Editorial
The Gist
- Cult brands challenge. Creating a cult brand requires defying conventions, a tough task with no set formula.
- Digital asset support. Effective digital asset management aids in consistently expressing a brand's unique message.
- Community engagement key. Cult brands excel by fostering a strong sense of community and shared identity among followers.
Most entrepreneurs dream of creating a “cult brand” and expect their marketers to help achieve that outcome. Yet cult brands are defined by defiance of convention and the status quo. There can be no formula for something that must reject formulas. So, what is a marketer supposed to do?
From our experiences with digital asset management (DAM) systems — Jake as a vendor and Jennifer as a power user — we see how brands organize and distribute content for millions of people daily. We know that consistently and repeatedly expressing a message is part of what cult brands do.
More specifically, they make themselves easy to talk about, they foster an in-group identity, and they retell the same mythology yet make each iteration fresh and relevant. A DAM system can support all three of those practices. We’ll illustrate how for the marketers in pursuit of cult status.
What’s a Cult Brand Anyway?
Not unlike members of a religious cult, followers of a cult brand promote it with missionary zeal. They discuss it in daily conversations. They rep it with apparel, stickers and tattoos. They think about the brand and use it often. They genuinely believe that introducing friends, family and strangers to the brand will make their lives better. Promoting the brand is thus an act of love.
We all know a cult brand when we see or experience it. Newer examples include musician Taylor Swift and the Barbie movie. Classic examples are Trader Joe’s, Star Trek, Harley-Davidson and professional sports teams. Few, if any, B2B brands hit cult status because they’re generally means to a business end rather than purveyors of meaning and identity.
The key is that a cult brand creates missionaries of its customers. But what enables them to spread the good word? To spare you from more New Balance and Trek examples (Jake’s two favorite cult brands), we’ve sourced some from colleagues and friends.
1. How Easy Is It to Talk About Your Brand?
Like a great podcast, cult brands supply talking points. When we discuss something, we want to sound “good,” which we might mean smart, funny, witty, moral, etc., depending on our personality. Cult brands make themselves discussable, in part, by providing consistent, compelling talking points.
Let’s take an unusual example: Powder Mountain in Eden, Utah, which unexpectedly took No. 1 in the 2024 SKI Reader Resort Survey. It’s a barebones resort with slow lifts, dinky lodges and no nightlife. While all the resorts in the American West are trying to pack the slopes and hotels with skiers, Powder is doing the opposite. It limits daily pass sales to prevent lift lines and preserve powder for days. By how it operates, Powder writes the talking points for passionate skiers, who revere it as a secret ski paradise. Indeed, multibillionaire and Powder fan Reed Hastings, founder of Netflix, acquired the resort to ensure that no one could ruin it.
We don’t know whether Powder uses a DAM, but its marketers clearly amplify those talking points. Their ad campaigns, supposedly “Paid for by Powder Mountain Locals,” cheekily urge people to ski elsewhere with warnings of rabid yetis and assurances that there is “nothing to see here.” How can people not talk about something that promotes itself as a place to keep hush hush?
Related Article: Storytelling and Selling: Expose Your Brand, Not Your SKUs
2. How Do Your Brand Members Recognize Each Other?
A community with restricted access becomes a source of status and identity. Country clubs, elite colleges and secret societies cultivate exclusiveness to build in-group versus out-group dynamics. Amanda Montell’s fascinating book Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism makes the case that language is the glue holding such cults together, whether they’re spiritual or commercial, manipulative or empowering.
Members of a CrossFit “box,” one of Montell’s examples, use lingo no one would understand at the local “Globo Gym” (that’s CrossFit slang for a corporate gym and a reference to the movie Dodgeball). Likewise, UFC fans fluidly use terms like triangle choke, armbar and back control even if they’ve never done martial arts before. If you know and use the lingo properly, you’re in the group.
Some brands definitely tag images, videos and graphics in DAM with cult verbiage as part of a strategy to reaffirm the group identity and promote fluency. The metadata schema for a cult brand’s DAM system should reflect that language.
Related Article: Is Your Brand Selling a Product or an Experience?
3. How Do You Renew Your Brand’s Mythology?
The books of global religions — the Torah, Bible and Quran, for instance — haven’t changed in many years. Spiritual leaders continuously reinterpret them to provide meaning and guidance in the current world, and so do cult brands. What is a “rebrand” if not the retelling of the same myths in a new way?
Over time, a DAM system becomes a repository of brand mythology, a series of Hero’s Journeys written anew. Consider some slogans and campaigns from Harley-Davidson, the cult motorcycle brand founded in 1903:
- Screw it. Let’s ride
- Live to Ride, Ride to Live
- Live Your Legend
- All for Freedom, Freedom for All
- American by Birth, Rebel by Choice
Ever seen a Harley-Davidson ad or social post? It’s motorcyclists on open roads in America’s iconic deserts, mountain ranges and forests — symbols of freedom, adventure and a national legend of rebellion against tyranny and convention. That story never gets old.
Related Article: OpenAI and X Chaos Is a Reminder of How Brand Resonance Is Always at Risk
A Cult DAM
An aspiring cult brand should think of its digital assets as motifs in a mythology — an accumulation of characters, events, moments, ideas and adventures that tell an epic tale. While sometimes we need functional, vanilla metadata to find the right asset — whether it’s a location, demographic, product name, season or asset type—we can also use metadata to capture the spirit of the brand. From what DAM users search, the assets they download and how they’re used, you might discern whether your DAM is amplifying your missionaries or constraining them.
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A cult DAM system doesn’t just trumpet marketing messages. It makes brand missionaries inside and outside the company feel like they’ve discovered an unknown part of themselves, a voice of truth once hidden. Normal brands tell stories to customers. Cult brands let their communities live, tell and co-write the story.
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