Derek Thompson notes that “many of the most successful new brands have been looking to an unusual but powerful source of inspiration – religious cults”:
Cults like the Moonies are built on the paradox that we feel most like ourselves when we’re part of a group, says Douglas Atkin, the global head of community at the room-sharing company Airbnb, and the author of the 2004 book The Culting of Brands: Turning Your Customers Into True Believers. “The common belief is that people join cults to conform,” Atkin wrote. “Actually, the very opposite is true. They join to become more individual.”
A number of Bay Area companies have come to incorporate this insight into their marketing strategies.
In 2004, shortly after launching the restaurant-review site Yelp, the founders were struggling to grow the company. They decided to convene a gathering of about 100 power-users. The get-together “was a big success,” Ligaya Tichy, who later served as Yelp’s senior community manager, told me. “Bringing users together to share what they loved about the site led to a huge spike in activity. What we realized is that people aren’t really motivated by companies. They’re motivated by other people. We needed to get the message across: you are what makes this product cool.” The number of reviewers on the site grew from 12,000 in 2005 to 100,000 in 2006.
Even today, Yelp still holds exclusive events for its most prolific reviewers, the Yelp Elite Squad, which a 2011 Bloomberg Businessweek article noted for its “cult influence.” “People have been thinking about the similarities between cults and brands for years,” Tichy says. “Only now you’re really seeing people start to codify these practices with evangelists and groups like Yelp Elite.”
The Dish 