Start Cults Not Communities

Is it just me, or is every brand you know currently pretending to solve the global loneliness epidemic?

Starting a business? Build a community.

Building a brand? Build a community.

Advertising not performing? Have you thought about building a community?

Community is the new answer to absolutely everything.

And I get it.

Anyone building a business right now knows that growing an audience is hard and increasingly expensive. People are more cynical about brands, more sceptical of advertising and very good at filtering out anything that doesn’t feel relevant.

Building differently in this environment makes sense.

Creating genuine affinity between a group of people and your brand can lower acquisition costs, increase loyalty and produce the kind of recommendation no paid media can replicate. It can also give you radical strategic focus on a valuable subset of a much larger audience, at a time when it’s incredibly easy to become distracted.

The commercial case is strong. The language is a mess.

COMMUNITY SOUP

We’re conflating a lot of different things and calling all of them community.

An online following. A mailing list. A paid membership. A group chat. Existing customers. People who like the founder. People who attend events. People who talk to the brand. People who have genuine relationships with one another.

These are not the same thing.

An audience pays attention. Customers transact. A genuine community contains relationships between its members. Fans have an emotional investment in the thing itself.

At the furthest end of that spectrum sits the diehard superfan. The person who participates, collects, recruits, creates, defends and carries the brand into culture.

That is where things become really interesting.

Of course people need community. We’re human. We want connection, belonging and the comfort of finding others who understand our particular interests, values and strange little obsessions.

But I’m interested in what turns those human needs into brand power.

What makes somebody care enough to buy whatever you release, bring other people in, display their allegiance and feel a meaningful sense of loss if the brand disappears?

This is where I’d rather talk about cults.

YES, I SAID CULT

Less matching robes, coercive control and surrendering your worldly possessions to a charismatic founder. No Bhagwan-esque sex cults required.

I mean the kind of intense allegiance most brands secretly want when they brief somebody to “build a community.”

Talking about cults or diehard super-fandom changes the nature of the problem. It raises the ambition and therefore the standard of thinking required.

You can gather a community around a shared interest.

To create a cult brand, you need to give that interest emotional charge, identity, mythology and physical form.

That forces you beneath the channel strategy and into the fundamentals of what you’re building. It is a much bigger creative and strategic brief than launching a Slack group or cracking Instagram growth.

BUILD FOR OBSESSION

High-value consumer brands understand this. They spend millions studying fandom, designing for it and understanding the different roles fans play.

Some fans will buy almost anything the brand releases. Some recruit others and spread the story. Some participate, interpret and co-create. Others collect, display and use their association with the brand to say something about themselves.

They don’t simply consume the brand’s activity. They become part of its delivery system.

Very few customers will reach that level of devotion, and that’s fine. The value lies in what happens when you build with that ambition from the beginning.

If your brief is to create broad awareness, you ask how to make the brand visible and easy for the greatest number of people to understand.

If your brief is to create obsession, you ask much harder questions.

What do we believe deeply? What do we stand against? What tension are we helping people resolve? What kind of person will feel immediately recognised here? What connects these people beyond an interest in the product?

Building for obsession demands radical focus. Not a vast, fictitious demographic connected by age, gender or income, but a specific group of people united by values, beliefs, behaviours or a particular way of seeing the world.

It requires an organising idea with enough meaning to hold them together.

MEANING NEEDS EDGES

Most brands are terrified of excluding anyone.

They soften the language, broaden the audience and sand away anything that might provoke disagreement. Eventually, they arrive at a perfectly pleasant sentiment that nobody could object to and almost nobody will remember.

But belonging requires some kind of boundary.

There has to be a sense of who gets the reference, understands the code or shares the worldview. The brand needs to know what it is and, more importantly, what it isn’t.

Cult brands have an enemy, although it does not need to be a competing brand or actual person. The enemy might be a tired category convention, a cultural belief, an outdated system or a way of behaving their people have collectively rejected.

That tension becomes a uniting force.

It gives people something to move away from and a more compelling world to move towards.

The stronger the edges, the more clearly people can decide whether the brand is for them.

BUILD THE INSIDE WORLD

This is where all the current conversation about lore, rituals and world-building starts to become useful.

Without an organising idea, lore is just a pile of references. Rituals are marketing activities. Insider language is branded vocabulary created in a workshop and desperately hoping to catch on.

With a powerful idea underneath them, they become evidence of a living world.

Shared language helps people recognise one another. Stories give the brand history and mythology. Rituals turn passive consumption into participation. Visual cues make allegiance visible. Objects become artefacts rather than merchandise.

A24 understands this beautifully.

It has turned a particular kind of cinematic taste into an identity. The films are the products, but A24 itself has become a signal, complete with collectable objects, unexpected experiences and campaigns that reward those paying attention. The work adds to the mythology of the brand rather than simply creating temporary awareness for the next release.

The films bring people in. The world gives them a reason to stay.

COMMUNITY ISN’T THE AMBITION

Community may form around a powerful brand. It may become part of its infrastructure and one of the ways its people connect.

But community itself is too vague to be the strategic ambition.

Cult changes the question.

It moves the conversation beyond where people gather and asks what they believe when they get there. It forces the brand to create meaning, identity and enough creative charge for people to do more than passively follow.

You don’t need millions of people.

You need the right people to care disproportionately.

So don’t begin by asking how to build a community. Ask what could make people obsessed.