Top Retail Strategies to Take from Cult Brands

The word cult is rarely ascribed to describe anything positive. However, when discussing the sometimes-fanatical relationship people can have with their favorite brands, the term is almost always associated with increased brand awareness, boosts to revenue, and a dedicated and engaged audience – something all retailers would love to achieve.

Cult brands should not be confused with fads. Fads are short-lived and burn out fast, whereas cult brands are built on long-term strategic thinking and relationships. However, most retailers out there would like to foster at least a portion of the dedication and engagement these kinds of brands enjoy, so let’s see what lessons we can take from them and apply to our own strategies in the future.

Cultifying your brand: branding best practices and making a difference in the minds of customers

Some of the best practices associated with establishing a cult brand start at the very beginning of your organizational story. Having an interesting and meaningful origin story behind is a fantastic way to get people invested in your brand and start building attachments.

This is why brand storytelling is so especially important. Demonstrating your brand’s mission, values and vision and telling your story is a critical step on the road to cultifying your audience and building real and meaningful connections.

If you look at real-world cults, a big part of what makes them appealing is their adherence to a single consistent message – one which gets repeated over and over again. This is why a consistent voice and messaging is crucial in establishing yourself as a cult brand. Your audience needs to be able to rely on your brand to meet their expectations or they’ll look elsewhere. Decide early on in your journey what your brand stands for – its beliefs, ethics, and values – and adhere to them.

The next factor to consider is how cults start out as a want but evolve into a need. In the early stage of this process, customers will be looking for a solution to a problem in their lives. However, once you have onboarded them into your brand, you need a way to keep them there and transform that want into a need. Think about the way fans of Apple technology show immense excitement over the next release – or gamers who express extreme excitement when a new PlayStation or Xbox is announced.

In these cases, people started out wanting a phone, tablet, games console, etc. but now feel they need the next big release, and the power of FOMO (fear of missing out) seduces them into upgrading every single time.

Meaningful Experiences

As many of us know, customer experience is a core component in establishing your retail business as a cult brand. You can have all the great messaging and storytelling you like, but if your core experience falls short, you’ll never get your cult brand off the ground. Take cult retail brand Princess Polly from Australia for example. Ever since it first started out as a physical fashion retail store in the Gold Coast back in 2005, this brand has been laser focused on providing its customers with a simple and meaningful user experience – however they choose to engage with them.

Here’s how: