Nick Susi on Substack

There has been a meteoric rise in cult brands that play at a higher level than their peers; brands that infuse their followers with a great sense of pride and purpose who then go beyond rationality to see their brand win.

“Ultimately, a great cult brand — your customers are your fans,” Sternberg says. “The reason they’re your fans, whether they can articulate this or not, is that they see themselves in you and your brand. The brand is a reflection of the best of them — of values that they think they hold, or they do hold, or want to hold, or aspire to hold.”

I've found that the most culturally relevant brands today are those that cultivate this same intensity of devotion. They're not trying to be lukewarm for everyone; they're willing to be boiling hot for a specific few. This level of excitement and passion only emerges through specificity and the courage to exclude.

In the absence of religion and other community belonging, consumers yearn to find the brands they can use as signals for identity curation and kinship – signaling to other Glossier or Stanley cup girls that no actually, we’re the same. Brands do this signaling implicitly (owning Aesop hand soap reveals something about you - well-to-do, metropolitan... See more

What interested me was the way that different subcultures and brands were feeding off one another. Lifestyle brands and DTC needed to draw on these subcultural elements—they needed to be the products people buy in order to participate. And in the other direction, product imagery was beginning to play an important role in subcultural formation. In m

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