I think the fact the Mac looks so different, its kind
of attention grabbing, it’s like look at this. This is not a PC. This is not a
beige box, this is something special, this is something different from the
norm.’ ”

People can be part of the symbolic structure of the brand too. Like Christ,
Mohammed, or Buddha, individuals can be elevated to representational
status in the brand world as much as the religious. In a society driven by
brand symbols it would indeed be strange for there to be no commercial
messiahs fulfilling the role of meaningvessels. I asked a group of sane,
stable, very self-aware Apple users what Steve Jobs represents. Clay
claimed that “it all kind of emanates from one person . . . the whole kind of
mythology and lifestyle.”

How important a symbol is Jobs? Clearly in Clay’s mind, a significant one,

but also in his heart too. I asked what would happen if Jobs got knocked
over by a bus. “I’d be massively . . . not hurt, but I’d be like worried ... I
don’t know the exact emotion I’d feel . . . whatever it was, it would be
intense. On some level it would be like losing someone you would
personally know. I would be definitely upset.”

Greg nodded and said: “I think I’d feel the same way. I mean it’s strange
how you’d be emotionally affected. He’s like the human symbol of the
company. When you think of Apple as a person, you think of Steve Jobs.
Whether you like him or not, he’s a big part of its identity.”

There are, of course, distinct dangers to including real people in the

symbolic system. For example, they might get run over by a bus. Living
symbols have the advantage of being objects with which a membership can
readily identify simply by virtue of being human, albeit elevated to
demigod status. But like the fallible gods of the Ancient world, human
symbols can trip, and bring your
Symbolism

brand-meaning down with them (as I write Martha Stewarts dilemma is also
creating one for her brand).

There are also dangers in creating a symbolic system that is, well, symbolic
of nothing. Aesthetics are not enough. Icons are only icons because they
communicate a world of meaning to the community that honors them. In an
artful celebration of two the brands’ similar aesthetics, VW has recently
aired a beautifully constructed commercial advertising a free iPod with a
Beetle, ending with the line “Pods Unite.” I like the commercial. The
camera almost caresses the smooth rounded lines of the products to, as
always for both brands, a cool piece of music.

But this would have been so much more if both brands had equal status as
cult brands. I would argue that VW’s reincarnation in the new Beetle is not
a cult-brand. While the body of the car is as distinctive as it ever was,
material differences (no matter how extreme) do not a cult brand make. The
New Bug does not mean anything. Its strange, space like features don’t
represent any group’s belief, unlike its meaning-rich predecessor. Unless
material differences explicitly symbolize a difference in values and beliefs,
then all you’ve got is an interesting shaped product. Instead of a
commercial trumpeting the unification of two community’s parallel belief
systems in a powerful assault against the mainstream, “Pods Unite” is a sort
of a “yeah we look alike, cool isn’t it?” announcement.

Get over your products. Get an integrated symbolic system. Get over the
plastic, the wires, the fillers, and the ingredients. (Products are price of
entry.) Think about the symbol system you’re making possible instead—
that is where you’ll find true and lasting differentiation. What kind of
environment are you providing that will allow your customers a place to
commune with their fellow believers and the distinct symbols of their
belief? What Temple to what god are you creating?

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COMMITMENT IS A TWO-WAY
STREET
ults define the idea of commitment in the popular mind.

V— Cult members are perceived to be devoted beyond any social norm.

Their extremism triggers wonder in many, repellence in others, and envy in
those who want to elicit similar devotion to their own organizations.

Contrary to most popular assumptions, cult members’ commitment may be

fierce, but it is not blind. At the end of the day, their attachment is the
function of an exchange. For all of the benefits of belonging that we’ve
covered in this book—a community, the ability to make meaning, self-
actualization—the member has paid a price. The opportunity cost of
belonging to a cult is high. Time, emotion, money, careers, respect, and
often family and relationships have been surrendered to the organization. If
that committment is not matched by an equivalent reward, including the
feeling that the leadership is as committed and has paid an equal price, then
the results can be disastrous for the cult.

This concept of “the trade of commitment” is equally true in the world of

business. For cultlike devotion to a brand, there must be a corresponding
investment from the company. Sean, an impecunious student felt committed
enough to his brand to “feel almost

personally responsible for the well being of the Mother Company. I find
with Apple . . . I’m much more prone to buy directly from Apple rather than
through a reseller. Just because you want . . . you want Apple to get
everything . . . it’s like, take my money.”

He is a marketer’s dream.
But this immoderate devotion can be spoiled. Anger a committed devotee
and you have a brand terrorist on your hands: Sean continued: “We talked
about people being really interested in the well-being of Apple. I think
there’s an opposite direction to that. . . when Apple does something really
stupid or really obnoxious or they make some big mistake. I’ve seen people
get personally offended by it, like they feel betrayed somehow or insulted
that Apple has done this.”

The rewards of creating cultlike devotion are high. But so are the potential
dangers. There must be mutual investment present in the high stakes of a
cult relationship.

We will now look at three dramatic examples of betrayal, one within a

classic cult and the other two within famous mass cult brands. In the first
two examples the betrayal was a surprisingly frequent and nearly always
catastrophic mistake made by the leadership. They lied to their followers. In
these examples the community’s faith in the truth of the cult’s meaning
system was abused by the actions of the leadership. They didn’t walk the
talk. In the third, the company—Apple—managed to recommit itself to its
customers and thus save its brand. During the dark days prior to the
resurrection of Steve Jobs, the loyalty of the Apple community was
gradually worn down by years of neglect and abuse. We’ll look at this less
startling, but equally damaging dereliction of duty to the cult membership.
And we’ll also examine what was done to remedy the problem.

In the process of examining these examples, we’ll also note how people
become committed (beyond the core attractions already

covered—belonging, meaning, etc.). We’ll look at how important it is to

match the cost of staying and to make the cost of leaving high.

An Abuse of Commitment
“I remember my mom messed up, like crying and trying to explain it to me .
. . like it was a really big thing . .. the pain of leaving like that. It was
horrible.” Bella was fifteen years old when she was wrenched from the life
she had known since the age of three. She, her mother, and stepfather were
leaving the Fellowship of Friends, a cult that had as many as three thousand
members worldwide, whose population lives in houses in groups of twelve
or fifteen in the best neighborhoods (you might be living on the same street
as one right now). Bella is now an actress and singer living in New York.
She has a pixieish beauty, with a transfixing stare. Her life up to that day
had been totally dominated by the Fourth Way, a philosophy taught and
applied by the charismatic, and now disgraced leader, Robert Earl Burton.

The output of the largest commune of the cult, a place called Apollo, is a
famed wine that is served in the best restaurants in the world (Ronald
Reagan is known to be partial to it). The product is symbolic of the ethos of
the cult. Like The Work, the Fellowship follows the teachings of Gurdjieff
and Ouspensky, who taught that individuals must jolt themselves out of the
waking sleep of everyday existence to elevate themselves to a higher
consciousness. The Fellowships interpretation of this often meant
consuming the best of everything in order to rise above the everyday.

Bella described how, when h^r parents were running the cult’s house in
Forest Hills, New York (an upscale suburb), they would attend the opera
and plays, and once a month go to a five-star restaurant. Burton preached
that you must constantly disrupt normality

into a state of “self-remembering,” that you must always be conscious of

the moment. Bella related a surreal and humorous attempt to stimulate her
consciousness when, in a swanky restaurant, her mother Margot took off
her shoe and put it on top of her head so that her daughter would “always
remember this moment.” She did. Bella explained the philosophy as
follows. “There are four states of consciousness. The first is when you’re
asleep. The second is when you’re waking sleep’ [the state most
nonmembers are in], the third is when you are really awake when you are
living in the moment. The fourth is when you’re in total higher
consciousness, awake, awake.”

But being stimulated to the third or fourth state was not always done in so
charming a manner as the shoe story, or by consuming the best of
everything. Burton, following in the footsteps of Gurdjieff, “liked to make
things hard for people.” He would tell members to dig a hole and then fill it
in again, a process called “friction.” The demands went further, ranging in
edicts from forbidding people to say the word “I” to forbidding them to
have children.

Margot, whom I also interviewed, had to make a similar sacrifice. She and
her husband were relatively early recruits to The Fellowship. When they
arrived at Renaissance (the former name for Apollo) in the hills of Northern
California, it was nothing but a few huts. They slept in sleeping bags on the
floor and built the place by hand. They rose up the hierarchy and were
commissioned to start and run branch communes in major cities in the
United States. That meant that every time Burton commanded, they had to
resign whatever jobs they had outside the commune, uproot, and start over.

She bitterly regrets it now, but when they were about to run the Miami
center, and Margot worried about uprooting her daughter, Burton told her
“if you put your work and yourself first, your daughter will learn from that,
and she will value that also for herself.” He instructed Margot to send Bella
away to her grandparents and she acquiesed.

According to Margot she and her husband “were never coerced to stay,”
even though they paid high financial as well as emotional prices. All
members had to tithe 10 percent of their wealth to the cult and some people
had to do two jobs to meet some of the additional financial demands that
Burton made. Why did they do it? When the times were good, they had
“emotional bonds that were deep and strong” with “wonderful people.”
They could go virtually anywhere in the world and stay at one of the cults
houses where “we welcomed one another ... we just had the comfort that the
other people understood that we were all working on the same thing”: the
Fourth Way, a path to enlightenment and self-fulfillment.

But they eventually realized that their own commitment to the cult’s way of
life and philosophy was not matched by their leader s. Burton had got a
good deal out of the cult. In the spirit of being stimulated by the best things
of life, he drank the best wines, ate the best food, flew on Concorde to visit
his schools in Europe, and surrounded himself, and the rest of the
commune, with sculptures and paintings worth millions. While he was
dressed in the best clothes, many followers could not afford dental work.
The leeway that the cult members had been giving Burton was demolished
by a revelation triggered by a sex scandal. As Bella put it “it turned out that
he was taking advantage of a lot of people. He was accused of socking
away a lot of the contributions made by his followers.” He had issued an
order that “no-one was to be gay, homosexuality was bad and that gay
students had to stop immediately.” But at the same time “he used his
power” to “take advantage of men . .. but straight men ... it messed a lot of
people up.” Some of these people left the cult and sued him, attracting
much negative publicity.

Why did Margot and her family not leave earlier? She was aware of the
sacrifices she was making; yet it took evidence of betrayal to weaken her
devotion and leave. “I guess it was like, you know, the story of the frog in
warm water,” she said. If you put a frog into a pot

THE CLILTING OF BRANDS

of boiling water it will leap out immediately. However, if you put a frog
into a pot of cold water and gradually heat it up, it will stay there until it
dies unaware of the slowly changing circumstances.

The cost of leaving for a cult member is normally very high. Margot’s
family had given up much in terms of finance, emotions, and time. To walk
away from such an investment is hard. “We’ve sacrificed all that, and with
nothing to show for it.” 1

They would also be leaving members of a community that had essentially

become their family. And the separation would be absolute. Burton had
issued an edict that those who remained would have no contact with those
who left. Margot and her family knew that they would be estranged in just
the same way as they had cut off others who had chosen to leave. As Bella
remembers, “We would be walking around Manhattan and she [her mother]
would see somebody she knew and had left and she wouldn’t be able to talk
to them. She would just look through them. It was against the rules. It was a
really big thing.”

Some religions threaten backsliders with hell or exile. So do some

commercial organizations with strong belonging cultures. Procter and
Gamble threatened that I would never be able to come back if I resigned.
And I would want to come back, because “out there” was mediocrity, “in
here” was the best you can get. The threat of being ostracized, of settling for
second best, even damnation if you leave is common technique of member
retention.

In strong commitment organizations there is a cost to leaving as much as

there is a cost to staying. An organization needs to ensure that the reward
for staying is perceived to be equivalent to the cost.

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The Cost of Commitment Is
Initially Low
How do people become committed in the first place? They don’t suddenly
wake up one day and say “I’m going to give up my house,

my family and my career for this organization that I heard about just
yesterday.” Do they?

It’s all about the frog in warm water. Bellas family’s entry process was
gradual and demanded small sacrifices. It cost only thirty dollars per couple
when they joined, but grew in increments until “we spent enormous
amounts of money.” Time and emotional commitment were also small to
begin with. In the early stages, interested individuals attended classes on
Ouspenky’s and Gurdjieff’s teachings at schools. They “didn’t feel as if
they had to make a total commitment. If you like the first classes you could
become more committed if you wanted to.” Of course, as they became
gradually more involved they formed friendships with other members. The
“Power of the Person” took over and by the time a significant commitment
was made, it was to new friends and “family’’ not just an organization.

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The Cost of Lying
Let’s go back to The Body Shop. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s,
business schools and periodicals across the nation touted the wild success of
The Body Shop, praising Anita Roddick’s unorthodox beliefs about
business and ethics, her commitment to principles that transcend the
ordinary profit-motives of large corporations. Roughly ten years later—ten
years after Anita Roddick became an overnight millionaire, ten years after
The Body Shop climbed to the red-hot top of the London Stock Exchange
—it all came crumbling down. In 1994, a relatively unknown freelance
writer named John Entine wrote an article for a niche magazine called
Business Ethics 2 (incidentally one of Roddick’s favorites, given its focus
on corporate social responsibility). Point by point, the article methodically
laid out a long and winding trail of lies, inconsistencies, and broken
commitments, a Body Shop based on profits, not principles.

Entine blew up the whole founding mythology of the Shop— wild hippie
Anita starting up on a shoestring with the odd ingredients she picked up on
exotic, third world travel. In truth, according to Entine, Roddick never
scoured the world for natural scents and emollients—she appropriated the
idea wholesale from a family friend who ran a dingy boutique she visited in
San Francisco circa 1970. It was called The Body Shop (she bought the
rights to the name from her friend later), and it sold hand-labeled bottles
filled with cosmetics and natural lotions from around the world.
“Comparisons of the brochures of the American original and Roddicks
copycat store are telling,” wrote Entine. “Four O’clock Astringent Lotion
morphed into Five O’clock Astringent Lotion. Korean Washing Grains,
uniquely developed by the women who sewed kimonos for the Americans,
became Japanese Washing Grains . . . Roddick copied product descriptions
word-for-word, including grammatical errors.”

And that’s just the beginning. Roddick built an entire empire on this
original lie, a radical commitment to grassroots beauty and business that,
with each new initiative, with each new product, amassed incredible loyalty
for her brand, but, according to her critics, amounted to little more than a
marketing ploy. Roddick’s central claim was about her products. (“We can’t
and shouldn’t be grouped together with the myriad of other companies
crying‘natural!’ ” Roddick preached, “Because as you probably know,
we’re not like other companies.”) Totally natural and acquired responsibly
from indigenous sources: these powerful, differentiating assertions,
according to Entine and now many former Body Shop customers, were total
fabrications.

From opening day in 1976, The Body Shop’s unique bottles were filled with
nonrenewable petrochemical-based ingredients like mineral oil, petrolatum,
carbomers, and isopropyl mysristate. “Those ingredients are still in today’s
products. ... As the company evolved from a hippie storefront in Brighton
into a growing English con

cern and finally into an international cosmetic company .. . synthetic

ingredients were introduced as preservatives to provide long-term stability
of its products. Roddick filled her products with bright dyes and artificial
fragrances. Over time, the brightly colored, heavily fragranced lotion
became as much a part of the company’s trademark as its natural
reputation,” Entine wrote.

And just where did these chemicals come from? In the Reaganera 1980s
when other corporations were raping the globe for resources, Roddick
differentiated her company by banging the pulpit for fair trade, good global
citizenry, and corporate social responsibility. “Consumers are increasingly
aware that their purchases are moral choice,” Roddick explains in her
Manifesto-Autobiography Business as Unusual, “The Body Shop believes
that trading should be an ethical act. Fair trade is absolutely central to us. It
means we have to avoid the direct exploitation of humans and animals and
avoid any negative impact on their habitats. And knowing that
environments, and the people in them, are not exploited means we can give
consumers the information to choose more responsibly.”

In a text he developed to defend himself against Body Shop’s legal

vengeance, Entine spells out about a half-a-dozen bogus fair trade
initiatives, rife with exploitation and hypocrisy. 3 Footsie-rollers made in an
Indian orphanage turned sweatshop. Rainforest bath beads supplied “by
some of the most rapacious, anti-environmental firms in Latin America
including the Mutran family which has been linked to killing union leaders
in the southern Amazon and employing slave labor.” The violations run like
a laundry list. “The lie is what upsets me,” the Director of Amanakaa
Amazon Relief Agency comments on The Body Shop’s fair trade policies:
“They’re not helping the Kayapo Indians. It’s all a show. First world
wages? They pay first world wages all right—the same dirt-cheap wages
other first world companies pay. They’re worse than United Fruit. Anita
Roddick is lying about how she helps the rainforest, but who would believe
some Brazilian activists?”

“Improper bacteria sampling procedures,” “Contaminated Banana

Shampoo,” “Contaminated Foot Scrub,” “Elderflower Eye Gel problems,”
“Bacteria on filling machines,” “Rancid products,” “Formaldehyde in
cosmetics”: Entine’s work on The Body Shop (he’s written several articles
to date) reads like a cult deprogrammer. Cult deprogrammers or
intervention specialists, as they’re known, follow an exacting method by
which each and every lie and broken commitment is spelled out in plain
English, until the member is forced to question everything the cult says and
does.

Deprogrammers take cult members through all the spiritual texts,

commandments, and values of the cult and show the inconsistencies
between what the leaders preach and what they actually practice. One-by-
one the truths and principles of the cult are encountered, examined, and
systematically deconstructed. 4 And that’s exactly what Entine did.
“Consumers buy The Body Shop’s pricey shampoos and lotions,” wrote
Entine, “because they believe . . . the company practices what it preaches.”

In a world when criticism can be hurled around the Internet, anyone can
discover and publicize the inconsistencies and untruths of any
establishment. The World Wide Web is littered with hundreds of ex-cult
sites, where spurned initiates can share stories about how they were hurt,
lied to, and abused. In the consumer world, grassroots consumer-advocacy
sites like PlanetFeedback function in a similar way (customers can log onto
an online community and warn the world about companies that have lagged
on their commitment). Brand-loyalists become brand-terrorists with a single
punch of the return key. In today’s world, the faintest smell of hypocrisy
from a commitment-based organization will surely become a PR debacle
overnight. It’s the anti-advocacy effect, writ short, “Hell hath no fury like a
cult-member spurned.”

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The Price of Neglect
Patrick had a “strange, irrational need for Apple to succeed. I want them to
do better and I want them to gain more market share.” He didn’t always feel
this way. I talked to him and some other Mac users who had been through
the “dark days,” and (lucky for Apple) had come out the other side.

