Why many companies now take their cues from religious sects

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DEREK THOMPSON

The Atlantic

In the third week of September, thousands of people organized themselves into neat lines that snaked along the city blocks of New York, Seattle, London, and dozens of other cities around the world. Sleeping in cardboard boxes, or keeping wakeful vigil through the night, they were participants in a biennial ritual: waiting in line to buy the new iPhone. Like most quasi-religious ceremonies, this one made little sense to outside observers. But the iPhone isn’t just another phone, and Apple isn’t just another phone manufacturer. It’s a brand with a cult following, whose new products inspire sane people to squat for hours outside the nearest Apple store like Wiccans worshipping before Stonehenge.

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Research shows that typically, the more information consumers have, the better they are at ignoring corporate iconography. One 2014 study, for instance, found that pharmacists and physicians are three times less likely than the typical customer to buy national brands of headache medicine when cheaper store brands are available. If all consumers became as informed as medical experts, the study concluded, national headache-remedy brands would see their sales cut in half.

An economy filled with product experts would wreck certain brands, according to Itamar Simonson, a marketing professor at Stanford. Advertising thrives in markets where consumers are essentially clueless, often because quality is hard to assess before you buy the product (medicine, mattresses, wine). But on sites like Amazon or eBay, and across social media, information from other sources—ratings, reviews, comments from friends—is abundant. We’re more likely to trust these signals precisely because they aren’t beamed from corporate headquarters.

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One of the hallmarks of a cult is that members unite to oppose what they see as an oppressive or illegitimate mainstream culture. Collaborative-economy companies—from Airbnb to the ride-sharing service Uber—have proved particularly savvy at exploiting this sense, and in so doing converting both merchants and consumers (the line between which sometimes blurs). But companies like Apple show that the creation of a cult mentality can be just as powerful with customers of regular goods—even products that have grown so popular, they would seem to be poor markers of individuality or special identity.

“Apple was more of a cult in the 1980s, when it was the converted few supporting the company against Microsoft and IBM,” says Jennifer Edson Escalas, an associate professor of marketing at Vanderbilt University. From its famous hammer-smashing “1984” ad against IBM to its 1998 commercial “Crazy Ones,” Apple has been deliberate in reinforcing an us-against-the-world ethos. The fact that it has preserved its devoted following while becoming larger than its opponents “shows that culting is useful, even when it’s misleading,” Escalas says.

It might seem creepy that some successful marketers are taking their cues from cult theory. But all advertising is manipulation. This new wrinkle takes advantage of a particular vulnerability—our need to be unique and belong to a group at the same time. Even experts like Susan Fournier, who doubts that cults offer a relevant model for marketing, think that brands play an important role beyond the simple provision of economic information. “I’m more frightened by a world that assumes we are rational actors optimizing all the time, without a sense of emotional connection, comfort, stability, or belonging,” she said. “Who would want that?”