The Next Great Consumer Companies Won’t Be Exclusive Clubs. They Will Be Inclusive Cults.

The keywords are not necessarily prestige and exclusivity but identity and belonging.Membership is micro. To prevent reverse network effects and maintain a high signal-to-noise ratio, brands often focus on specific customer sub-segments and overdeliver for them. This works particularly well for brands that sell easily commodified products. For exam... See more

Exclusivity based on if you can afford something is not going away as long as we have a capitalist society. FOMO and exclusivity/curation is a natural part of how we gather, and trying abolish it is not a worthwhile endeavor, but the best institutions aim for a concept that I first heard expressed at Sofar Sounds — Inclusive Exclusivity.

Great cult brands drive wedges between schools of thought, alliances, communities, ideologies, and even other brands. They do this by spreading their radical differences with those searching for individualism. Ultimately, with a lot of luck and incredible attention to detail, these select few cult brands become a destination for their followers to ... See more

The key to Clubhouse’s rapid accession is that its social design makes it an ideal platform for cults at a time when the social internet is rapidly evolving away from organizing around communities and toward cults. Clubhouse’s rise likely signals major strategic shifts that several legacy social platforms are going to have to consider.

Membership is about connection and access over privacy and ownership—and not everyone values these the same way

Much has been written about how brands like SoulCycle built cult-like followings by tapping into the collective desire to connect to something larger than themselves. Today, this practice has gone mainstream, so the question becomes, How can brands go beyond selling and engage with people’s spiritual lives?

As audiences coalesce around micro-communities as a refuge from an ongoing barrage of content and platforms, how brands connect with them matters. Offerings like Glossier’s Slack group, Vogue Club, and A24 All Access reveal a trend of brands rethinking their audience loyalty strategies. Providing space for fans to interact with your brand (and each... See more

The keyword here is not necessarily prestige and exclusivity, but identity and belonging. There’s a pure pleasure in the intimacy of consuming together, along with enjoying status within a community. Thanks to a membership in a community, a hypebeast gets access to new product drops and events. This is the domain of intangibles that most loyalty pr

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