They admitted that the Apple brand had a near miss during the dark days
and that it had forced them to seriously review their commitment. As Lou
puts it, “back in ’96 when things were hitting rock bottom and I remember
thinking ‘what’s with these people, what’s happening here?’ ” They were
“pretty archaic for a while . . . my Apple wasn’t much compared to the new
PCs that were coming out that my friends had.”

This is a story of betrayal through neglect. And it’s also one of recovery by
a recommitment of the leadership to the people. It is possible to “re-cult” a
brand that is dying, but it requires absolute focus and uncompromised
energy to reestablish the lost trust.

Your company or brand may not have endured the kind of crisis that The
Body Shop or Fellowship of Friends experienced. Not all commitment
problems come in such obvious or blatant forms. More commonly (which is
to say, very commonly), they are the result of everyday organizational
inertia—minor concessions, group think, and general lassitude. Every time
a limp idea is chosen for political expediency, every time a mediocre
message is approved out of fear, every time vision and care is subsumed by
mechanism and compromise, there you’ll find an institution slowly rotting
at the core and quickly alienating its core constituents.

Steve Jobs’s baby slowly rotted in this way throughout his long exile. It was
not necessarily because the company lacked a pop-icon

CEO like Jobs but because the company lost its original commitment and
vision and became distracted by quarterly results and foolhardy product
development.
Everyone fondly remembers 1984 and the Superbowl commercial that
launched a global icon. Yet nearly a decade later, Apple was essentially
unrecognizable as the company that so boldly trumpeted its vision of a
better world. A movement that generated the intense loyalty of groupies
around the country was but a shadow of its former self. The only thing that
remained was the premium price—not the ingenious and easy-to-use
software, not the beauty and uncommon aesthetics of its hardware. The
Apple of the 1980s was clunky and run by corporate men as beige as the
dull machines it manufactured during these years.

Some observers believe that the introduction of the iMac series of

computers saved Jobs and his company. More important, the CEO made a
conscious decision to recommit. He threw himself back into the community,
reciprocating his constituents’ energy with his own. He was “investing in
me ... I think he understands Mac users [unlike the inter-regnum
management] that’s why the company has done so much better under him”
as Greg claimed. They saw their devotion mirrored by their leader.

Not only did Jobs recommit to the community with product; he did it by
acutely understanding that the cult membership was buying into an idea.
Previous to his return, the company had been in a tailspin without vision
and the product that lived that vision. Jobs quickly pulled the brand out of
this catastrophic dive by actually reinvesting in the ideology prior to the
launch of the iMac. In a typically radical move, soon after his return to the
company he cut the R&D staff by about 80 percent and shuttled the money
to Chiat/Day, the communications company that crafted the famous 1984
commercial. At Mac World, where he launched the Think Different
campaign and the iMac, he publicly reset the course of the

Commitment is a Two-Way Street

brand. The following is an excerpt from his speech to software developers

and dealers:

“Marketing is about values. We have to be very clear on what we want our

customers to know about us. They want to know who is Apple and what do
we stand for. What were about is not making boxes for people to get their
jobs done, although we do that very well. Apple is about more than that.
What Apple is about, its core value is that we believe that people with
passion can change the world for the better. That’s what we believe.” The
commercial, featuring clips of Picasso, Branson, Einstein, and others
begins: “Here’s to the crazy ones . . .”

In short, the company was finally fulfilling its part of the bargain by
providing not just reinvigorated products, but by reestablishing a vision. Its
products have rekindled Apple’s reputation for shaking up the market (look
how fast the beige box-makers copied the brightly colored iMac, the
bestselling computer that year) and providing justification for the
memberships’ belief that they are different (and better than the rest of the
world). And it even provides sustenance when they are persecuted for their
deviance. According to Patrick he gets “hassled” because “you’re using
something different from them,” (PC users) and interestingly, he believes,
they’re jealous: “I think it’s because they secretly know that they’re wrong,
they made the wrong decision [choosing a PC]. They know we’re better. I
mean, who ever says, ‘Oh wow, you’re using a Dell. No one ever says that.’
” When Mac users get together they have plenty to share, including the
mythology of their passionate crazy leader, who loves and is committed to
them.

And the cherry on the top for Patrick was that Jobs has helped him to
become a missionary once again. For brand advocates, their reputation is on
the line when they make a recommendation. There must be the stuff there
that warrants a conversion. In the case of Apple, the conversion and
therefore the credibility of converter are

significant. According to Patrick: “We are all somewhat different because

we use a Mac, and I think that when you convert someone you feel like you
maybe have changed them for life ... it’s really a massive deal... they need
to be saved.” Patrick needed to feel that his brand, and the commitment of
leadership behind it, was up to midwifing the conversion.

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Commitment Is a Lifetime
Contract
As with any loving and real relationship, a company must continually
commit to its customers, renew its beliefs with real product and service
experiences every quarter. Apathy is the enemy in a cult relationship. Every
action, every offering, every communication must be scrutinized for its
commitment to the membership.

Check everything you do by the standard of fair trade: are you making a
similar sacrifice (in terms of money, time, energy) as the cult member? Will
whatever you are proposing jeopardize the commitment of the devoted (but
not blind) membership? Playing the cult game is one of high stakes. You
will get very high rewards, but they come at the cost of your commitment—
your time, money, energy, ideas, and veracity. The highest cost of all (the
cults destruction) will be incurred if you scrimp on your side of the trade.

10

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GO FORTH AND MULTIPLY
D o you want a large or small cult? This is not a facetious question. Most
cult leaders start out expecting that they will capture a large following, yet
most of what they proceed to do guarantees a small one. Cult leaders,
whether of the religious or business variety, can be more successful if they
do something foreign to their natures—be humble.

The Joy and Pain of Deviancy

Cults are inherently deviant.

Deviancy is good. It has the potential to change civilizations or markets if it

succeeds in gaining a large and influential enough following. Without
deviancy cultures and markets would grow tired and atrophy. And without
difference, the cult will not attract those who are alienated from the
establishment.

But too much deviancy can exclude a large potential audience. Moreover,
cults can be destroyed by an establishment that is threatened by too much
difference. They can be persecuted into oblivion. By managing deviancy
well cult leaders could be as famous as Jesus

Christ or Mohammed. By managing it badly, they could be as infamous as

David Koresh or Jim Jones.

Cults fail as seeds of cultural change if they fall on the stony ground of
refusal by the common man. Cult brands also fail if they don’t move
relatively quickly beyond the early adopters to the majority of consumers,
the ones who provide the real revenue and profit. It’s all about managing
deviancy and familiarity. To understand the ramifications of deviancy and
growth, let’s look at how new ideas are adopted.

The problem with new or different ideas is that people hate new and
different ideas. The majority does anyway, and they are the only ones who
count. Only early adopters relish the revolutionary, and they seldom make a
long term, profitable business. They’re always on to the next thing, and if
they do stay for a limited time, they will demand innovation because by
nature they enjoy anything novel. That is a costly consumer segment for
any business to attempt to satisfy. It tends to be relatively small and it
demands huge product development costs. What business really needs is to
appeal to the majority, not just a small group of strange people who thrive
on strangeness.

Your objective should be to focus acquisition investment on the

conservative majority; those who are slow to adopt the new, but who, when
they do, are slow to leave it. Thus, the challenge facing the marketer, the
cult leader, the politician, or anyone intent on starting a new and different
organization is to do the following. They must crack the conundrum of
selling something unfamiliar to individuals who, at heart, want the familiar.

How do leaders avoid the handicap of the new? How can they build a
strong attachment to their idea among a large and ordinary audience that is
normally repelled by the strange?

Make the Novel Appear Familiar

This idea will be antithetical to most marketers and cult leaders. If you have
something new, the accepted wisdom suggests, shout it to the world. Claim
the crown of innovation. Be feted in business magazines as the new
revolutionaries.

What makes better sense is to craft “buyable newness.” The cults that have
flourished have tempered newness. As a result they have attracted ordinary
people to become mass-market organizations relatively quickly. They
learned to modify their apparent difference in order to penetrate the
mainstream culture. Successful revolutionaries are the ones who have
figured out how to seduce the masses by making their proposition appear
not so revolutionary.

Christianity, one of the most successful cults, achieved market leadership in

a short span despite some radically new theology. Estimates suggest that by
300 A.D., roughly half the population of the Roman Empire was Christian,
rendering it politically necessary for the Emperor Constantine to anoint it as
the state religion. (This political decision has since been mythologized into
a miraculous conversion story, in which Constantine witnessed a vision
from God before a battle that he subsequently won, and that inspired him to
convert.) The expansion of the cult to this point equates to a 40 percent
growth rate per decade, fast in any terms, but especially for a culture-
transforming idea. Mormonism is following almost exactly the same path. It
is on track to be the next World Religion by 2080, and has also grown at 40
percent per decade over the past century, which will number it in the
hundreds of millions by the middle of this one.

Both religions in their early period were the kind of cults that we would
recognize today. They had ideologies that threatened the establishment, and
dictated behavior that it found antisocial. And

they were both chastised in their early period for being too deviant. Christ
was crucified, and the Mormons fled to avoid persecution because they
intimidated their neighbors with their strangeness.

So how did they recruit enough from the ranks of the ordinary to become
major religions? They made themselves appear not so new.

If the idea you are proposing is radically new, defuse its strangeness by
making it recognizable, to some degree. The counterintuitive strategy for
business, religious, and political leaders is to eschew the vanity of claiming
to have invented something completely new, and instead propose that you
are simply improving on an already good idea.

We’ll examine two ways of doing this. The first key strategy is to use the
membership as a translator of the new. This route uses “The Power of the
Person” that we discussed in chapter 3. Utilizing relationships to present a
familiar face to an unfamiliar idea is an extremely potent recruitment
strategy. It’s what makes word of mouth the uncontested leader in effective
media available to a marketer. The recruiter can be literally familiar (they
are friends, family, colleagues or neighbors) or equally, they can be
figuratively familiar—they are “like me.” “If this person (who is like me)
likes this product, I might too,” is the essence of this approach. Or, “Mary
Kay’s story is like mine.” “I connect with that person in that ad.”

The second strategy is to craft the ideology and practice to appear as if it is

built on the foundation of something already accepted. Thus, Christian
teaching developed from Judaism, and Mormonism from Christianity.
Swatch is like a conventional watch, but it’s costume jewelry not Tiffany’s;
and Starbucks is like a continental cafe, but it’s American, and with take-
out. New, but yet somewhat familiar.

Familiarity Breeds . . . and Breeds

The most famous face of recruitment for the Mormon Church are the well-
scrubbed and wholesome missionaries who work for two years anywhere in
the world that they are sent. They are the least effective method of
recruitment available to this most successful of contemporary cults, at least
when they are used in the way most familiar to us: cold calling on the street
or at peoples doors. The church has recognized the power of social
networks. They’ve utilized the productivity of existing relationships. In the
words of Jayson, who was recalling his missionary assignment in Romania,
“You know, somebody has joined the church, and they believe in it strongly
... so they bring their friends to church, they send the missionaries to their
parents or cousins or whatever. The most effective way of finding new
people is a personal referral .”

In other words, the church recognizes the potential of using the rail tracks
of social interaction already laid down by close-knit families and networks
of friends to speed its new ideas. Kevin and Robert, two committed and
charming young men currently on mission in New York, confirmed that the
church places its “biggest emphasis for missionaries on talking with friends
of people who are already members of the church. That’s the biggest source
of converts right there.”

The church also knows the power of outreach in terms of forming social
relationships before making the pitch of the new idea. Peggy Fugal, the
agency founder in Salt Lake City, recalls that according to church lore:
C.

One in every one thousand people cold-contacted by a missionary joins the

church.

THE CLILTING OF BRANDS

One in every five hundred people who knows a Mormon when contacted by
a missionary joins the church.

One in every two hundred fifty people who is referred to the missionary
joins the church.

One in every one hundred people who is befriended by a member joins the
church.

One in every fifty people who goes to church with a member joins the
church.

One in every twenty-five people who is taught by the missionaries in the

home of a member joins the church.

She reports that the latter is the “goal and the focus in missionary work”
and hence the Mormon adage: “every member is a missionary.” Every
member is a potent organ for the cult’s procreation.

At its beginnings, the Mormon church accelerated to over 24,000 members

in fourteen years from a base of preexisting social contacts. Joseph Smith,
its founder, recruited its first members from his family and those of the
surrounding population that was connected in some way to his immediate
social circle.

In addition to using the power of social networks —the potency of the

person —the Mormons also know the value of introducing an initially
defused doctrine. The recruitment formula demands that their unique
doctrine be presented in the context o/common ideological ground. The two
brave missionaries in downtown New York are very conscious of avoiding
potentially alienating Mormon ideology at the first approach:“There’s [sic]
differences [of doctrine]. So we’ll first try and focus on a lot of the
similarities and get that established; a belief in Jesus Christ and God. And
then we’ll talk about things like the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith.”

There really are fundamental differences in ideology. They veer so radically

that several of the world’s major religions refuse to recognize the Mormon
Church’s baptisms as valid (including Catholics,

Presbyterians, and Methodists). Among the more innovative tenets are that
God was once “as man is now” and that he developed a power and
spirituality that all Mormons are enjoined to imitate and eventually reach.
He has a divine wife. They believe that “Zion will be built upon the
American continent.” 1 Human beings were once spirit children who
acquire physical form on earth for a period of testing prior to rejoining their
family in one of several heavens.

This radical theology is not presented at first contact. Commonalities will

be found when prospects are first approached (mutual friends, an interest in
sports, and so on). If the prospect is interested in finding out more about the
member’s beliefs, six prescribed “presentations” are given that gradually
introduce the Church’s doctrine.

Officially, the name of the Church is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-
day Saints. The name has been deliberately modified over time by church
officials to emphasize its similarity to the established Christian religions.
This tempering of the Church’s essential difference can be useful in
defusing a potentially negative response on first contact. As Robert related,
“Sometimes I’ll hear someone who will say you guys aren’t Christian. But
usually they’ll change their mind after they look at the name of the church.”

This normalization policy really geared up when the Winter Olympics were
scheduled for Salt Lake City. Church leaders knew that the global media
would be scrutinizing the religion as much as the games. They officially
shortened the name to “The Church of Jesus Christ.” Referring to it as the
“Mormon Church” was no longer acceptable. Even now, on the
organization’s own materials, the words Jesus Christ are typographically
emphasized at the expense of The Latter-day Saints. The church has
mollified its oddness over time to outsiders. But its radical theology has not
changed. Compared to its surrounding culture, it is still deviant. It has just
crafted familiarity into its appearance as it penetrates further into
mainstream society.

Let’s look now at a mass cult brand. It was deviant—it represented

a revolutionary new way to make and sell cars. But it gained enough of a
following among the masses to create a revolution. Over a decade later the
rest of the market is still copying its early, deviant practices. Saturn, like the
Mormons, defused its radical difference by appearing familiar.

Saturn: A Familiar Kind of Car Company

“A different kind of company, a different kind of car.” This mantra, hymned
in all communications, was designed to promise a different kind of buying
and ownership experience. Yet the appeal of the Saturn proposition to a
large and unsatisfied buying population, was that at its heart, it was a
difference that appeared profoundly familiar. It was a revolution undertaken
by ordinary people. It was a radical idea executed by familiar faces. And
behind it was an idea so familiar that it was impossible not to accept it.

One of the signature commercials shows a man (actually the General

Manager, the real one) talking to camera: “It all started with a challenge for
the old values . . . maintain the old values.” He’s a heartland kind of man,
weathered and stoic, and embodies, you feel, all things that make America
decent. To go back to the heart of things you have to start over, he argues,
and to do that you have to go to a place where the employees will feel
comfortable, because “you can’t build cars without people.” At this point
there are lots of shots of the literal greenfield site for the plant—an icon of
heartland America (although it happens to be Tennessee) with tractors,
horses, fields all nestled around a small town called Springhill.

In another commercial (all of these have become part of the mythology of

owner and employee alike, ten years after they were aired), the customer
becomes an intimate within the community of employees at Springhill.
Judith Reiswig, a third grade teacher, placed an order for a Saturn “after
reading the Time magazine arti
Go Forth and Multiply

cle.” This homely woman, everyone’s vision of an upstanding and

sympathetic teacher, your auntie in chalk-dusted bifocals, explains that “I
liked the whole idea of what Saturn was all about. It’s one of the things I try
and instill in my kids, so I hope its true. It reminded me a little bit of a mom
and pop operation in the old days.” She sends a picture of herself to the
plant and finds it in the glove compartment signed by the team members
who built her car.

The launch commercials spend very little time talking about the car. As the
tagline suggests, it’s the company that’s important, and the company, the
commercials insist, is the people. And what are these people like? They are
like you and me. The commercials are an anthem to the unsophisticated
wholesomeness of the average American, set in the bucolic context of the
(increasingly lost) lodestone of unchanging values, rural America.

This campaign, in fact the whole Saturn idea, as Judith Reiswig explained,
is an explicit appeal for trust in the face of newness. By returning to already
accepted values of the culture—community, respect for individuals, pride in
your work and ownership of its outcome, celebration of geographical
communities, and family values—the dubious prospect of a new American
car company was rendered acceptable.

The company and its communications juggled the paradox of familiarity

and difference through all the points of contact with its customers. The most
important of which is of course the dealerships. They are, in fact, not
dealerships but “stores,” an important distinction. Saturn wanted to connote
a buying experience typical of other less pressured purchases, somewhere
where the distressing ambiguity of a deal was removed. So they introduced
the now famous no-haggle pricing policy.

By 1992, Saturn had sold nearly two hundred thousand cars in the United
States in its second year, making it the tenth highest selling brand. It was
being sold faster than it could be built. Seventy percent of Saturn’s
customers were new business for GM. Loyalty
and word of mouth was high. A J.D. Power survey in 1992 measuring
customer’s predisposition to loyalty ranked Saturn fourth after three luxury
brands: Lexus, Infiniti, and Cadillac.

In 1993 nearly half of the first time visitors to a Saturn showroom had been
referred by a friend or family member. In other words, the power of the
person had kicked in, giving the brand cult a relatively fast start by having
new ideas presented by old faces. But it was the advertising that was the
catalyst to this huge army of unpaid salespeople. The brand was being
presented by familiar faces in the figurative sense; the people in the ads
shared the values of the audience. They seemed familiar in very basic terms.
They were figurative friends and family that articulated a different culture
from what you expect when buying a car, but one that is profoundly
familiar in terms of basic human values. In other words, the advertising was
like mass word of mouth.

