All posts tagged: cult

Bigger and smaller: the polarisation of brand experiences

By Mark Di Somma

If you’re a cult brand looking to take on a scale player in an industry that favours significant footprint, how can you hope to win? Possibly by retaining everything that reinforces your cult brand kudos and plugging in to what Jeremiah Owyang refers to as the Collaborative Economy. According to research that he shares here, companies like Airbnb are now giving traditional hotel brands something of a run for their rooms. The model is effective, according to Thomas Friedman who wrote an article in the New York Times that Owyang references, because this collaborative approach is personal, local and based on a refreshing sense of trust. Friedman quotes Brian Chesky, the guy who started Airbnb, ““It used to be that corporations and brands had all the trust … There is a whole generation of people that don’t want everything mass produced. They want things that are unique and personal.” The fact that 140,000 people around the world are staying in Airbnb rooms on an given night proves that intimacy can indeed scale. That’s possible of …

Becoming a cultrepreneur: the first 3 secrets

By Mark Di Somma

I coined the term ‘cultrepreneur’ some years back to describe enterprising business people who consciously set about developing brands that are anti-scale, hard to find and fervently followed – cults. A number of people have asked me how you go about building a cult brand. So here’s my first three secrets: 1. Make something amazing, and then make it unavailable. Alright, not completely unavailable. But part of the secret of growing a cult brand is to grow the legend, and part of growing the legend is to cultivate a myth of short supply. With a cult brand, you always want to be making just under the market demand. Enough to cover costs obviously, but too little for everyone to be able to get hold of it easily. The thought of missing out intensifies the pleasure of getting and the desire to procure. 2. Nail the long tail. Cult brands appeal to those who think they know better about a particular subject, and who want more than what is widely available. The secret is in the …

Cult branding: Developing a scarcity strategy

By Mark Di Somma

In a world dominated it seems by the push for scale and mass coverage, it’s easy to forget that sometimes the smartest thing you can do is the polar opposite: develop a deliberately limited edition brand that shuns the mainstream. I’ve written about this a number of times – here’s an example – and coined the phrase cultrepreneurs to describe those enterprising individuals who have chosen to create and market brands with cult status. As this story about Julian Van Winkle and his Old Rip Van Winkle Distillery shows, there is nothing accidental about why his aged bourbon attracts a fervent following. I really liked the owner’s description of ‘a strategy of scarcity’. Here are just some of the ways Van Winkle builds cult status: The company deliberately stymies supply in order to raise cachet and lift returns. It’s one of the great ironies of cults that, beyond what you need to be viable, sometimes the less you produce, the more you make. As Van Winkle says he could unload two or three times what …