Does all of this mean that your cult should not be different? That it should
be as close to its surrounding culture as possible? No. As I argued in chapter
2, difference is critical to a cult. The discontented need to find a community
that has different values from the existing culture, one which disappoints
them and in which they do not feel at home. This growth strategy of making
the novel appear familiar is not a contradiction of the need to be different. It
is about the presentation of difference at the first point of contact. The
Mormons appear to be a regular Christian religion when you first meet
them. It is only later that the true differences become apparent. Most of the
recruits arrive at the cult’s radical theology via the familiarity of a personal
connection. By the time that the new belief system is revealed, the recruit
has already formed relationships with people that they trust. It’s a small leap
from a trusted friend to their religion. If my friend thinks this is the right
path, then there must be something to it, the typical logic goes. The prospect
is likely to become a recruit (if they are not already committed to a religion)
because the novel is made familiar.

11

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TENSION: THE MANAGEMENT
OE DEVIANCE
ension can be one of the biggest challenges facing a cult leader.

I It is the single biggest intangible that needs to be understood and managed

if you ever wish to see your cult flourish. Some religious sociologists have
interpreted tension as a two-way street where cults not only reject society,
but are, in turn, rejected by society. 1 Tension is, simply put, the dynamic
continuum between these two acts of repulsion. At one extreme, a cult’s
deviance from the social norms can become so offensive that society cannot
tolerate its existence. At the other, a cult might be so tame it becomes
indistinguishable from its surroundings, rendering it indifferent and
irrelevant.

You could employ all the tools taught in this book to create a cult brand, but
if you neglect to properly manage its tension, your cult will die.

There are as many ways to manipulate tension as there are ways to be

different or similar. You can be too different like Napster and be crushed by
the recording establishment, or become overly familiar, like Snapple (which
under Quaker Oats ownership lost its cult status and the stock price
plummeted). The objective is to balance your brand s tension.

TOO MUCH TENSION

Perhaps the most tempting mistake is to push your cult too close to the
edge. It is so easy to get caught up in your ideology and scream, “You’re
wrong, we hate you” to the establishment. But cults that are too different
can be too threatening and the establishment won’t hesitate to destroy them.
It is a simple tactic that the dominant Christian Church, for example, has
used countless times in the past to maintain its position. Pilgrims or
Mormons, Cathars or Protestants were all, at some point, too tense and had
to run for cover, suffer being burned, or simply cease to exist. When the
church shouts “heresy” it is a sure indicator that there is a threatening level
of tension.

In a more recent example, Falun Gong is in a highly tense state with the
Chinese government. At one time supported by the authorities as a healthy
practice, it is now heavily persecuted in mainland China where it has
become too popular for a totalitarian power to tolerate.

The Mormon Church has had a history of making the establishment

uncomfortable. Joseph Smith began receiving visits from the angel Moroni
in upstate New York on September 21,1823. The angel bore instructions
from God that bade Smith to transcribe the religious history of an ancient
American civilization, and in so doing, he created the Book of Mormon.
According to this text the church set up by Jesus in Palestine had become
corrupt, and the world had endured 1,500 years of apostasy as a result. It
was up to Smith to restore the original Church of Christ.

As the church mushroomed in size it fled from western New York to Ohio,
to Missouri, to Illinois, and eventually to the seclusion of Utah. Every move
was necessitated by flared tensions. The Mormons directly inflamed the
establishment by claiming the lat

ter’s version of Christianity was corrupt and had been for fifteen centuries.
Mormon ideology was seen as pure heresy by their neighbors. These two
factors, plus the very rapid growth of the new religion, proved to be such a
threat to the status quo that it could not be tolerated.

Nauvoo, Illinois, was where the rapidly growing cult fled after the Missouri
governor issued an order that Mormons must be “exterminated or expelled”
(several Mormons were subsequently massacred following this order). The
cult built a beautiful city that quickly prospered into the largest in Illinois.
The cult thought that they had finally found their home.

However, just like the other places they had moved, tensions with neighbors
grew. A paper that heavily criticized the Mormons was published and the
Mormons fought back by destroying the paper’s publishing facility. Joseph
Smith was imprisoned and his guards stood by as an angry mob stormed the
building and killed him. Smith’s murder was almost the breaking point for
the new religion.

After its leader’s death, Brigham Young essentially saved the fledgling
religion by literally removing it from a highly tense state. According to Jan
Shipps, a Mormon scholar, when Young moved the Mormons to Salt Lake
City, he “established such a firm boundary between the Saints and the non-
Mormon world that the Saints in Utah were able to live outside the ordinary
American political process.” 2

The Mormon Church had finally found a place where it could prosper and
cement a community of devout followers. They were isolated from the
anger of the American establishment. They were no longer existing in a
state of high tension, and were able to lay the groundwork for what became
exponential growth.

The Mormons’ strategy is a drastic example of how to deescalate tension.

But it saved the cult. Napster didn’t fare so well. The new company was too
offensive to the recording business, both in terms

of jeopardizing its immediate bottom line, but more important, in terms of

the long-term threat it posed to the very structure of the industry. So it
persecuted them accordingly. Instead of retreating to live another day like
the Mormons, Napster stood its ground and fought to the death.

Napster’s Decline through the Eyes of an Apple

Napster’s story is fairly well known. The brash music Internet company was
founded by a college freshman named Shawn Fanning. He started it as a
means to share rare songs with his friends, and it exploded into a full-scale
cultural phenomenon. It did so many things right. Napster was an
exemplary cult brand that enjoyed passionate consumer attachment even as
it saw rapid growth. It demonized its opposition; it was a community built
on customer interaction. But it failed at perhaps the most difficult aspect of
cult brand formation—managing its tension. In effect, Napster was blinded
by its own ideology and failed to realize that the institution that it was
goading had the power to destroy it.

Napster grew at an almost unprecedented rate. Within Napster’s first

eighteen months, the service had grown from Shawn’s thirty original friends
to over eighty million users, each using the service to search for songs on
Napster’s central database and download them for free. By creating this
enormous catalog of music (all the songs on each user’s computer were in
the database, literally billions of songs) that was so easy to access, young
Mr. Fanning had managed to strike a chord that resonated with the millions
of users who quickly joined Napster’s ranks. Napster was about more than
just free music; it was about freedom from the companies who wielded
absolute control over that music the public could enjoy. With Napster, the
common man was no longer dependent on the record labels for music—it
was a new method of distribution.

Napster deliberately positioned itself as a leader of the new economic

revolution that it had created. Using the Internet as his tool, Shawn Fanning
had slapped the establishment in the face, showing that some punk
programmer in jeans and a T-shirt could potentially take down an entire
industry John Perry Barlow noted in Wired magazine that this shift has
been, “long awaited by some and a nasty surprise to others, the conflict
between the industrial age and the virtual age is now being fought in
earnest, thanks to that modestly conceived but paradigm shifting thing
called Napster”

Napster consciously kept its tension with the recording industry high; it
wanted friction to define itself as a freedom fighter versus the tyrannical
bad guy. In the eyes of its members, music lovers’ sovereignty was being
squashed and pillaged by the totalitarian establishment who were forcing
everyone to listen to Britney Spears and N’Sync. What really set Napster
apart from the recording industry was that it didn’t force anything on its
users. Napster didn’t try to influence users’ preferences, and when you
wanted a song, you got only that song and not fifteen other tracks that were
undesirable (that you had to pay for). Napster users had ultimate control of
their musical destiny.
But the record companies weren’t only afraid that people were not buying
as many CDs as in the past. (The entertainment industry as we know it is
hurting. Since 2000, CD shipments are down 15 percent and 2002 was the
first year that blank CD sales outnumbered sales for recorded CDs.) This
shift in distribution methods, the companies realized, could render them
extinct. In a virtual economy, music buyers could have a direct relationship
with the producers and artists who distribute their songs through private
web pages. If MP3s become the new medium of music dissemination, with
their ease of transfer and use, CDs could easily become obsolete. It was
clear that the record companies had to fight Napster for their own survival.

In December 1999 the Recording Industry Association of

America unleashed its ultimately fatal attack on Napster, suing them for
copyright infringement. Expecting and wanting a fight, Napster and its
supporters saw the battle as a David versus Goliath fight with their civil
liberties at risk. How can you limit what people trade over the Internet?
How is file sharing any different from burning a mix CD for your girlfriend,
they raged? The RIAA, on the other hand, framed the battle as one of right
versus wrong, painting Napster as a facilitator to robbery. Napster helped
people steal from the record companies, and in turn, the artists themselves.

Eventually in 2001, the RIAA won, and a judge ordered Napster to shut
down unless it could find a way to function within copyright laws.
Napster’s legal downfall came about because of how it operated through
central servers that tracked and controlled the transfer of files between
users. The judge saw Napster as an entity that acted as a distribution
channel, therein, becoming more than just peers sharing files with each
other.

Might things have happened differently if Napster had done a better job of
handling its tension with the record industry? Quite possibly. Napster’s
successor Kazaa is profitable and has grown to be larger than Napster.
According to industry leader, Download.com, Kazaa is the world’s most
downloaded software, with 230,309,616 downloads. To put that in
perspective, a recent population estimate of the United States by the 2003
World Population Data Sheet came in at 291.5 million people. In many
ways, Chris Sherman of Online was right when he said, “shuttering Napster
will be like beheading Hydra, with two new heads growing back for every
one hacked off.”

Kazaa has learned from Napster’s mistakes and is flourishing. While similar
to Napster, Kazaa is a more legal beast. This is because Kazaa is completely
decentralized and blind to the uses of its program. That is, Kazaa can’t
control what its users create and has no idea who is downloading what file,
whether it is a copyrighted song or the directions to their boss’s home. This
decentralization

begs the legal question: how can you be liable for illegal activity that you
aren’t aware of? Furthermore, according to Niklas Zennstrom, one of the
two creators of Kazaa, the only way the system can be shut down is if every
user elected to disable his program. So what is the point in persecuting
something that is almost impossible to defeat?

The point is a simple and imperative one of survival. Kazaa poses an even
greater threat to the establishment than Napster did because it allows for
music, movies, games, pictures, and software to be shared between users.

Several recording labels and movie studios are currently suing Kazaa for
copyright infringement, holding that Kazaa’s creators knowingly created
software that prevented them from having any control. Kazaa, taking
Napster’s freedom stance one step further, has filed a counter suit claiming
that movie studios and recording labels don’t understand the digital age and
that when they act in concert, they have monopoly power in the distribution
of entertainment.

However, Kazaa is doing things to balance its tension that Napster never
did. Much like the Mormons, when the going got tough, Kazaa ran away.
Kazaa was about to get an injunction in the Netherlands, where it was
developed, so it sold its assets to a company in Australia which
subsequently incorporated itself in Vanuatu, a tropical tax haven in the
South Pacific with no copyright law. As such, it moved to a damper version
of Utah, a haven from attack.

Kazaa also contends that its intent has always been to develop a means to
distribute legal, copyrighted material. Nikki Hemming, CEO of Sharman
Networks, which owns Kazaa, states that, “Our vision from inception was
to develop and prove a model for the distribution of licensed content.” And
more important than its stated intent is the fact that Kazaa is developing
channels that distribute licensed material. Kazaa is currently the world’s
largest distributor of licensed, digitally rights-managed content on the
Internet,

THE CUTTING OF BRANDS

with more than 20 million licensed files downloaded per month. Through
Kazaas Altnet application, 3 users can download licensed material for as
little as ten cents a song. Altnet is by no means floundering. It sells 500,000
licenses daily and since Sharman gets a cut of the sales, legal sharing could
become its greatest source of revenue.

Even after the recording and movie companies sued Kazaa, Kazaa has been
trying to establish a working relationship with them. According to Nikki
Hemming, “The only thing preventing this product from being this amazing
distribution mechanism is the lack of cooperation.”

Signs of this cooperation are starting to appear. Recently, Sharman

Networks launched a new version of Kazaa that expands the range of
licensed content available to users with the addition of channels that allow
users to search, browse, and buy content from third party providers. One of
these channels is the Russell Simmons Hip-Hop channel, which will
showcase short films from Def Filmmakers. This marks a significant step
toward the establishment because Simmons is the founder of Def Jam
Records, a very successful label.

In yet another sign of lessened tension with the establishment, Microsoft

has chosen to distribute promotional trailers for the movie, The Rules of
Attraction, in its Windows Media 9 format on Kazaa. The videos were put
on the Kazaa network by Altnet, Kazaa’s subsidiary that uses Microsoft’s
digital rights-management software to place electronic locks on the songs
and videos it distributes. These locks deter unauthorized copying, enabling
companies to take advantage of the virtually free distribution provided by
Kazaa without losing the ability to demand payment and limit usage.
The entertainment industry is clearly up in arms over file sharing and in
light of a federal ruling in 2003 that reinforced the legality of file sharing
applications, it has decided to find other fish to

fry—the users. The RIAA has decided that since it can’t seem to shut down
file sharing services like Kazaa, that it will sue the individual users of these
services. In April of 2003, lawsuits were filed against students at Princeton,
Michigan Technological University, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
that seek billions of dollars in damages—$150,000 per song. Additional
suits were filed later in the year.

Not surprisingly, this move has failed to sit well with the public. Fred von
Lohman, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, contends that,
“This latest effort [by the RIAA] really indicates the recording industry has
lost touch with reality completely. Today they have declared war on the
American consumer.”

While the entertainment industry is busy trying to sue individuals for using
an application that has been judged to be within the bounds of legality, an
old hat at cult formation has been scheming. Apple’s Steve Jobs noticed
something in Napster and Kazaa that reinforced his hypothesis: if file
sharing is about the distribution of music and not free songs, then it should
be possible to charge people to download music by the song.

Now, Apple isn’t the first company to try and sell individual songs to users
over the Internet, but it is the first to do so in a userfriendly environment
that doesn’t severely restrict ownership of the downloaded music. Apple’s
iTunes Music Store is as simple and intuitive as every other Apple product
out there. You can listen to a thirty-second preview of any song and then
buy it for ninety-nine cents with a click. There are no monthly subscription
charges and you are actually buying the song instead of renting it compared
to some of the other Internet music shops. The end product is even superior
to the old MP3 format;, songs will be encoded in a new ACC format that
offers superior sound quality and smaller files. This means you can fit more,
better quality music onto your iPod when you use iTunes.

Perhaps iTunes’ best chance for success is that it has Steve Jobs
as its leader. Sony’s CEO, Andrew Lack, recalls, “I don’t think it was more
than a fifteen-second decision in my mind [to license music to Apple] once
Steve started talking.” Dr. Dre, an artist, producer, and one of the founding
fathers of hip-hop, has noted that nobody has come up with a better plan to
sell music online. In typical fashion, Jobs is not humble about his newest
venture, claiming that his digital store will forever change the distribution
of music, the marketing of the artists, and how the music is used by fans.

Napster and Kazaa demonstrated that the establishment had become

outdated in its distribution model and that consumers felt marginalized by
the monopolistic recording industries. Recognizing that the record labels
are fighting for their lives, Jobs created a venture that is one notch closer to
the establishment and therefore less tense than its predecessors. By signing
on with Jobs, the recording industry is admitting that a new distribution
system is needed, while maintaining its fight against the piracy of Kazaa.
All that is left to see is whether the Napster catalyst really was about
freedom of choice and not free music.

AN EARLY PRECEDENT

Interestingly, this case of Kazaa and Apple’s iTunes learning from Napster’s
mismanagement of tension has a distinct parallel with the rise of
Protestantism during the late Middle Ages. In the early fifteenth century, the
Catholic Church had a monopoly over religion much as today’s recording
industry has a monopoly over the distribution of music. The Church
consolidated its power by keeping all religious texts in Latin and making
sure that its priests were the only ones who could read and interpret them
for the general populace. God was not democratically distributed.

When the first religious reformers like Jan Hus of Bohemia began to call
the Church’s abuses of power to light, they were quickly killed off, much
like Napster was. Hus was enraged by what he saw as an abuse of the
Church’s power with the selling of indul

gences (essentially the sale of tickets to heaven) to finance a war between

two papal claimants. Of course, the Church would not tolerate such a
dissenting voice and burned Hus at the stake, showing the same sense of
self-preservation that the RIAA employed in fighting Napster.
Hus’s ideological successor, Martin Luther, followed a path more similar to
Kazaa’s or iTune’s in his battle with the monolithic Catholic Church. He
too, was angered by the selling of indulgences, this time to finance the
building of St. Peters Basilica in Rome. However, his tension with the
establishment was significantly less than Hus’s because German princes
who were trying to wrest power away from the Church protected him. In
effect, Luther had state sponsorship. The princes tempered Luthers tension
with the Church, and with their protection he was able to nail his
revolutionary Ninety-Five Theses on the doors of the cathedral in
Wittenberg and start the Reformation.

With Luther’s success Protestantism was born. The Catholic monopoly had
been greatly weakened and the new Protestantism democratized religion to
the point of preaching that everyone can commune with God.

Martin Luther and the more contemporary revolutionaries of Kazaa and

iTunes have been successful because of their mediated tension with the
establishment. While their ideas might have been born in the dying flames
of their high-tension predecessors, they each placed themselves closer to
societal norms in order to survive. They are different, but not too different.

OceanofPDF.com
Isolation: Too Much Tension Can
Alienate Potential Customers
There is another possible fallout of too much tension, namely, that if you
are too different you will alienate your cult’s potential audience.

Cults are supposed to attract the alienated, not further alienate them. To be
too deviant is to repel your potential recruits. If that happens, your cult or
brand will be strangled by its lack of new membership, a noose of its own
making.

The Peoples Temple is a particularly strong example of this self-

strangulation. It was once a thriving cult. Their mass suicide at Jonestown
was simply the final chapter of a decline that followed a period of rapid
growth. In 1972, Jim Jones moved his cult, the People’s Temple, to San
Francisco where he hoped to be able to gather a greater following. Jones, a
Christian minister with socially liberal views, had moved his organization
twice before because of high tensions between it and the surrounding
conservative communities.

San Francisco proved to be the perfect environment for the People’s Temple
to flourish because of its naturally liberal leanings and populace who felt
alienated from the more conservative establishment. Soon its membership
grew to over eight thousand people and Jones had become the toast of the
city’s liberal elite. Politicians courted Jones because of his unique ability to
guarantee thousands of supporters and workers at rallies. Jones became a
necessity at every major function in San Francisco. He was something of a
religious celebrity.

However, during this time, Jones’s beliefs became ever more deviant and an
article in New West magazine exposed the San Francisco community to the
true inner workings of the People’s Temple. This article detailed fake
healings, beatings, and other abuses, as well as the requirement that
members liquidate their assets for the church. These reported events were
the stimulus that eventually forced the People’s Temple to leave San
Francisco for Guyana.

Jones realized that with such bad press he would not be able to proselytize
so effectively. Now, his deviance had been exposed, he faced the risk of not
only stagnating, but also losing members

because of their connections to the naysaying establishment. He knew that

if he stayed in San Francisco the bad press would influence his existing
members. He knew that estranged family members would crusade to win
their children, brothers, and mothers back. He knew that he would lose
many members to the palpable disdain of society. So he quickly mobilized
as much of his group as he could, and retreated from establishment’s
scornful eye.

Deep in the jungle, Jonestown functioned outside of Guyanese society as a

commune of foreigners who ignored their hosting government. Here, it was
impossible for the cult to attract new members, Guyanese or American. But
perhaps more importantly to Jones, it was also impossible for his members
to defect. Their lives became completely dependent upon Jones and his
community.

The People’s Temple festered in the heat of Guyana until November 19,
1978. On that day they murdered a U.S. Congressman who had visited
Jonestown to investigate allegations that Jones was keeping members
against their will. Perhaps realizing that this heinous act effectively marked
the end of his organization, Jones ordered the remaining nine hundred of his
members to commit mass suicide by drinking cyanide-laced fruit punch.
This drastic end to Jones’s cult shocked the world.

As mentioned in the previous chapter, cults must make the novel familiar or
they are doomed to be a flash in the pan. Too much deviance and they will
wither and die. There are as many brand examples of these as there are
cults. In fact they have come to define the term “cult brand” in many
marketers’ minds: niche, faddish, extreme, they disappear as fast as they
arrive, because they mismanage tension.
One vivid example of this existed during the early 1990s in the United
Kingdom. It was a brand of smokes called Death Cigarettes. Cigarettes
labeling themselves “Death.” Replete with the requisite skull and
crossbones on its packaging and a label stating that

THE CLILTING OF BRANDS

tobacco seriously damages health? How cool! Finally a brand that mocked
all the negative press about smoking. A brand that acknowledged that all
smokers know that smoking is bad for them, but that they smoke anyway
because they enjoy it.

Death Cigarettes quickly became the smoke of choice for all of Londons
many hipsters. But once their novelty wore off, Death Cigarettes quickly
faded away because, well, people just don’t like to be reminded of their
mortality. Death Cigarettes’ brand premise was just too different, too
outside of what most people enjoy thinking about on a daily basis to
become a long-term success.

Difference is a fickle beast. Cult leaders and brand managers must

constantly monitor their organizations to make sure that their deviance is
not enraging the establishment or offending potential members. But just as
importantly, leaders must make sure that they are not becoming
indistinguishable from their surroundings. Without difference, your cult
won’t act as a beacon to the dissatisfied and your existing members’ passion
will wane.

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NOT ENOUGH TENSION
Snapple had managed to achieve a cultlike following by the early 1990s
because of their stark difference from the rest of the beverage industry. It
was quirky, from Brooklyn, and 100 percent natural, while their competitors
were a spawn of faceless corporations. It was the perfect antagonist in the
beverage industry and balanced an ideal amount of tension with its unique
stance and communications.

Snapple’s unusual advertising featured an actual employee named Wendy

Kaufman, who quickly became known as the “Snapple Lady.” Ms.
Kaufman was the outgrowth of Snapple’s desire to reflect their natural
attributes with authentic advertising and she quickly became the brand’s
icon, differentiating Snapple from the other popular drink choices of Coke
and Pepsi. And who would

Tension: The Management of Deviance

make a better icon than an “all natural,” plump 4 employee whose job it
was to answer Snapple fan mail? Their first ads featured the Snapple Lady
sitting at her desk reading and answering actual letters from fans.
Eventually, the campaign expanded to include Wendy fulfilling fan
fantasies such as hosting a Snapple wedding.

Snapple s popularity grew with Wendy’s and by the time Quaker Oats
purchased Snapple for $1.7 billion, Snapple sales were approaching $700
million a year and Wendy was receiving up to 3,000 letters a week. 5 But
Quaker decided to dump Wendy. They felt her thick Long Island accent was
too regional and that the key to national success was to appeal to a broader
audience.

Quaker obviously made the wrong choice. By dropping Ms. Kaufman and
trying to appeal to everybody, they lessened Snapple’s tension with the
norm. Without Wendy, Snapple might was well be Coke or Pepsi, and
Snapple s customer base was justifiably alienated from the brand. In just
three years, and despite a $40 million sampling push, sales of Snapple
plunged from a 1993 peak of 75 million cases to 45 million cases by 1996.
6

By early 1997, a fan movement had begun to fight the corporate giant
Quaker Oats to bring the Snapple Lady back. 7 Having learned a thing or
two about marketing, Wendy helped snowball this movement by appearing
on hundreds of radio shows that bashed Quaker Oats for killing her brand.
One ardent fan built Ms. Kaufman a Web site to further her cause, and thus,
www.snapplelady.com was born. Wendy’s new Web site included a petition
to get the Snapple Lady back and chat rooms where the community could
meet and share Snapple-related stories. Soon, it started receiving thirty to
forty thousand hits a week without any advertising— Snapple fans were
finding their own ways to commune.

Later in 1997, Quaker decided to take a $1.4 billion loss and sold Snapple
to Triarc Co. for $300 million. Triarc immediately decided to resurrect the
Snapple Lady, and celebrated her return with a parade down Fifth Avenue
that featured Ms. Kaufman clad in fruit

and flowers on a palm tree-themed float, yelling, “I’m home. I’m back
because they need me.” Triarc explained Wendy’s absence with a new
commercial spot that explained that she had been on a twoyear vacation on
a remote island where the natives worship Snapple and released a limited-
edition product called Wendy’s Tropical Inspiration. The media loved this
fanfare and Ms. Kaufman appeared on NBC’s Today Show , ABC’s Regis
& Kathie Lee , and a host of other programs. And amazingly, within six
months the sales decline was halted, a feat virtually unheard of in the world
of beverage marketing.

Snapple was able to rewrite its history and reclaim its cult following simply
by turning up the tension dial again. It created a huge business by
maintaining enough tension with the norm. It was about being natural in a
world of processed people and goods. Snapple was natural in its ingredients
and natural in its business and communications. To drink Snapple was to be
real, not some processed vessel of corporate will. Quaker Oats tried to make
Snapple everyman’s drink and failed. Once Triarc resurrected Snapple’s
deviance, its fans came running back.
Mass-cult brands are the arch manipulators of tension. They are able to
artfully manipulate the tension dial to be different enough, but appear
similar enough. A heavy hand can doom a cult. Too different and it alienates
itself from its potential public, and invites its own destruction by an alarmed
establishment. Too similar and it loses its reason for being to prospects and
existing members alike. But just right, and it can thrive as a large and
passionate community.

12

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A ClILT IS BORN
T he jury is out on whether Saturn will remain a mass cult brand.

Right now it is at a turning point. Which way the brand cult will move is
unclear—will it become a regular car brand with some loyal customers, or
an exceptional brand and corporate community with large degrees of loyalty
and word of mouth? One of the most successful mass cult brands in history,
Saturn stands to lose much because many of the essential founding elements
of the cult have been dismantled or eroded over the past few years.

The Saturn story exhibits some of the most important ingredients for cult
creation (the cult paradox, difference, making the novel familiar, power of
the person, clear ideology, a sense of mutual responsibility, contact, and so
on) which we will now review. It also displays some factors particular to
the situation in which many managers of large corporations find
themselves.

Saturn was formed because of the threat of superior competition that was
nimbler, smarter, and offered cheaper and better products than GM could
deliver. GM was being crucified in the small car segment by the Japanese
car industry. Starting in the seventies, the car giant had tried several
strategies to repulse the threat. It launched its own response, the Chevette. It
tried to buy

THE CLILTING OF BRANDS

equity stakes in Isuzu and Suzuki (if you can’t beat them join them). It tried
a joint venture with Toyota. None of these classic strategies really addressed
the issue however. The problem was not just the competition; it was the
industry itself. The competition had simply highlighted that the American
car industry was fundamentally flawed. Its own inherent failings simply left
it vulnerable to newer and better ideas.
How was the industry flawed? It had a systemic failure. The leadership at
GM and the UAW both agreed that every “given” in their industry was
hobbling competitiveness, especially the poisonous relationship between
the two organizations. They agreed that the issue had become so acute that
it was in everyone’s interest for something new to be tried.

Up to that point, each side had tried their own classic territorial maneuvers.
The management solution to noncompetitive pricing was to turn up the
speed dial of the assembly line—brute-forcing productivity. The attempt to
buy stakes in Japanese companies and brand their imported models was also
a strategy to bypass the union. In the face of job losses, the union made it
more painful to shed jobs with costly strikes. In a depressing cycle of
predictable, shortsighted strategies, the competitive threat was made more
potent not by anything the Japanese were doing, but by the instinctive
response of an industry atrophied by convention.

The “99”
In 1983 fifty people from the UAW, and fifty from GM management (one
of the 100 eventually left, and so they became the legendary “99”) formed a
study group to examine the industry. Not only did they find out how the
Japanese did what they did, but how the American car industry had done
what it had done—how it had ended up in such a mess. They traveled the
world touring compa

nies that exhibited best practice both within and without their industry.

Within a year the team concluded that the most productive organizations
focused on people, systems, and cooperation. The 99 was, in fact, a living
embodiment of their own recommendations. GM must change by creating
an ethos of cooperation and convention-challenging. The genesis of Saturn
was founded not in the idea to launch a new, more competitive brand, but in
labor relations.

Fine, but if the idea was to create an organization where management and
union worked together and where new processes were implemented, what
form would it take and what would it produce? Should these new practices
be tried at an existing plant? No, too much, too soon. This radical
experiment could dangerously destabilize a huge organization. At the same
time that these issues were being considered, the superior Japanese models
were forcing GM to recognize that their product was flawed. They needed a
good quality small car that competed with its foreign challengers.

In 1984, a small group at GM, including CEO Roger Smith, concluded that
the right thing to do was to make this entity a completely separate venture.
Don Hudler, former CEO of Saturn, said it “was a venture between the
UAW and GM to see how small car manufacturing could be kept in the
U.S.” That it became a whole new subsidiary, a new brand, with a designed-
from-scratch new car and a radical new retail system took most of the
industry by surprise, including many at GM. Joe Kennedy, former head of
Sales and Marketing, says this decision was made with no study and very
little consultation. It was an impulse decision. No one even bothered to do
the normal legal trademark checks on the name. Nonetheless, the new
company was announced in the first week of January 1985.

Roger Smith spawned what could in effect appear to be a direct challenge to

the core business. He chose to launch a new company

with totally new practices, with the mandate to challenge everything, and to
launch a new product, brand, and distribution channel. He was either
building a folly that would swallow a huge investment, or he was launching
a competitor to his own business.

He realized that heretical ideas would be suffocated in the stale air of

convention. To escape the poisonous legacy of the establishment he really
had no choice but to take a gamble. The only chance that heretical ideas had
of making it would be in a greenfield site, literally. In a state far away from
the smokestacks of Detroit and the cynical eye of management and worker,
Saturn was built in a bucolic setting near the town of Springhill, Tennessee.

An established institution spawning its own cult had been tried before. The
Catholic Church between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries faced
thousands of challengers that were stealing millions of its members. It had
attempted to become the Universal Church, to be market dominant, to be
the only candidate for religious expression. In the attempt to appeal to all it
had become indivisible from the state as a governing institution. It often
appeared more worldly than its secular partner. Calls for a return to the
fundamentals of Christianity were legion. Cults and sects were cropping up
everywhere (Martin Luther was but one of many hundreds of dissenters
over several generations) and gaining significant congregations of
passionate followers. Old ideas appeared bankrupt and irrelevant to a
population demanding more genuine spiritual satisfaction. The church was
at the top of its S-curve. It had to do something radical to satisfy the
radicalism of the age.

In a brilliant move to out-compete its competitors, it“culted” itself. Church

leaders created the monastic orders of Cistercians and Dominicans,
aesthetic communities that attracted passionate adherents who might well
have gone to the myriad competitive cults and sects to satisfy their need for
spiritual fulfillment. For several centuries they thrived as places where
vigorous theology existed outside the corrupting influence of the main body
of the church,

and to a significant degree, was successful in defusing the potential of its

competitors.

A sponsored cult can of course be allowed to succeed to the point where it

seriously challenges the survival of the parent. It can be nurtured to become
the new iteration of the mother organization and eventually grow to replace
it—a more vigorous, more relevant, more innovative child of an aging
parent. The Catholic Church chose not to let this happen. They used the
monastic orders as homes for their own discontents lurking within the main
body of the church, and as an option for outsiders tempted by competitive
offerings. But they did not let the new orders grow to become challengers to
the established Church’s hegemony (something we’ll see echoed in GM’s
ultimate strategy with regard to Saturn).

Start a Cult with Heretics

The 99 made their recommendations. Smith made the decision to create a
separate company. Now they had to find the people to run it. This was 1985,
five years before launch. Not only would the venture require the special
kind of people that could launch the first new car company in America in
fifty years, design and produce a new brand, and establish a new
distribution network. But it also demanded the kind of people who could
stomach generating and implementing ideas that flew in the face of virtually
every convention in the car industry. It was a “brave and crazy risk,” as the
ranks of GM saw it.

These individuals would face pressure from their own demons of doubt
tutored by years of immersion in one of the most hidebound industries.
They would face derision from the rest of the industry. They would perhaps
face pressure from their own compatriots in mainstream GM management
and the UAW who would

conceivably see them as recklessly destabilizing a delicately constructed

status quo. But perhaps equally seriously, they would have to give up the
familiar and take a risk. For many, the opportunity cost was too high.

You might expect that the entire 99 were obvious and immediate recruits for
the embryonic company. They were the ones that had undertaken the study,
knew the serious flaws of the status quo, and had ideas on how to fix them.
They knew the devil, and it wasn’t better than the alternative. Yet only
twenty or so of the original group migrated into Saturn. As Joe Kennedy put
it: “Some of them were traditional union guys, or traditional management
guys who came together to do a study, but couldn’t see letting go of the
world as they knew it. They may have intellectually understood the
concepts that they discovered, but they couldn’t emotionally.”

The founders self-selected on the basis of comfort with heresy and passion
for the idea. Joe described these early members as “closet heretics.” By
inclination they would question anything, and now they were given the
opportunity to follow through. The gate through which the founders had to
pass was one of cost: “You could not join Saturn lightly.” To commit to
something you must give up something valuable, in this case a cushy job
and predictable outcomes, an easier task for those heretical by nature.

The Cult Paradox in Action at Saturn

The closet heretics that lurked at the margins of GM were identified and
brought into a community where a culture of respect and what Joe calls
“giving people the appropriate dignity” gave them confidence to voice their
crazy ideas.

It was safe enough for grown men to feel comfortable coming to tears over
some issues. Joe expressed it as a highly creative community where
everyone was “living on the high wire of emotion.” Fac

tory workers, management suits, and salty union negotiators were not the
kind of people you’d expect to “let loose with some deeply personal story
or angle that brings a level of power to an idea,” but they could at Saturn.

What made the Saturn community especially close was an accumulation of

a classic set of community building circumstances. There was a clear threat:
the Japanese invasion that was jeopardizing jobs. It was fueled by the
awareness that everyone had made some sacrifice to be there. It had a clear
ideology, one of respect or “humanity” as Joe called it. The members did
not really feel comfortable, fulfilled, or recognized elsewhere in the GM
organization. “High contact” was forced between members. Saturn ran
offsite courses that forced intimacy and trust amongst all the players that
included a famous climbing wall (the program was called “learning the
ropes”). Over fifteen thousand people went through the program. This tight
community of misfits enabled the paradox to work. “People were able to
blossom who might not have been envisioned as blossoming in another
context . . . people became very successful [at Saturn] who were either not,
or could not be envisioned, as successful in the GM or UAW context.” In
other words, they became more themselves.

The Holy Trinity

At Saturn, the community was a Holy Trinity. The plant, the retailers, and
the customers all developed strong communities among themselves. But the
real community lay within the sense of responsibility that they had for each
other. At all points of contact, for any of the stakeholders, the experience
was one of belonging to a community of mutual responsibility between
makers, sellers, and buyers.
Don Hudler emphasized that, “Well, we realized we needed each

other.” What initially started as what he called a “partnership” between the

UAW and management evolved into one with “the retailers, which evolved
into one with the customers . .. and they would help us sell cars.” The end
benefit of advocacy was a function to a large degree of the sense of
responsibility the customer had to the Saturn Family. Many groups
traditionally alienated by the car industry (women, young buyers, ethnic
groups, and homosexuals) became disproportionately represented within the
Saturn buying population. Suzanne, a woman in her mid-twenties who
worked in the media said, a little embarrassed, “I felt stupid buying into the
whole Saturn Family thing, but I just bought in so hard . . . they were going
to be a different kind of company.” She recommended the brand to at least
twenty of her friends and colleagues.

A Cause
The power of a cause—to fight an enemy, to right a wrong, to implement a
better way—is to unify and galvanize members to action behind a common
goal. The ostensible cause for Saturn appeared to be the critical need to face
off a threat. The Japanese were coming and it was down to this team to save
the day and faith in the American car industry. The brand name is a legacy
of this original goal. It does not refer to the heavenly body in our solar
system as most believe (and the logo subsequently was designed to recall).
It was called the Saturn project after the space program that was started in
the sixties. The NASA program was designed to catch up and overtake
Russia’s surprise and humiliating lead in the space race. GM’s Saturn
project was founded as an attempt to redress the shaming of the American
car industry by the Japanese.

This may have been the stimulus for the project, but is what not what
became the true cause for the Saturn creators. It was not rich and
sustainable enough. It was an external stimulus, one that might

eventually go away. For the passionate heretics, the cause evolved from
repulsing a threat, a cause based on fear, to changing the world for the
better, one based on righteousness. It was an internal motivating force that
infused the cause with the energy it needed to fight the real enemy, the
status quo. The status quo abused everyone: customers, workers, and
management. It must be overturned.

The operating idea of the founders was “if we always do what we’ve always
done, we’ll always get what we’ve always got.” This attitude generated
what became the core ideology of the organization that fueled the cause. It’s
not written down anywhere, but its genesis was embedded in the
recommendations of the 99: respect for each other. As Don Hudler
remembers, “The premise was that whatever it is people are doing, most of
them already have most of the answers figured out ... we listened to people
whether they were production workers, potential customers, or whether they
were Saturn retailers.” That is how innovations such as the car clinics, that
became a defining idea for the brand, were adopted and flourished.

Interestingly, the ideology of respect flowed from the internal community to

the external customer community. With most companies this flows in
reverse order. When a company discovers the power of treating its
customers well, it generally translates that practice internally, transforming
everyone inside into a customer. At Saturn the ideology flowed all the more
powerfully from inside the organization to the outside. The customer was
buying into a core belief and practice already present within the company
and as such it felt all the more genuine.

Customers Rooting for th^ Cause

If the status quo is something generally believed to be bankrupt, the
ideology of a cult can become adopted by the disenfranchised

THE CTILTING OF BRANDS

and elevated into a cause. Something of this nature happened to Saturn. The
extension of the cause to the customer base happened because they could
identify with it. At one level, Saturn was fixing a problem that no one else
had the courage or desire to address (a retail experience that normally felt
like root canal treatment).
At a whole other level, customers were buying into respect as a larger idea.
Respect was missing in the service business generally. But it was also
missing in everyday life for many of Saturn’s customers. As Joe says, “I
think the people that Saturn serves are ordinary people. We didn’t serve the
rich, we didn’t serve the upscale, we served a lot of ‘heart of America’ kind
of people.” The respect with which they were treated in the dealership
resonated, and the stories they saw in the commercials featuring customers
like them being respected struck a cord. As Joe says “they, too, were regular
employees in big corporations that didn’t listen to their employees and
didn’t involve them in decisions. And hey, here’s this company doing all
these neat things. And I know it’s real because I’ve been through the
experience of buying one and I’ve felt it.”

They were rooting for an idea. And rooting for an idea makes money. I
asked why Suzanne bought Saturns: “The car was nice enough looking and
I needed an economical car. But I like the idea of the company... I really
went because of the message . . . it’s sort of a democratic car, a Midwestern
car . . . full of substance.” She was again embarrassed that she was buying
into the thing wholesale for such an advertising literate, cynical individual.
But as she said, “They were a total package of, like, ideology ... you think
you’re immune, and here I am thinking about it again ... I’m excited.”

A Cult Is Born

Commitment
Be authentic. Joe Kennedy agreed that the cult only works if the customer
feels a genuine commitment. He related how he has other companies
coming to him to ask what they should do to imitate Saturn’s success:
“Someone would say ‘Teach me how to get this cultlike enthusiasm for my
product.’ And we’d say, ‘Well, what do you believe in?’ And they would
say, ‘We’ll believe in whatever we need to believe in to do it.’ And we’d
say,‘Well if that’s your attitude, you’ll never do it.’ ”

One of the secrets behind the success of the Saturn cult was that it wasn’t a
lie. The ideology of respect was so vigorously held within the internal
community that it ensured that the customer experience was real. Don
Hudler knew from the outset that it was the retail network that would be the
brand to a major degree. Wayne, another loyal customer said he bought the
car because of the customer experience: “They treat you with respect.”
Despite the fact that his most recent purchase was “a little more expensive
than some of the others (he also comparison-shopped Honda and Toyota)”
he bought Saturn because “they’re really working for you .. . so it’s like
we’re all a big Saturn Family. So it’s like you’re hanging out with people
like you. You’re going to see your family. That’s kind of their mantra.”
These are also the words of a member of a marketing-literate generation.
Wayne is a ponytailed, earringed family man in his late twenties working as
a hardware and software buyer for a midsized company, pretty self-aware
and acutely attuned to what he calls “marketing-bullshit.” You cannot get
this kind of sustained buy-in if there i5 a whiff of inauthenticity.

Cults Start from Within

How do you ensure authenticity? The most effective way is to ensure that
there is a cult within the organization, not just among its members. The
clergy must be as committed as the congregation. Constructing a cult
following a formula can be done, but is a dangerous game; any hint of
hypocrisy can be its undoing (the Catholic Church is having a challenging
time right now). All those who worked at the Saturn plant and the retailers
were chosen, or self-selected on the basis of their passion for the idea, or
they were closet heretics seeking a better “church” in which to practice.
They all had sacrificed something to join. The management and line
workers alike had lost seniority and taken a cut in pay to enlist. Retailers
were making a financial investment in an idea that most of the industry
thought was lunatic and doomed to failure.

The internal passion was cultlike and translated palpably to the external
followers. The plant, retailers, and customers alike all bought into the
vision. More than that, they all had a sense of belonging to something
different, where divisions between management, production line, customer,
and retail network were truly obscured.

And it worked. Don Hudler says that the original business goal for the
addition of Saturn to the GM line-up was a net 75 percent more sales from
customers that would have otherwise gone to competitive brands. This it
achieved in its early days, and continues to do now. In addition, it
reinvented how cars are sold in America. No small feat for a low price car
company that to this day beats luxury brands in terms of customer
experience.

13

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THE CULT WAVERS, A CHURCH
STRENGTHENS
F or all its early success, the future of Saturn as a mass cult brand is unsure.
Its initial meteoric rise on the automotive scene has slowed, and in recent
years production lines have been down as new models have been introduced
but not met sales expectations. And many of the founders of the cult have
left.

Saturn is showing some of the classic signs of self-destruction seen in cults

throughout history thanks to three of the classic cult “destroyers”: a lack of
perceived mutual investment, a decline of the internal cult that sustained the
distinctive ideology, and too much tension.

On the other hand, some of the basics of a car brand have been improved.
Saturn has finally become more than a one-car company with the
introduction of a midsize model and an SUV. The cult appears to be alive
and well at the most important point of contact with the customer: the
retailer network. And finally, the mother church has itself become more
effective by adopting some of Saturn’s practices and its personnel (the two
are connected).

So which way will it go? Let’s look at these more recent events in a little
more detail.

THE CTILTING OF BRANDS

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Lack of Mutual Investment
By the time the brand was three or four years old, the company’s financial
commitment was looking a little thin from the consumers’ perspective. The
car was never intended to be an engineering breakthrough. It was to be
competitive with the very good Japanese small car market, and it was,
offering good value for money in terms of reliability, safety, and basic
specs. But it was beginning to be left behind and it was looking a little old.
What’s more, those loyal to the Saturn brand who wanted to trade up
couldn’t. It was a one-car brand. Don Hudler said, “we were losing
customers who wanted to stay with Saturn, but we didn’t have the products
that met their needs.” It was “like having a Civic or Corolla franchise.”

Customers were right in thinking that the company was hedging its
investment in them. For a new model to be in the showrooms three years
after the brand’s launch, the go-ahead on the midsize car would have had to
be signed off at the launch. It was 1991 and CM was going through a
particularly tough time. It had “other mouths to feed” in terms of the other
brands, according to Hudler, and they had to cut somewhere. There was the
argument— with which Hudler sympathized—that before Saturn was given
another billion dollars, it should show a return on the $2 billion already
invested.

By the end of the decade, Saturn customers’ loyalty was being stretched.
The experience in the store was still beyond compare, especially in the low
priced sector, but it was, at the end of the day, a car company and the cars
were not up to par.

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Too Much Tension
Tension started to dial up dangerously at Saturn in the late nineties during
an especially bitter dispute between the GM and the UAW union. The heads
of the respective sides called in the loyalties of their members at Saturn
who, until then, had been protected from what had become an even more
poisonous relationship at the head office. Saturn needed production at the
GM plants maintained so that it could continue to use their parts to build its
cars irrespective of any dispute in Detroit. This was seen as a violation of
loyalties by both the main management and union. No longer would both
sides at headquarters treat Saturn as an exception. Its special status within
GM was eroded and both Saturn management and union representatives
were ordered to toe the line with their respective organizations.

What’s more, leadership within GM changed and proffered a new strategy.

Commonality was the theme: bring structures and processes in line within
the corporation. This made business sense. Economies of scale were needed
to make GM more competitive. But it flew in the face of the founding
notion of Roger Smith. He knew that Saturn’s radicalism would only work
if it was kept at arm’s length from GM headquarters. It had a separate plant,
its own processes, and its own unique culture.

Saturn produced only 3 to 4 percent of GM’s sales, but it had a much higher
percentage of mind-share within the organization. As such it attracted much
resentment. It was viewed as “the late child in a wealthy family.” There
were jealousies. Saturn and its children “were spoiled, given everything that
the older kids had to work their asses off for,” says Don Hudler.

This was a case of a business unit entering too high a state of

tension with its own holding company. The child was upsetting the parent.

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The Vatican Absorbs Its Own Cult
GM brought Saturn within the walls of the mother church. Roger Smith had
maintained Saturn’s distance by allowing the new division to report directly
to the president of GM, Lloyd Reuss. Skip Lafauve, the original CEO of
Saturn, Hudler (who replaced him when Lafauve retired), and other senior
managers at Saturn would travel to Detroit every month to update Reuss on
their progress and plans. All the other divisions of GM, immense in their
own right, had to report to one of the many vice presidents. Saturn’s unique
reporting structure has been dismantled and it has now fallen in line with
usual practice at GM.

Saturns are now designed at GM’s main design facility. It shares many basic
parts with other divisions. The cars are also now made at other plants. The
midsized car was the first to be built outside of Springhill in Wilmington,
Delaware, by plant workers who had none of the Saturn cultural legacy.
Many within the industry blame these moves for a decline in the quality of
the product.

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The Internal Cult Dies
Skip Lafauve, a quietly charismatic man and the leader of Saturn, retired.
“He wasn’t a song-and-dance man ... he got people excited because of his
compassion and his own commitment to what he was doing,” said Hudler.
The union leader at the Saturn plant, Michael Bennett, 1 was ousted. Other
founding leaders left Saturn and were brought into roles within GM.
Michael Bennett complained

that it’s “the entire dismantling of the entire Saturn concept—it’s no longer
a different kind of car company, and it’s no longer a different kind of car.” 2

When I asked Hudler whether there is the same degree of ownership and
mutual responsibility amongst the Springhill members that had been
Saturn’s defining idea, he admitted “it exists to a lesser degree . . . although
there’s some people that still cling to it.”

He also confessed that the early zealotry had eroded. Why? “You don’t have
the freshness that once gave us all the more energy,” he said. It’s harder to
keep things going than it is to start something new. (He has retired from
Saturn management and opened his own Saturn chain of retail outlets in
Texas.)

Not all is gloomy for Saturn, far from it. The products themselves are more
plentiful and produced at competitive costs by amortizing resources with
GM. Although profitability had never been the prime objective for the
Saturn launch (stemming the loss and recapturing customers in the small car
segment had been the goal, which it achieved handsomely), profitability is
projected to reach acceptable standards. There has also been a less tangible
but arguably more impactful effect of the integration of Saturn.

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Absorption of Your Own Cult Can
Be a Sound Strategy
The mother church has improved its own effectiveness by embracing its
own difficult child. Two or three hundred key people from Saturn were
absorbed into GM at senior levels. Six of the eleven top Saturn management
became officers at the mother church replacing their responsibilities at the
smaller company for the equivalent, but much larger ones at the parent. As a
result “a lot of the things we did at Saturn are now standard at GM,” Don
claims proudly,

although he was hesitant to go on because “people at GM bridle at this . . .

they get very upset that this upstart could teach them anything.”

Absorbing the upstart is a sound strategy if your long-term objective is to

create innovation at the main institution. It permits revolution with low risk.
Heretics and their ideas were greenhoused at Saturn. Upsetting the status
quo was limited within the confines of a relatively small province of GM
until the innovations were proven in the marketplace. The best ideas were
reintegrated, the resisters of change at GM were gagged by the undeniable
evidence of dramatic business results. The company got a revolution
without upsetting the apple cart. Whafis more, as Roger Smith wisely noted,
there was no massive institution to stifle the ideas. Spawning them outside
in a greenfield site, and then integrating the ones that worked inside was a
sound strategy.

However, you can only do this once. GM has risked the erosion of the all
that makes Saturn a good car division by drawing it within the purview of
the establishment. Once the cult is in, it’s in. You will be very lucky if you
can maintain heresy if you have absorbed the leaders into the mother
church, and pulled the amputated cult within controlling distance.

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The Cult Lives on-Outside the
Mother Church
Actually, GM has been able to draw in the cult and maintain some of its
cultlike quality. The cult appears to be alive and well in the remote reaches
of the satellite churches of Saturn—the retail network. Saturn’s heresy was
truly manifested to the consumer at the point of sale. It was the reason the
majority of them bought the car, again and again, and why they
recommended it, again and again.

The retail experience was radical. Many others have since copied it, but few
have really reproduced the experience. Some have stolen

the idea of no-haggle pricing. Others have redesigned their showrooms to

feel more user-friendly and less like storage facilities with men in bad suits.
But few have really got to the heart of what made the experience different,
the people. Saturn hired virgins, those who had never been tainted by the
sleazy deal, and refugees, those who wished to escape from it. Saturn
retailers would “rather them not have experience,” Bob Abernathy, a
leading car retail manager in Texas told me.“We don’t want bad habits . . .
inexperience were happy with. We would rather train them ourselves.”

Does the zealotry and vision still exist amongst the staff? Does the customer
still feel the difference and believe that the famed Saturn Family still exists?
I visited a retail outlet and spoke to the staff, and interviewed some
customers who had recently bought Saturns.

The dealership I visited doesn’t really feel like one. It’s small, intimate, and
homey. Almost immediately upon entering you find yourself facing a
reception desk with a friendly young man waiting behind it. Behind him is
what looks like someone’s living room with comfortable club chairs, a
carpet, magazines, and doughnuts and coffee. There were no seedy little
offices with dealers hunched over papers talking conspiratorially to nervous
looking customers about the special deal he’s negotiated with his boss just
for them. There were “guest areas” (you are a guest before you buy a car, a
customer after you’ve joined the family) consisting of wooden tables and
chairs in the open (“there’s nothing to hide ... all the prices are the same for
each customer”) with consultants in open necked sports shirts chatting to
relaxed families.

Bob showed me the “launch bay” where customers receive their new car,
are introduced to the whole team (whatever employee is around, whether
mechanic or service manager or porter), and shout the Saturn cheer: “We
say, We say, Saturn!” He showed me the consultants’ shared office where
they call a customer the day after delivery and again three days after to
check whether they are happy

THE CUTTING OF BRANDS

with their purchase. I asked him whether the car clinics and barbecues still
happen. The clinics are run quarterly and barbecues are held by each store
“on a whim,” maybe once a month or every two months.

How does the staff feel about the brand and their jobs? I spoke to the
service manager who had been at the store in its former location for ten
years. His job was to organize the service, of course. But he said his real job
was to “make the marriage work” through the frequent contact of the
servicing experience. The sales consultants do the “ceremony and the
honeymoon.” As a result, he estimates that the outlet gets roughly a 70
percent recommendation rate from existing customers.

Abernathy believes that the Saturn Family, although it sounds corny, is real.
He claims, “If you broke down in Houston with a normal car, no one would
pull over unless to rob you. If you are driving a Saturn, another customer
would pull over and help.” He introduced me to Art, who four years ago
was a virgin. Prior to becoming a sales consultant he was a professional
photographer. Instead of a job offered to him at a local university, he took
one at Saturn instead, but not before he interviewed other consultants at
associated outlets to check on the veracity of the claims about the culture. A
stocky, muscular man with a short beard and engaging talkative manner, he
enjoys working there “because of the camaraderie.” He claims that the
culture of respect is alive and well and that “we treat each other the same
way we treat our customers.” I asked him where that comes from. He said
bad sales consultants self-eject: “I think the kind of people that end up
staying are the right kind of people. Were basically nice. The others just
spin off.”

Do the customers feel it? Art, of course, claims that they do. He says that at
bottom it’s the service they get: “these people come back to Saturn for
maintenance when they could go to Jiffy Lube or their neighborhood
mechanic. It is, that’s the joke, you know, the Saturn

Family, but it’s true. I mean, it’s almost like becoming a member of a club.”

To check I interviewed a few customers at the other end of the country.

Wayne had just bought a Saturn in upstate New York replacing one he had
for ten years. Why another Saturn? “We bought it because we like the
brand.” What was the brand as far as he was concerned? “The dealer
experience.” They had been going to various Saturn dealerships for
servicing of their previous car for ten years. Interestingly, when they went
to a dealer in Westchester to buy their second car, the experience was not
good. Wayne shook his head and said “it was just awful.” He kept going
back refusing to believe his beloved brand could be like that: “maybe they
were having an off day,” but they were “just not nice people.” Did this put
him off? Thankfully for Saturn, he rationalized it as not “Saturn-like”
(coincidentally a term used internally by the original founders). He wrote it
off as an exception.

He found a place that was more typical in his view. The personnel were
“more casual” than the Honda dealership he had also tried when he
comparison shopped. At Honda he encountered “prototypical pushy
salesmen.” It wasn’t a high-pressure sale at Saturn— “He didn’t try to sell
me on the extras; in fact, I had to ask him ‘what are the extras?’ ”

The numbers seem to prove the point that the cult is still working at point of
sale. Last year Saturn got best overall rating by J.D. Powers for service
excellence, and was beaten this year only by luxury brands. But what about
that poor dealership that Wayne found? The rigorous vetting of retailers that
had occurred at Saturn’s foundation no longer takes place, according to
Hudler. Clearly
it needs to be reinstituted as new customers come to the brand.

c.

They are unlikely to be as charitable as Wayne.

The cult is alive and well at the retailer level, apart from this worrying
aberration in Westchester. The employees have still got

religion and so has the customer. But there is a lurking threat to this satellite
cult. GM must resist the temptation to bring the retail organization under
closer control. According to Hudler, the marketing and retail relationships
to date are essentially unchanged in their separation from the mother
church. However, this year the Saturn retailers’ annual meeting was
integrated into the larger GM bash. At one point the Saturn retailers entered
a room for a cocktail party with “five thousand of their closest friends.”
Don says: “They really didn’t like it. . . because of the loss of camaraderie.”
Mortified at the turn of events, the Saturn dealers insisted “overwhelmingly
that ‘we need to have a Saturn-only thing’ ” next year.

Not giving them their own annual meeting was clearly a mistake and if it’s
not a one off, the internal cult amongst this unique network will die—and
with it the experience that sells the car. The Saturn Family is palpably felt
by retail employees and customers alike must be maintained. If the internal
cult at the retail level is extinguished by not keeping it separate from
mainstream GM, then the external cult will also fail. As long as the
customer feels the authenticity of the cult at the retailer level, then its death
at the plant may have less of an impact.

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The Long View: The Mother
Church Adopted an Effective
Defense
During the course of this book we’ve examined how brand cults are made.
We’ve looked at things from the perspective of organizations that are often
the challenger of the status quo. But what if your organization is the one
being challenged? What if in your market, new ideas have emerged and are
gaining popular and passionate support? Roger Smith was facing this scary
predicament in the early eighties. The Japanese car makers were the
heretical organisms that had entered the U.S. market and were stealing
away a sig

nificant congregation. If you face this problem (it is at some point inevitable
for any dominant entity) then the following strategies may help. GM, the
challenged incumbent, ultimately used two of the strategies with its launch
and reintegration of Saturn.

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THREE STRATEGIES TO DEAL
WITH COMPETITORS’ CHETS
These three options, used in the past by threatened churches, and today by
threatened corporations and brands, are open to you as potential defenses
against competitive heresy. Only two of them are real defenses, however,
because only two yield sustainable answers.

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1. Persecution
Pour resources and energy into destroying dangerously heretical
organizations. Persecution has been the consigliere of organized religion for
millennia as a way as staving off competitors. But business has not escaped
the temptation to brutalize competitors, either. For example, the major
airlines’ automatic response to fledgling competitors has been to overwhelm
them with scheduling and undercut them with unsustainable pricing.
(Swallowing this cost is seen as a sound investment to drive the upstart into
oblivion.)

This is only a short-term solution. If the dominant incumbent is really

bankrupt and irrelevant then heresy will prevail. You may be able to kill off
one cult, but another will surely emerge to satisfy the latent needs of a
dissatisfied consumer population or congregation. Although they stamped
out calls for reformation for centuries, the Catholic Church ultimately could
not prevent it.

2. Absorption
Absorbing competitive ideas into your own organization has also been a
tactic used for thousands of years. Much of what is now believed to be its
own unique theology the Christian Church actually stole from competitive
cults. It essentially defused the challengers’ power by co-opting their
difference. (GM’s attempt to buy into its Japanese competitors could be
seen as such a strategy.) This can be a very successful long-term strategy. It
can produce its own problems, of course, typical of many attempts to merge
organizations with different cultures.

3. Culting Yourself
Saturn is a good example. Culting yourself can be a very smart way of
repulsing others by beating them at their own game. The idea is to launch
your own cult. Establish a separate entity with its own theology and devoted
followers, and invest in it so that it steals share from the newcomers. Protect
yourself by attacking like with like.

This last strategy worked for ten years. Then GM pulled Saturn closer to the
mother church in terms of reporting structure and control of its processes
and output. But it also employed the second strategy outlined above. It
absorbed the heretics and their theology into the main church and became
the stronger for it. GM actually exploited both strategies—absorption and
self-culting. In effect, it had two bites at heresy—by starting its own cult,
and then ab

The Cult Wavers, a Church Strengthens

sorbing its fledgling into the main body of the company and reinventing
itself from within.

The original Saturn founders may look on sadly as the cult of Springhill
declines, but the larger picture for GM could well have improved. As long
as it can maintain the cult at the retailer and customer level, then it may be
able to have it both ways—to reinvent itself from within and have a thriving
cult.

c.

14

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WHO RONS THE COLT?
“ T) ower-crazed control freaks” would be the verdict of most

I people. Informed by images of Applewhite, Jim Jones, and Koresh, whose

whims dictated the very existence of their followers, the average person
quite reasonably concludes that a mandate to wield absolute power defines
a cult leader.

Actually, the most successful cults have quickly distributed power and
responsibility beyond the founder or one central figure. There is one
fundamental flaw that puts severe limits on the longevity of a despot’s cult:
the despot’s own longevity. Cult leaders tend to die. Proxies can be built
into the organization to perpetuate a founder’s role (as have the Catholics,
in the form of the Pope, or the Mormons in the form of the Living Prophet;
in these cases the Godgiven mandate for revelation and control is passed
from one leader to the next). Otherwise ownership of the organization must
be shared more widely within the franchise for the cult to live beyond a
human lifespan.

“Command-Control” is not a sustainable model for brands in contemporary

marketing either. Of course brand managers have never had the power of a
despot. But the organizational model they work within is an attempt at
direct manipulation of customer

THE C LILTING OF BRANDS

behavior from one central point. For the past fifty years or so most
companies have followed the paradigm institutionalized by Procter and
Gamble. The brand manager is, as they call it, “the General Manager of the
brand.” They are the commanders who dictate what the product, packaging,
advertising, promotion, pricing, distribution, and budget will be. Into the
market goes the brand shaped by these decisions. And especially during the
fifties and sixties when this model first came into its own, consumer
behavior jerked with almost puppetlike responsiveness to the brand
manager’s will. It was an era when the producer, not the consumer, dictated
the terms.

But this model has become old. Even within the world of cult brands where
extreme attachment is expected, the old command control method of
management is increasingly rare. Ownership of the brand must be shared
with its membership for it to thrive. The power has shifted. The new
protagonists are the consumers and they are demanding a greater role in the
shaping of their own community. This is to be encouraged of course. A
feeling of ownership will normally lead to feelings of loyalty to the
community they’ve helped shape.

But that redefines the role of a brand manager. For a cult brand, his or her
role in this consumer society is less one of a commander of the market
place, and more of a supporter and nurturer of the community their brand
may be fortunate enough to enjoy. But that demands a massive change of
attitude. The vocabulary that’s still used today in the marketing world is
telling. It’s drawn from the command-control culture that it’s imitated for
generations: that of the military. Marketers run “campaigns,” they “target”
consumers, they go for “market domination,” they “launch” an “attack” on
competitors, they “penetrate” markets, and “capture” market share.

The following are some models that portend the future. They all distribute
responsibility for the running of cult, some much more than others. And
imbedded in them all is respect for the role of the community.

All this is not to say that there is no role for a “charasmatic leader.” If you
have one, use them. Steve Jobs, Malcolm Forbes, Mary Kay have all been
huge assets to their brands. As we have seen, they can become metaphors
for the members of the community, and often write the founding ideology.
But it is very important to ensure that their power is distributed before their
disappearance predicts that of the cult brand. Any good manager knows that
absolute power in the hands of one person, no matter how effective they
may be, yields only a short-term benefit to the organization.

The Member as Priest Model

This model provides for a certain amount of direction from above, but with
a sense of ownership and accountability throughout. As such, its
membership tends to be highly loyal, extremely motivated, and very
energetic on behalf of the organization. Not surprisingly, some of the
organizations that we have spent the most time talking about in this book
are the ones that live this model.

The structure of the Mormon Church is very rigid, apparently onerously

hierarchical, and seemingly all power is vested at its peak. At the top there
is a Living Prophet. Beneath him are two counselors. Together with the
quorum of twelve apostles directly underneath them on the organizational
chart, this select fifteen are responsible for making and maintaining official
church policy. Beneath the quorum of apostles there are seventy area
presidents with each area president being responsible for several stakes.
Each stake is made up of several wards and every ward has a bishop who is
responsible for a local congregation.

To reinforce the apparent invulnerability of the ordained structure, the man

at the top is a direct successor of the founder, Joseph Smith, the first
prophet of the church. Rather like the role of the

Pope at the head of the Catholic Church, these Living Prophets can issue
doctrinal edicts.

Where the Mormon Church differs from the Catholics is in its distribution
of ownership. The structure may be hierarchical, but it is accessible.
Anyone can be president. Anyone can be an apostle or any of the other
spiritual roles within the church. 1 You do not have to be celibate, decked in
black and red, or employed by the vast structure of the Vatican to run the
church.

Where the Latter-day Saints also differ from the Catholic Church is that the
management of the organization goes very wide and deep. The
congregation runs itself. It administers moral, spiritual, and temporal
benefits to the whole community and actively runs the organization. Within
the entire church only the most senior leaders receive a stipend (the
Apostles and the Seventy). Literally millions of people set aside strictly
defined time commitments to help govern their individual religious
communities. This degree of involvement is not just a matter of someone
volunteering to arrange the church flowers, but is a direct substitute for the
kind of responsibilities shouldered by paid clergy in other religions.

By creating a structure that encourages such wide and comprehensive

distribution of responsibility and ownership amongst its members, is
democratic (with a hint of the hand of God present), and totally involving
for those who devote so much of their time and resources, the church has
created a very robust organizational model. It remains to be seen (by our
descendants I suspect) whether it is a more vigorous model than even the
Catholic Church.

Similar to the Mormon Church, Mary Kay also employs an apparently

daunting hierarchy. It begins with MK corporate and moves from national
to regional to local directors of individual sales forces. Where it is radically
different from most sales organizations however, is that Mary Kay is
essentially a republic of independent businesses that pay a tithe up the line
via other independent business owners to the Mary Kay Corporation. Each
consultant is ultimately

working for herself with the center only providing “spiritual direction”
(especially in the form of the mythic founder) and the wherewithal to
conduct their business in the form of products and sales materials.

Saturn distributes ownership to its retailers, each a separate fiefdom

(notwithstanding that its buildings, its members’ clothing, and its pricing
policy is set to uniform standards). In fact, several of the “brand-defining”
ideas would never have happened if it weren’t for Saturn’s culture of letting
go. The now famous Saturn Cheer, where the retailers left what they were
doing and clapped as a customer took delivery of their car, grew organically
out of the retailer network.

At the factory, every line worker or member of management felt that they
ran the company. Don Hudler, Saturn’s second president, emphasized that
Saturn, “adopted the philosophy early on, that everything we did, we would
do by consensus.” This was true even when it came to his own employment.
He was interviewed not only by his management colleagues but also by
union members.
By enacting such egalitarian and rare ideals, Saturn created a culture of
mutual ownership that encouraged highly creative involvement in the
brand. An authoritarian, rigidly enforced brand strategy and program would
likely have missed the ideas that only a community freed to “play” wou ld
have generated. A distributed ownership within the body of the membership
itself creates the right environment for ideas, energy, commitment, and
ultimately advocates; a member who feels as if they have helped model the
brand will likely be an evangelist for it.

c.

Piggybacking

So the idea of sharing ownership with your community appeals to you, but
you don’t have a community yet? Don’t despair. Just co-opt

somebody else’s. Piggybacking onto other communities has been a

successful strategy of cult formation throughout history.

A nascent Christianity suckled from Judaism’s breast, and the Mormons

hopped onto Christianity’s back. However, these are cult examples, and
brands can’t just appropriate the market leader (except by merger). As a
fledgling shoe company, Nike couldn’t just co-opt Adidas or its brand
values, but it could, and did, leverage and own the emotions of the running
community, and ultimately champion them. Ben & Jerry’s couldn’t latch
onto Haagen-Dazs, but they could align themselves with the liberal agenda
and gain market share off the back of the ideals of established political and
social communities.

EBay is a cult that piggybacked itself into the business hall of fame. It
latched onto preexisting communities of collectors. From the beginning
they exploited the collecting culture by co-opting the collectors wherever
they congregated. In 2000 alone, eBay had planned to sponsor or speak at
forty-eight trade shows for collectors. 2 As one journalist explained, “The
roots of this strategy for reaching into the collector community lie more in
Tupperware parties than in the typical Internet model.” 3 The “Tupperware
party” idea was critical to eBay’s growth since word-of-mouth marketing
depends entirely on the reputation of the “evangelists” touting your
services. In eBay’s case, these evangelists were “collector-experts.” EBay
called them Ambassadors, and as George Koster, eBay’s senior manager of
new business, explained, their role was important for reaching the
collecting population. “Collectors are like Amway distributors. They love
what they’re doing and they want to share it. We’ll give [the Ambassadors]
the tools so they can recruit others, so they can have parties in their houses
and talk about eBay.”

The French researchers Bernard and Veronique Cova wrote a paper on tribal
marketing that proposes the doctrine of piggybacking. 4 They hold that
marketers should consider their product

Who Runs the Cult?

or service from the perspective of its “linking” value to a community rather

than its “use” value. That is, marketers need to ask how their brand can best
support a community versus simply how the product is delivered and used
by individual customers.

Cova and Cova note how Salomon, a very traditional ski brand was able to
woo and grow market share within the snowboarding community. This was
a difficult challenge given that the brand was hated by snowboarders. They
were generally disparaged as “daddy’s brand,” preeminent in a sport of old
farts: skiing. Realizing that they had an uphill battle, Salomon emphasized
internally that it must “be humble” and that it had to “keep a low profile and
listen.”

This is a pretty radical strategy for marketers. Be humble? How often is that
phrase uttered in the boardroom? But they pursued an infiltration plan by
first observing snowboarders in their natural environment to learn their
habits, needs, and attitudes. They created a marketing unit consisting of
snowboarders and supported a team that didn’t even use their brand
(Salomon didn’t make boards yet).

A year later, Salomon launched its new snowboard line with no advertising,
simply a physical presence at training camps and the placement of Salomon
boards in pro shops (not a traditional winter sports channel). They
continued their strategy of community support by maintaining a presence at
snowboarding playgrounds and allowing boarders to test out their products
without any pressure to buy. They were just there, allowing the community
to sample the product.

This strategy worked for Salomon, allowing it to rise to number three in the
French snowboarding market within the same number of years. This feat is
especially impressive considering that it didn’t have the relatively easy task
of launching a new brand. It was fighting the legacy of being a brand
loathed by the very consumers that

they were attempting to sell to. They achieved this feat by financing,
supporting, and nurturing an existing community. They did not attempt to
launch, attack, assualt, capture, or penetrate.

When piggybacking, it’s vital to remember that the community is not

something that is to be invaded. Nor do you employ all of the tactics and
plans traditionally taught in marketing classes that more resemble battle
plans to engage an enemy than approaches to engage a discriminating and
independent community of customers. The community is more important
than you or your brand. Loving the community and putting it first, so that it
comes to adopt, own, and even champion your brand is the route to follow.
Be ever so humble, for that is the way to gain lasting allegiance from your
customer group.

Letting Go

It is tempting to interfere with your brand community, especially when

things go wrong. BMW Motorcycles company almost ruined what started
with the best of intentions. In a vivid example of learning the lesson of
letting go, the brand team retreated, just in time, from the kind of bombastic
interference redolent of command/ control management.

They had provided a virtual church as a meeting place for its very
independent community of riders. The company’s communications agency,
Merkley and Partners, turned what had been essentially a“brochureware”
Web site into an actively used church hall where the running of services
was left to the congregation. The new design recognized the community’s
obsession with the ride and made landscapes and riders the focus of the site.
A ride section was designed, rather like a church notice board, where riders
posted their favorite trips with maps and details for the rest of the
community to use.

Who Runs the Cult?

But the heart of the site consists of the bulletin boards in the actively used
Community Section of the site. The site was the first by a major corporation
to relinquish control of the content to the membership alone. It worked
more like an independent organization’s Web site than a company-
sponsored one. This strategy worked well and the site was actively used.
That is until about a month after launch, when a cult leaders (and major
corporation’s) fear came true. A disgruntled member started attacking the
company.

He had a particular grudge. It wasn’t until later that it was learned that he
had applied for a job at BMW and was rejected. He started posting hate
mail over the boards. He became a lightning rod for those who had had
some bad experiences with the brand. Company officials were
understandably nervous. Could they allow negative comments not only
about the bike or a dealer or two, but also about the corporation to appear
on a company Web site? After some debate, they believed they could not
and instructed the agency pull all of the brand terrorist’s postings off the
board overnight.

This was the worst thing that they could have done. The company tried to
control the boards and by doing so it lost control. The brand terrorist was
elevated to martyr, and the company was made to look defensive. Many of
the community who were neutral about the discontented rider’s postings
suddenly were not.

Quickly, the company reversed its decision. The negative comments were
reposted and the marketing director made an announcement that in the
future they would not censor the content, and that the boards would become
self-policing. This would be the final company posting, he wrote, and he
and other employees would only get on the boards in their capacity as
fellow riders. The company retreated and the site now functions as a heavy
traffic church for an active community with sixteen thousand registered
users.

The BMW cult is run by the membership for the membership. Through a
deft recovery, the company has enabled a highly functional sponsored
meeting place for its decentralized cult and in the process built respect for
itself from that membership. The delicate relationship between the company
and its brand community was restored by its recognition that its role is one
of support, not control.

Occasionally, gifts fall into the laps of unsuspecting brand managers.

Sometimes communities will adopt a brand that the brand isn’t trying to
engage. If it does, don’t mess with it. Resist your inclination to control
events and let the community become the brand manager.

Timberland is one of these brands. Timberland is best known for their

hiking boots and all their communications paint an authentic outdoor
picture of the brand. Their retail outlets have the feel of wooden cabins and
their Web site is laden with pictures of isolated natural beauty. Their “about
Timberland” statement claims that they are the “global leader in the design
of apparel and accessories for consumers who value the outdoors and their
time in it.” Yet Timberland boots are huge in the very urban hip-hop
community. One rapper/producer has even named himself Timbaland, and
in 2001 six boys were named for the brand. The company’s revenue rose to
$1.2 billion.

Alex Wipperfurth has written an excellent book called Brand Hijack that
delves deep into this concept. One of his cases follows the story of Pabst
Blue Ribbon (PBR), a popular blue-collar beer from Wisconsin. In the
1970s PBR was one of America’s most popular beers, but its market share
had declined ever since. Many factors caused this. For one, there were
many shifts of company ownership and each new owner seemed content to
let the brand slide. In an industry that annually spends roughly $1 billion
advertising, PBR hasn’t had a television campaign in many years.
Pabst, now owned by South African interests and based in San

Who Runs the Cult?

Antonio, sold less than a million barrels in 2001. This was its lowest figure
in decades and 90 percent below its peak in 1975. But by mid-2002
something had changed drastically. Pabst Blue Ribbon had miraculously
become the fastest growing brand of all domestic beers, achieving double
digit growth within a declining industry.

What happened to spark such a turnaround? A thriving community had

adopted PBR as a brand that espoused their ideals. It started out West when
the bike messenger community in Portland adopted Pabst as their beer.
What they liked about the beer was much more than the fact that it typically
sold for a dollar. They liked how they had never seen advertisements for it,
and that it was a throwback to America’s heartland and blue-collar ideals. It
was a beer that wasn’t about image.

Ironically, the bike messenger’s embrace quickly gave PBR an image. They
spurred a revolution that made PBR the rallying flag of urban hipsters
everywhere. The Hipster’s Handbook, a how-to guide for the hip-impaired
declares PBR as, “The best-tasting domestic beer. Very popular with guys in
work shirts and cowgirl hipsters. The only beer that is cool to drink out of
the can.” A trip to Williamsburg, Brooklyn (perhaps the epicenter of the
hipster universe) easily cements the roots of PBR’s comeback. Young
counterculture ragamuffins with unwashed hair and torn jeans proudly wear
Pabst T-shirts and hats. Almost every bar serves PBR and it has become the
official beer of several art galleries.

Impressively, PBR’s marketing team has resisted the temptation to jump on

the hipster bandwagon and try to market to this cynical demographic. They
realize that they are popular because they haven’t been trying to woo
anyone. Neal Stewart, PBR’s divisional marketing manager, constantly uses
such heretical phrases as, “let the consumer lead the brand,” and “organic,”
or “genuine.” When Kid Rock’s camp was interested in an endorsement
deal, Pabst declined. When offered the chance to sponsor major
snowboarding events or support extreme athletes, it also passed. PBR
wisely
realizes that it needs to completely let go if they want to continue to enjoy
their resurrection within the hipster community. To try and market to them
would only be to offend them and therein lose their only constituency
besides aging steelworkers.

Letting go is hard to stomach for most managers. The inclination to

interfere is completely understandable given brand managers’ job
descriptions—ones that generally require skills for active command and
control. I know. I, too, used to be in the middle of one of those brand
manager-centric org charts at Procter and Gamble where the culture was
one of direct action and consumer response.

Nonetheless, distribution of ownership is vital to ensure the cult’s longevity

and vigor. And sensitivity to one’s role in a cult’s management is critical as
the community itself demands more participation in its destiny. The typical
image of autocratic cult leader, or imperial brand manager is on its way out.
A balance of power is on its way in.

OceanofPDF.com
CONCLUSION
he opportunity for creating cult brands has never been better.

But at the same time the need to do so has never been more acute. Too
many marketers have adopted a defensive attitude when actually they are on
the brink of creating some of the most tenacious bonds between their brands
and customers.

The smarter marketers have known for a long time that decisions for or
against their brands are not just made rationally. In fact the smartest have
known instinctively what neurologists now believe, that no decision is made
entirely rationally. All decisions reference the emotional centers of the
brain. They know that an emotional predisposition towards their brand can
give them an advantage even when their product is out-featured or out-
priced by competitors. Nonrational connections form the stickiest bonds.

Marketers’ only real choice is to become more dependent on emotional ties

or face ever-dwindling profits. As more markets are characterized by
products and services with little material difference, brands have to become
more central in satisfying emotional needs.

Few stronger emotions exist than the need to belong and make meaning.
And brands are poised to exploit that need.

As we have seen, brands have the potential to become the new centers of
community. They are the cousins of the newer types of communities that
have replaced the old geographically anchored ones. Well financed and
conceived, succored by media, communications, and mobility (the very
things that eroded traditional communities), they can become the loci for
groups of individuals unified by shared values, interests, and identity.
Whether by design or intuition, very few marketers (such as the ones we’ve
studied) are doing the right things to exploit this opportunity. Others (the
majority) are doing nothing and gaining nothing. And still others are
enjoying the fruits of a strong community despite their inactivity (and in
some cases because of it, such as Pabst and Timberland) because consumers
have just got up and done it themselves.

I’ve studied cults because they are the most extreme manifestation of
community, and I wanted to understand how devoted communities can be
formed around brands. Some brands we’ve looked at are already enjoying
dedication from their members. When someone can say, in all seriousness,
“I think that there are people who would understand Macs and don’t know
it yet, and those are the people who have to be reached, those are the people
who have to be saved,” then clearly brands already have the capacity to
generate cultlike fanaticism. The purpose of this book is to extend that
capacity to many others.

Some people I’ve spoken to about this subject (including marketers) have
been depressed at the prospect. “Is consumerism really going to penetrate
so far into our lives that that the spawn of grubby business will replace the
traditional ways of communing with our fellow citizens?” is the gist of their
complaint. Others are skeptical that brands can satisfy such complex needs
anyway. And others point to the growth of alternative forms of spirituality
(yoga, Kabbala, Buddhism, etc.) as a sign that there’s increasing
disillusionment with the materialist American Dream.

These laments and skepticism may be justified. But based on the evidence
of my and others’ research, whether we like it or not, brands are being used
as credible sources of community and meaning. And I think there’s an
important reason why they have been elevated to this role.

We live in a spiritual economy. There is a marketplace for worldviews and

communities as well as goods and services. There are both consumers and
producers of belief systems and community. And the laws of supply and
demand apply as much in the spiritual exchange as they do in the economic.
Where the economic and spiritual marketplaces differ, however, is that in
the former, demand can rise and fall. In the spiritual marketplace demand is
pretty constant. There is always a need to belong and make meaning. They
are the essentials of the human condition after all.

Supply, however, can be satisfactory, plentiful, or entirely absent. When

demand is satisfied, say, by vigorous organized churches with broad
congregations, it is harder for new religions to edge their way into the
marketplace. When it’s not, you’re likely to see many cults emerge. For
example, the population of the Pacific coastal states are as religiously
inclined as the rest of the country but they attend religious services much
less, because there are fewer established Churches. As a relatively newly
settled region with a highly transient population, traditional forms of
worship have not yet taken root . 1 Alternatives are ready to spring up to
meet the latent demand (an explanation for California’s reputation as the
source of wacky cults).

We may well be at a pivotal point in the supply/demand equation right now.

The fact that significant numbers of people are looking to brands to provide
the functions normally provided by social, religious, and political
institutions is because those institutions are not meeting their needs. The
traditional and established religious

THE CLILTING OF BRANDS

and secular institutions are having their authority questioned and their
relevance reviewed by the general population. 2

We’ve reached a unique intersection in society that favors marketers. On

one side, established institutions are proving to be increasingly inadequate
sources of meaning and community. On the other, there has been a growth
of a very sophisticated kind of consumerism. Marketing is reaching its
maturity in terms of shrewdness and artfulness. Billions are being spent on
gratifying a discriminating audience with complex and subtly crafted
brands. The confluence of these two trends is leading to these commercial
creations being embraced by a population disillusioned by altogether less
satisfying, and often less trusted organizations. Alongside alternative
religions, brands are now serious contenders for belief and community.
So, as long as traditional institutions fail, and marketers remain
sophisticated, then brands can become credible sources of community and
meaning.

This is a major recalibration of the role of brands. And if you think you are
exempt from the opportunity this presents because your product exists in an
unexciting category (you sell packaged goods, for example, not
motorcycles), that it is not especially competitive or has poor product
performance, just remember that emotional attachment trumps rational
analysis. At the end of the day, an Apple computer is just a box of
electronics. While Harley has had a 40 percent market-leading share, it has
also had a technically very poor product (they would leak oil on the
showroom floor). We saw customers get passionate about, and generate
complex identities for flavored sugar water, a “packaged good” that is
consumed in

Conclusion

minutes. Saturn has unexceptional cars, Mary Kay products are good but
not revolutionary, and the WWF is absurd.

If you are resolved to start a cult brand, then here is a reminder of the most
important principles of cult formation. Make your brand different enough,
but the same enough. In the world of cult brands, people buy people, not
things or ideas alone. Maintain just the right amount of tension with the
norm. Have a meaning system, and an integrated system of symbology that
communicates it. Invest at least as much into the cult as your members do in
terms of emotional and financial commitment, energy, and creativity. Never
lie. Rethink your position from being a commander-controller to being a
community nurturer—a more humble role.

The next cult brand could be anything. The next cult brand could be yours.

c.
MOTES
INTRODUCTION

1. New York Times, “Exurbia and God: Megachurches in New Jersey,” by

George James, June 29,2003.

1. THE GREAT CULT PARADOX: WHY PEOPLE JOIN

1. Steve Hassan, Combating Cult Mind Control.

2. Eileen Barker, The Making of a Moonie: Brainwashing or Choice?

3. Robert Lifton, an eminent psychologist was commissioned by the U.S.

government to investigate charges of brainwashing by the Chinese. His
findings were published in Thought Reform and the Psychology of
Totalism. He wrote the following in conclusion:

Behind this web of semantic confusion lies an image of “brainwashing” as

an all-powerful, irresistible, unfathomable and magical method of achieving
total control over the human mind.

It is of course none of these things, and this loose usage makes the word a
rallying point for fear, resentment, urges toward submission, justification of
failure, irresponsible accusations, and for a wide gartlut of emotional
extremism.

Additionally, mind control, brainwashing s cousin, has lost credibility as a

manipulative cult technique as one of its most important proponents,

Margaret Thaler Singer, had her findings undermined by her own

professional body, the American Psychology Association, when they found
them to be “unsupportable.”

3. WE LOVE YOU

1. Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity, p. 19.

2. Money Magazine, April 2003.

3. Eileen Barker, The Making ofMoonie ; Mark Gallanter, Cults: Faith,

Healing, and Coercion, 2nd Ed.

4. Mark Gallanter, Cults.

5. John Lofland and Rodney Stark, “Becoming a World-Saver: A Theory of

Conversion to a Deviant Perspective,” p. 871.

4. YOU BELONG

1. Lisa F. Berkaran, Ph.D.; Linda Leo-Summers MPH; Ralph I. Horowitz,

M.D., Emotional Support and Survival after Myocardial Infarction, Annals
of Internal Medicine, vol. 117, no. 12, 15 December 1992, pp. 1003-1009.

2. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality:

A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, p. 51.

3. Muzafer Sherif documented the experiment in an influential work, The

Psychology of Social Norms.

4. Yankelovich Monitor, Index 2002.

5. Robert Wuthnow. 1998. Loose Connections: Joining Together in

America’s Fragmented Communities, pg. 5

6. Albert Muniz and Thomas O’Guinn, “Brand Community,” Journal of

Consumer Research, March 2001.

5. CULTING IS A CONTACT SPORT

1. Mormon males—59 percent, females—64.4 percent versus the U.S.

average for men—31.9 percent, and women—44.7 percent. From Douglas
J. Davies, Mormon Identities in Transition, p. 48.

2. Dean Hoge and Fenggang Yang, “Determinants of Religious Giving

in American Denominations: Data from Two Nationwide Surveys,” pp.
123-148.

3. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Priesthood and

Auxiliary Leaders’ Guidebook.

4. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Teaching, No Greater

Call: A Resource Guide for Gospel Teaching.

5. The “Presidency” members receive a small stipend, but usually support

themselves independently.

6. WE’RE IN THIS TOGETHER

1. Rodney Stark, Rise of Christianity.

2. Mary Kay Ash, Mary Kay on People Management.

7. THIS IS WHAT WE BELIEVE

1. The Body Shop brochure: “The Business of The Body Shop.”

2. Jane Simons, The Queen of Green. Director, London. September 2000.

3. Christopher A. Bartlett, Kenton Elderin, and Krista McQuade, The Body

Shop International, p. 4.

4. Anita Roddick, Business as Unusual.

5. Adam Morgan, Eating the Big Fish, pp. 169-170

6. Anita Roddick, Business as Unusual.

7. Ibid.

8. Elizabeth Lamoureux, A Case Study of‘The Body Shops’ Rhetoric of

Corporate Social Responsibility, p. 57
9. The Religious Movements Homepage: University of Virginia, http://
religiousmovements.lib.virginia.edu

10. Charles W. Denison, “The Children of EST: A Study of the Experience

and Perceived Effects of Large Group Awareness Training,” Ph.D. Dis.

11. Anita Roddick, Business as Unusual.

8. SYMBOLISM

1. R. M. Maclver, Society, p. 340.

2. Wolfgang Koschnick, Dictionary of Marketing, p.40.

3. John Murphy, Brand Strategy, p. 18.

4. Rita Clifton and Esther Maughan, Twenty-Five Visions: The Future of

Brands, p. 79.

5. James Auer, “Volkswagen exhibit fueled by style, German History,”

Milwauwkee Journal Sentinel, Online Edition, February 26,2002.

6. Rita Clifton and Esther Maughan, Twenty-Five Visions: The Future of

Brands, p. 71.

9. COMMITMENT IS A TWO-WAY STREET

1. Joanna and Chris, members of The Work whom I interviewed are equally
angry about their lost sacrifice. As a result, they cooperate with a leading
cult deprogrammer, Rick Ross, to publicize and inform on the highly
secretive cult.

2. Jon Entine,“Shattered Image: Is The Body Shop Too Good to Be True?”

3. Jon Entine, “A Social and Environmental Audit of The Body Shop: Anita
Roddick and The Question of Character.”

4. As described to me by Rick Ross, one of the country’s leading

deprogrammers (or “exit counselors” as he described his trade).
10. GO FORTH AND MULTIPLY

1. From the “Articles of Faith of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day

Saints.”

11. TENSION: THE MANAGEMENT OF DEVIANCE

1. Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge The Future of Religion:

Secularization, Revival, and Cult Formation.

2. Jan Shipps, Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition.

3. Both Kazaa and Altnet are owned by Sharman Networks.

4. Wendy Kaufman described herself as the anti-Christ of all advertising

because she was five foot two and two hundred pounds in Advertising Age,
June 23,1997.

5. The Wall Street Journal, December 14,1998.

Motes

6. New York Times, “Advertising,” April 10,1998.

7. Advertising Age, June 23,1997.

13. THE CULT WAVERS, A CHURCH STRENGTHENS

1. Michael Bennett, Chairman of the UAW union local at Saturn from 1986
to 1999.

2. Keith Bradsher, “The Reality Behind the Slogan; Saturn Unit, once a
Maverick, Is Looking a Lot More Like GM,” New York Times, August 23,
2001 .

14. WHO RUNS THE CULT?

1. However, there is one very big exception to this, one where the church
has not responded to cultural pressure. These positions are only open to
men.

2. Claire Tristram, “Takin it to the Street,” MC Technology Marketing

Intelligence, February, 1999.

3. Ibid.

4. Bernard and Veronique Cova, “Tribal Marketing:The Tribalization of

Society and Its Impact on the Conduct of Marketing,” European Journal of
Marketing in 2002 and Beyond, Version, January 2001.

CONCLUSION

1. Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge discuss this in their excellent
book The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival, and Cult Formation.

2. Established churches in the West are seeing congregations shrink. In

Europe, where many of the world faiths blossomed, attendance is in the low
percentages of the population. In Britain, only 0.66 percent of the
population attends the Church of England weekly. In France, only a paltry 5
percent attend a religious service every week, and even in Italy the
percentage is as low as 15 percent andmo higher than 33 percent
(depending on which study you consult—“Faith Fades Where It Once
Burned Strong,” Frank Bruni, New York Times, November 13,2003).
Although the

Notes

United States is a more religious continent than Europe, the proportion of

people who say that they never go to church or synagogue has tripled since
1972 to 33 percent in 2000, and those that do may be over-claiming.
Professor of theology and culture, John G. Stackhouse, believes actual
churchgoing “may be at little more than half the professed rate.” Secular
institutions are not doing so well either. The great foundations of our
society that inform its collective identity do not currently get much of a vote
from the American public, literally. Each election year a lower percentage
of American voters turn out to vote than any other of the twenty-two
established democracies in the world, except for Switzerland (American
Outlook Magazine). Only 18 percent of the public agree that they have “A
great deal of confidence in” the American Judicial System, only 14 percent
for the Federal Government, and 25 percent trust advice from lawyers. The
institution of the presidency did a little better than lawyers at 30 percent.
This survey was undertaken in mid-2003, just after a war allegedly fought
in response to a threat of an attack on American citizens, normally a time
when a country rallies around its civic institutions. People have most
confidence in their “own abilities” which came in at 72 percent (2003
Yankelovich Monitor).

The influx of new religions is also a symptom of poor supply by domestic

institutions. Where the major religions once functioned as onestop shops for
meaning and community, they are now competing for customers, many of
whom are creating their own potpourris of belief, mixing a little Judaeo-
Christian thought, with a touch of, say Buddhism and a sprinkling of tantric
yoga. This behavior is happening because no single source is satisfying
their needs.

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INDEX
Abernathy, Bob, 179,180 absorption of your own cult, 177-78,184 abuse of
commitment, 123-26 Adidas, 192

adoption of new ideas by conservative majority, growth strategy and, 136

advertising, 114-15

Apple’s “Think Different” campaign, 10, 115,132-33

beginnings of “consumer,” 114 by religious organizations, xiii by Saturn,

142-43

VW Beetle “Think Small” campaign, 114-15

airline industry, 31,32,183 jetBlue, see jetBlue Virgin Adantic, 31,32,97

alienation, feelings of, 6,11,14,17,20 Amanakka Amazon Relief Agency,
129 American Airlines, 31,32 American Family Foundation, xviii American
Marketing Association, 113 Apollo commune, 123 appearance to separate a
cult brand from others, 26,27-30,28-29

Apple, xiii,xvi, 1-2,28,31-32,200 brand community, 8-9,64,65 cult brand

paradox and, 8-10 demonizing other brands, 31-32,33 iPod, 117,119 iTunes
Music Store, 153-54 Macworld, xiii, 31-32,87 Prince Street, New York,
store, 116-17 reculting of the brand, 131-34 symbolism and, 116-18 “Think
Different” campaign, 10,115, 132-33

trade of commitment and, 121-22 see also Jobs, Steve Applewhite,

Marshall, 187 Arizona Rx, 107,109

Barger, Dave, 37,40,42,96 Barker, Eileen, 2-3 Bass Red Triangle, 113 belief
system, see meaning system belonging, xiii, xix, 6,12,15-16,57-67,199
creating a worldview and, 61 -62 enhanced individuality and, 4-8,12-13,
16,61-62,167

belonging ( cont.)

sense of reality and, 60-61 survival and group membership, 58-59 Ben &
Jerry’s, 97,105-6,192 Benetton, 97

Bennett, Michael, 176-77 Berger, Peter, 60,61 Berkman, Lisa, 59 BMW, 74-
76,79

database of Motorcycle Owners Association, 76

interference with its brand community, 194-96

MOA (Motorcycle Owners Association), 76

mutual responsibility of riders, 91-93 Owners Anonymous book, 92 BMW

On, 76 Body Shop:

aspirational vision of, 103-4 Charter, 100

creation of meaning system, 97-101, 103

exposure of trail of lies, 127-30 franchising of, 99 initial public offering,
101 storytelling by, 99-100 bonding to an organization, 54 socialization’s
effects on, 50-51 brainwashing, 2-3,19 brand communities, 64-67 Brand
Hijack (Wipperfurth), 196 brand manager, 188 Branson, Richard, 31 British
Airways, 31,32 Burton, Earl, 123-26 Business as Unusual (Roddick), 129
Business Ethics, 127

Cadillac, 144 Cathars, 146

Catholic Church, 172,183,187

monastic orders, “culting” itself with, 164-65

Reformation and, 154-55,183 charismatic cult leaders, 4,189 Chiat/Day,

132 China and Falun Gong, 146 Christianity, xiv, 184,192

demonizing of other religions, 32-33 heresies, destruction of, 146 making

the novel feel familiar, 104, 137-38

mutual responsibility and spread of, 88-89

tension between Mormons and,

146-47

see also individual churches Christian Scientists, 26 Church of Latter-day

Saints, see Mormons Cistercians, 164-65 Citigroup, 18 Clow, Lee, 115
Cohen, Ben,105-6 cold calling, 139-40 command-control model of
marketing, 187-88

commitment, trade of, 121-34 abuse of commitment, 123-26 attachment as

function of an exchange, 121

cost of lying, 127-30 initial cost of commitment, 126-27 as lifetime

contract, 134 reculting of a brand, 131-34 community, sense of, xiv, xix,
55,57-67, 201

brands and, 64-67 mutual dependence and sense of responsibility, see

mutual dependence and sense of responsibility
new forms of social interaction,

62-63

shared experience and, see shared experience see also belonging

Community and Society (Osborn and Neumeyer), 57

Conflict Analysis research, 107-10 conformity, 4,33

conservative majority, growth strategy and adoption of new ideas by, 136
Constantine, Emperor, 137 consumer advertising, 114-15 contact, see
interaction, creating opportunities for meeting and Continental Airlines, 40
Cornwall, A. Marie, 50,61,67-68 Cova, Bernard and Veronique, 192-93 cult
brands:

birth of, Saturn as example of, 161-72 defined, xix

feeling of difference and, see difference, feeling of

growth strategy, see growth strategy interaction, importance of, see

interaction, creating opportunities for meeting and

meaning system, see meaning system paradox, 8-10

primacy of the person, see primacy of the person

running of, see running of the cult sense of belonging and, see belonging
shared experience and, 82-84 symbolism of, see symbolism tension of
deviancy, see tension of deviance, managing the trade of commitment to,
see commitment, trade of cult deprogrammers, 130 cult of the individual,
54-55 cult paradox dynamic, 4-8 cults:

defining, xvii-xix

different, feeling, see difference, feeling of ethics and, xiv

growth strategy, see growth strategy history of, xiv

interaction, importance of, see interaction, creating opportunities for
meeting and

meaning system, see meaning system mutual dependence and, see mutual
dependence and sense of responsibility

normalcy of people populating, xv, 2, 44,46

paradox dynamic, 4-8,10-13,166-67 popular image of, xii, xiv, xv, 2

primacy of the person, see primacy of the person

reasons for joining, 3-4 running of, see running of the cult sects
distinguished from, xvii-xviii sense of belonging and, see belonging shared
experience and, 82-84 symbolism of, see symbolism tension of deviancy,
see tension of deviance, managing the trade of commitment to, see
commitment, trade of see also specific cults Customer Relationship
Management (CRM) programs, 74 customers, attracting the right, 46-50

Darwin, Charles, 58 databases:

BMW, 76

Mormon Church, 71-72 Deadheads, 28 Death Cigarettes, 157-58

Declaration of Independence, 24 defenses of challenged organizations, 182-
85

defenses of challenged organizations ( cont .)

absorption, 184 culting yourself, 184 persecution, 183 Def Filmmakers, 152
Def Jam Records, 152 Dell, 31

Delta’s Song division, 96 demarcating the cult from the status quo, 26-
31,33

demonizing the other, 31-33 dependence, mutual, see mutual dependence

and sense of responsibility deviancy:

acceptable degree of deviancy,

135-36

alienation of customers by too much, 155-58

making the new feel familiar, 104, 137-44

managing the tension of, see tension of deviance, managing the see also
difference, feeling of difference, feeling of, 6,8,17-33 cult brands and,
18,20-33 Apple community, 9-10 declaring its difference, 23-25
demarcating the cult from the status quo, 26-30

demonizing the other, 31-33 determining your franchise’s sense of

difference, 20,21 -23 dialogue of difference, 25 doctrine of difference, 24
growth strategy and, 135-36 Hare Krishna example, 18-20 separation from
the status quo, 17 see also deviancy

Dionysus, Bishop of Alexandria, 89

distractions, removing, 51-53 Dominicans, 164-65 Download.com, 150

Doyle Dane Berbach (DDB), 114-15 Dr. Dre, 154

early adopters, 136 Easy Rider, 25

Eating the Big Fish (Morgan), 100 eBay, xv, 93,192 Ambassadors, 192
business model, 47 getting the right customers, 47-50 moral code, 48,49

rating system for participants, 48-49 Electronic Frontier Foundation, 153

Entine, John, 127-30 Erhard, Werner, 101 EST, 101

ethics, cults and, xiv

evangelical churches, recruitment methods of, xiii

evolutionary psychologists, 59 exclusivity, 27-28

fair trade, 129 Falun Gong, 146 Fanning, Shawn, 148,149 Fellowship of
Friends, 123-26 focus on the person, 38-44 Forbes, Malcolm, 189 Ford,
Henry, 100 Ford Bronco, 64 Friendster, 63
Fugal, Peggy, 68,70,71,72,139-40 functional task, liberation from the, 52-
53 fundamentalists, xviii

General Motors, see GM GM, 52

change in leadership, 175

Japanese challenge in small car segment to, 161-62,168-69,172,182-83,184

Saturn and, 52,165-66

adopting of some of Saturn’s practices and personnel, 173,177-78 attraction

of new customers for GM, 143,172

as direct challenge to the core business, 163

financial commitment, 174 reasons for forming, 161-62,168-69, 172,182-83

tension between, 175-76 the 99 study group and, 162-64,165,

166

-UAW relationship, 162 Greenfield, Jerry, 105-6 group membership, see

belonging;

community, sense of growth strategy, 135-44 deviancyand, 135-36 making

the novel appear familiar, 137-38

Gurdjieff, George Ivanovitch, 123,124,

127

Haagen-Dazs, 192 Hare Krishna, 18-20

bonding with people before

commitment to ideology of, 36-37 demarcation, acts of, 26,27,28,30-31

symbolic behaviors of, 112 Harley-Davidson, xv, 74,75,105,202 “bad boy”
image, 21-23,25 demarcating the brand from others, 27-30,33
essential elements of Harley experience, 23

feeling of difference and, 18,21-23,25 iconography, 29-30 language of

riders, 30,31

owner’s group, 25,87 Hassan, Steve, 2

health, social connectedness and, 59 Heaven’s Gate, 5,24

Hells Angels Motorcycle Club, 22-23,25, 28,29-30

Hemming, Nikki, 151,152 Hipster’s Handbook, The, 197 history of cults,

xiv Hollister, California motorcycle convention of 1947,22,25 Hudler, Don,
77,163,167-68,169,171,

174,175,176,177-78,181,182,191 human potential movement, 101 humble,

being, 135,193 Hus, Jan, 154-55

IBM, 31,32

iconography as delineator, 29-30 identity:

creating a distinctive group, 31-33 cult brand paradox and, 8-10 need to
create, xiii, xvi ideology, see meaning system individuality:

American Myth of, 58 belonging and enhanced, 4-8,12-13,16, 61-62,167

cult of the individual, 54-55 Infiniti, 144

interaction, creating opportunities for meeting and, 50-51,67-79 BMW, 74-

76,79 Mormon Church, 67-74,79 Saturn, 77-79,167

interfering with your brand community, avoiding, 194-98 Internet, the, 63

exposure of lying by cults and cult brands on, 130 intervention specialists,
130

iPod, 117,119 Isuzu, 162

Japanese car industry, forming of Saturn in response to challenge from,
161-62, 163,168-69,182-83 J. D. Power surveys, 144,181 Jehovah’s
Witnesses, 26 jetBlue.xv, 1,96

business model, 39,41,52-53 collective responsibility for the customer, 41

egalitarianism at, 40-41 liberating crew from functional tasks, 52-53

primacy of the person at, 37-44 training at, 40-42

Jobs, Steve, xiii, 10,31-32,87,116,189 Apple iTunes Music Store and, 153-
54 launching of Macintosh at Macworld, 31-32

recommitment to Apple, 131-34 as symbol of Apple, 118 Jones, Jim,

136,155-56,187 Judaism, 104,138,192

Kaufman, Wendy, 158-60 Kay, Mary, 91,189 Kazaa, 150-54 Kennedy, Joe,
163,166-67 Koresh, David, 136,187 Koster, George, 192 Kukendell,
Lawrence, 79

Lack, Andrew, 154 LaFauve, Skip, 176 Landmark Forum, The, 101-3
language used to separate a cult from others, 26,30-31

Large Group Awareness Training, 101 leadership of cults, 4,187-91

charismatic, 4,189

by one central figure, 187 by proxies, 187 see also names of individuals
leaving a cult, difficulties of, 125-26 Lexus, 96,144 Life, 22

Linderman,Alf, 97 logos, 28

Loose Connections (Wuthnow), 62 love, feeling of, see primacy of the

person love-bombing, 10,53-54 Luther, Martin, 155

Macintosh computers, see Apple Maclver, R. M., 111-12 management of

cult brands, see running of the cult Marines, 28

induction process, 82-83 mutual responsibility culture of, 89-90 shared

experience in, 82-84 “the Crucible,” 83 marketing, 202
command-control model of, 187-88 community, 57-58

consumer awareness of techniques of, 4 fear of alienating potential

customers,

17

to individuals, 58 by religious organizations, xii-xiii targeting the alienated

and separating the organization from the mainstream, 18 vocabulary of, 188
Mary Kay Corporation, xv, 51,203 cult brand paradox and, 13-16
customers, getting the right, 47 distribution of ownership, 190-91 love
bombing, 54 “Mary Kay Values,” 91 mutual responsibility at, 90-91 shared
experience and, 87

structure of, 190-91 meaning system:

aspirational nature of, 103-4 belonging and creating a, 61 -62 functions of,
95-96 interpretation of the world’s chaos by, 102-3

the media and, 96-97 primacy of relationships prior to, 36, 139,140

purpose offered by, 102,103 requirements of a, 101-4 sense of control

provided by, 102 symbolism of a, see symbolism ways of finding a, 104-10

by building on existing ideas, 104-6 by observing and giving voice, 105,

106-10

meeting, creating opportunities for, see

interaction, creating opportunities for meeting and Mega-churches, xii-xiii

membership, getting the right, 44-50 customers as members, 46-50 like-get-
like, 46 Mercedes, 96

Merkley and Partners, 39,107,194 Miata, 87

Microsoft, 31,33,152 mimicking of product innovations, 96 Mini (car), 97

Morgan, Adam, 100 Mormons, 24,50-51,146,187,192 cold calling, 139
contact strategy of, 67-71,79 deescalating tension with the establishment,
146-47 degree of involvement and annual contributions, 68 demarcation,
acts of, 26,27,28 distribution of ownership, 69,73-74,

190

focus on similarities when recruiting, 140-41

history of, 146-47 keeping tabs on membership and prospects, 69,71-72

making the new feel familiar, 104, 137-38,139-41,144 membership’s
running of the programs themselves, 69,73-74,190 missionaries, 139,140
name change, 141 origins of, xiv-xv radical theology of, 140-41 recruitment
techniques, 54,139-40 structure and management of, 189-90 tithing, 70
MP3,149,153 Muniz, Albert, 64 music industry:

Apple iTunes Music Store, 153-54 Kazaa and, 150-54 Napster and, 147-54
mutual dependence and sense of responsibility, 87-93 BMW riders, 91-93
Christianity and, 88-89 the Marines, 89-90 as outcome of sense of
belonging, 88 at Saturn, 167-68,173,174 Mystery Cults, xiv mythologizing:

at jetBlue, 43-44,87

the primacy of the person, 42-44

shared experience and, 87

Napster, 145,147-54 NASA Saturn project, 168 Neeleman, David, 39,41-

42,73 Neumeyer, Dr. Martin, 57 new ideas:

adoption of, by conservative majority, 136

new ideas ( cont.)

making the novel feel familiar, 137-44 see also difference, feeling of New
Religious Movements (NRMs), xviii Nike, 28,192

demonizing other brands, 33 nonconformity, Apple community and, 9-10

O’Guinn, Thomas, 64 Online, 150 On The Level, 76

openness or searching for compatible environment, 6,12,14-15 opportunity
costs of belonging to a cult, 121

Osborn, Dr. Loren, 57 Ouspensky, Peter, 7,123,127

Pabst Blue Ribbon (PBR) beer, 196-98, 200

People’s Temple, 5,155-56 person, primacy of the, see primacy of the

person

piggybacking, 191-94 Pilgrims, xiv, 146 PlanetFeedback, 130

power distribution, see running of the cult primacy of the person, 35-55,127
create opportunities for meeting and interaction, 50-51 focus on the person,
38-44 get the right membership, 44-50 love bomb, 53-54 make the new feel
familiar through relationships, 138,139-40 mythologizing the, 42-44
remove distractions, 51-53 summary of principles of, 38 Proctor and
Gamble, 188,198 product innovations, 96 Protestantism, 146,154-55

purpose, sense of, 102,103 Putnam, Lord David, 114

Quaker Oats, 145,159,160

reality, belonging and sense of, 60-61 Recording Industry Association

(RIA), 149-50,153

recruiting the right members, see membership, getting the right

Reformation, 155,183 Reiswig, Judith, 142-43 religious organizations, xii-
xiv New Religious Movements, xviii origins as cults, xiv see also individual
religions responsibility for each other, see mutual dependence and sense of
responsibility

Rethinking Media, Religion and Culture (Linderman),97 Reuss, Lloyd, 176

Rise of Christianity, The (Stark), 88-89 rites of passage, shared experience

and, 83 rituals as acts of demarcation, 26 Rock, Kid, 197 Roddick, Anita,
97-101
creation of a meaning-driven brand, 97-101,103-4,105 exposure of trail of
lies, 127-30 Roddick, Gordon, 99 Rules of Attraction, 152 running of the
cult, 187-98 avoiding interfering with brand community, 194-98 member as
priest model, 189-91 piggybacking, 191-94

Saab, 64

sacred and profane, merging of, xii-xiii sale, liberation from the, 51-52
Salomon, 193-94

OceanofPDF.com
Index
Saturn, xv, 77-79,161-85,203

birth as a mass cult brand, 161-72,184 attraction of traditionally alienated

customers, 168 authenticity of commitment,

171-72

the cause, 168-70

community building circumstances, 17

customers identifying with the cause, 169-70

GM’s reasons for forming Saturn, 161-62,163,168-69,172,182-83

greenfield site for, 164 heretics as founders, 165-66 mutual responsibility,
167-68 the name, 168

the 99 study group, 162-64,165,166 brand community, 65-66 buying

experience, 51-52,143,172, 178-82 Cheer, 191

commercials, 142-43 contact-creating strategies, 77-79 as direct challenge

to GM’s core business, 163

distribution of ownership, 87,191 Family, 168,180-82 forming of

relationships, 51-52 future as mass cult brand, 173-85 decline of internal
cult, 173,176-77 integration into GM structure, 176, 177-78,184

lack of mutual investment, 173,174 positive signs, 173 signs of self-

destruction, 173 survival of cultlike qualities at consumer point of sale, 178-
82 too much tension, 173,175-76 “Homecoming” event, xiii, 65-66,78-79
making the new seem familiar, 142-44 referrals from friends and family,
144

respect for each other as core ideology, 169,170,171

shared experience of ownership, 87, 191

success of, 143-44

sects, cults distinguished from, xvii-xviii security, desire for, xiii, 6 self-
actualization, 6,12-13,16

human potential movement and, 101 Separatists, xiv shared experience, 81-
87 the Marines, 82-84 metaphorically, 84-86 storytelling and, 86-87 World
Wrestling Federation (WWF), 84-86

Sharman Networks, 151,152 Sherman, Chris, 150 Shipps, Jan, 147

Simmons, Russell, 152 Smith, Joseph, 139-41,146,147,190 Smith, Roger,
163-64,175,176,178,182 Snapple, 4,95,107,108-9,145,158-60 SoBe,
107,108

social connections, see belonging;

community, sense of Sony, 154

Southwest Airlines, 39

Spain, Al,41,42,43

spirituality, alternative forms of, 200

Starbucks, 138

Stark, Rodney, 88-89

Steele, Lieutenant Martin, 82,83-84,90

Stewart, Martha, 119

Stewart, Neal, 197

storytelling:

by The Body Shop, 99-100 to demonstrate the primacy of the person, 42-44
shared experience through, 86-87 Suzuki, 162 Swatch, 138

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Index
Swette, Brian, 49 symbolism, 111-19 function of, 111-12

history of supplying symbolic meaning to brands, 112-15 limited to

aesthetics, 119 real people as part of symbolic system, 118-19

types of symbols, 112

tattoo brand logos, 28 TBWA Worldwide, 115 teamwork, see mutual

dependence and sense of responsibility tension of deviance, managing the,
145-60 not enough tension, 158-60 too much tension, 146-58

alienation of customers and, 155-58 Mormon Church, 146-47 Napster, 147-

54 Reformation, 154-55 Timberland, 196,200 Toyota, 162

TradeMark Bill, United Kingdom, 113

trauma, past, 6

Trekkies, 28

Triac Co., 159-60

tribal marketing, 192-93

Tupperware, 192

UAW, see United Auto Workers (UAW) Unification Church (Moonies):

background of recruits to, 2-3 introductory weekends, 5 love-bombing,
10,52-53 recruitment process, 10,36,52-53

United Auto Workers (UAW), 162,165-66, 168,175

the 99 study group and, 162-64 universal needs, xiii, xvi University of
Virginia, xviii
validation, sense of, 7-8 values-led companies, 105-6 Vanuatu, 151 Virgin
Atlantic, 31,32,97 Volkswagen, see VW Beetle von Lohman, Fred, 153 VW
Beetle, 87

reintroduction of, 119 “Think Small” advertising campaign, 114-15

Wal-Mart, 87

welfare of other group members, concern for, see mutual dependence and
sense of responsibility Whole Foods, 97 Wiccans, 10-13 Wild One, The, 25
Wipperftirth, Alex, 196 word-of-mouth, 138,192 Work, The, 6-8,46
worldview, see meaning system World Wrestling Federation (WWF), 84-
86,203

Wuthnow, Robert, 62,63

Yale University, 59 Young, Brigham, 147

Zennstrom, Niklas, 151

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3 1127 □□□B1135 3
PATE DUE

~ A pi )—9—A -2005

Arn o u

-—

GAYLORD | ’RINTED IN U.S.A

message that to be a part of their brand is to be a part of something special.

The Culting of Brands is packed with interviews with current and former
cult members, passionate Snapple drinkers and Saturn drivers, and some of
today’s most creative marketers. It’s the first book to dare make the
connection between religion and consumerism, beliefs and buying instincts.

DOUGLAS ATKIN is the director of strategy at world-renowned ad agency

Merkley and Partners. He has worked with numerous clients to increase
their cult appeal, including Mercedes, Pfizer, Smith Barney, Fila, and
jetBlue. He lives in New York.

For more information visit www.CultingofBrands.com.

A member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 375 Hudson Street York, N.Y.
10014 portfolio www.penguin.com

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Advance praise for THE CULTING
OF BRANDS
“Like The Tipping Point , The Cutting of Brands opens up a whole new
avenue for building more vital and robust brands.”

-DOROTHY WETZEL,

“So . . . Steve Jobs is the new Jesus Christ? Crazy as that sounds, the
calculus of building a powerful new brand is the same as that for a cult.
This is a breakthrough book that will make you rethink what you thought
you knew about brands (and religion!). I loved this book. Buy a copy right
now and be saved.” —SETH GODIN,

“Recognizing a pattern that is becoming more pervasive in the management

of brands, Douglas Atkin analyzes and catalogues the ultimate definition of
brand loyalty—culting. This is a must read if you believe that brands drive
company profits.” —SERGIO ZYMAN,

“Culting is one of the coolest ways to build a brand and nobody tells the
culting story better than Douglas Atkin.” —AL RIES,

“As the world more and more develops as a platform for communitybased
marketing, The Culting of Brands brings us the important process of
communicating to customers in this new way. Douglas Atkin gives us a
useful road map for companies to make this happen. Please read this book.”
—LARRY WEBER,

ft

5ATLRN.
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