Brand Rituals
Jul|23|2009 Mark Gallagher and Laura Savard
Tradition underscores brand authenticity
We live in a homogenized world, where competing goods are produced in the same factories and competing services are carried out by the same people. As a result, we are offered overwhelming sameness. Perhaps the Kaiser Chiefs said it best with their song “Everything is average nowadays.”
Transforming otherwise identical offerings into an experience, ritual can add a unique benefit by offering non-feature differentiation. Ritual can be a brand signal, unlocking new value for both the brand and consumers alike. It acts as a differentiator in a world of sameness, but for a set of actions to become a “brand ritual” consumers must relate those actions to the brand.
How rituals work
Human beings are creatures of habit. We function through activity patterns: brush teeth, shower, shave, drink coffee, wake up… These routines help people move from one emotional state to another but are not necessarily attached to specific meaning. A ritual is a specific sequence of actions that holds symbolic value. The action itself conveys meaning.
Ritual vs brand ritual
It’s the difference between the campfire tradition of making Smores and the bar-side ritual of a lime in a bottle of Corona. Consumers are not going to own a ritual unless the ritual itself makes sense. Placing a lime in the neck of a Corona bottle has become the only way to drink a Corona. To have it any other way not only alters the taste, it alters the experience. You probably saw the image above, and recognized it as Corona even though the labels were hidden.
Rituals can span from the casual to the formal and are woven into our religious, cultural and social lives. Brand rituals may coincide with specific occasions or be built into the product or service itself. They may be performed by a single individual, a third party or by a group. Regardless of who performs the ritual or when it takes place, brand rituals exemplify the cultural connection between brand and consumer.
Due to the symbolic nature of rituals, the actions create affinity towards the brand and provide consumers with a reason to revisit the brand experience. Performing these orthodox acts underscores authenticity. Like the name or logo, ritual becomes inherently memorable and fundamental to brand loyalty over time, creating connections between the brand and the ritual act by creating neural pathways that reinforce relevance.
Benefits of brand ritual
By translating actions into brand-specific meaning, rituals can help build lifelong bonds between brands and consumers by providing people with a sense of satisfaction, strengthening social bonds by imparting something personal that brings us closer to the brand, our friends and ourselves.
The most successful rituals introduce new people to the brand as a right of passage. This knowledge is passed on firsthand. Each consumer educates the next in a viral pattern. The very act of performing the ritual gives the consumer ownership. That person learns the ritual, teaches another, who teaches another and so on. This makes simple, easy rituals more effective. The simpler the ritual, the more likely it will spread. When the act is simple, fun and easy to pass on it can reach pandemic. Complicated rituals die quickly or become simplified by the people who perform them.
Look for rituals in the way that your consumers experience your brand and formalize them. If a small group of consumers have built a ritual around your brand, then it may have merit to become a movement.
photo: Dave Bradley
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Agreed that rituals are powerful and habit-forming. They are also brand-enforcing with the caveat that a brand must first have something to offer in the way of status/power/prominence before a ritual can be broadly connected to it.
But is the lime/Corona phenomenon really a ritual?
What I mean is that I can drink Tetley Tea cold with milk and sugar. That habit can catch on to the point where others think "wow, iced tea with milk and sugar, that's great." But that ritual isn't going to help define the brand for two reasons.
First, it's a quirky little ritual that I made up to mess with the heads of waitstaff everywhere.
Second, Tetley's product doesn't lend itself well to consumption or use that allows a simple, memorable ritual. There are too many other ways to take your tea.
Lime in Corona, genius companion to the beer that makes the brand memorable. If there were an ad with just a lime and the beach, you could still tag it with Corona at the end and never show a bottle. But memory isn't a ritual either.
Which then makes me think, are you really talking about rituals or accessories? A lime goes with a Corona. A styrofoam cup goes with a Dunkin Donuts large iced coffee. One helps you recognize the brand and both are admittedly rituals.
But I'm more inclined to think that the practice of defraying condensation hand with the use of a second cup on your iced coffee is more ritual-like than adding lime to a Corona.
While creating this comment I found myself hard-pressed to come up with another ritual for a major brand. Is that because there aren't any? Is it because we're all individuals who enjoy our products in our own way?
Not sure. But this absence of other examples leads me to feel even more strongly that the lime in Corona is like the Haynes printed tag, the Snapple cap messages, the Tivo 'boop, boop, boop' sound and the Domino's odd octagonal pizza box.
These are just traits that contribute to the brand and may reinforce our feelings for the product and brand, but they don't start, finish or even compel us to shepherd a ritual to other prospective consumers.
After further review, the tie of a brand accessory to a habit that's necessary to fully enjoy a brand is as thin as the lime sliver that goes in your drink.
Jeff,
Rituals are designed into brands every day. They add authenticity by attaching meaning to action.
There is no doubt that most attempts fail, but those that succeed, provide tremendous value by becoming brand signals: tangible cues that directly equate to the brand.
You may not recognize the value of ritual as a brand signal, but Corona surely does (the act of squeezing a lime into a bottle of beer is distinctly Corona), as does
Porsche:
Starting the car with your left hand
Guinness:
Patented pouring technique
Apple:
iPhone's sliding/pinching interface designed to have "ritualistic qualities"
Toblerone:
"Whacking" a Chocolate Orange to separate the slices
As you can see there are many examples and we invite everyone to contribute more examples. These rituals go largely unnoticed by consumers as "brand rituals," but create value nonetheless. We chose to focus on a single brand ritual (squeezing a slice of lime into a Corona) because we wanted to keep the post short. It is a blog after all.
Thanks for your feedback. We now know why the comment plugin we chose is called "Intense Debate."
Cheers,
Mark Gallagher
Brand Expressionist®
Very interesting discussion, however I don't feel that Jeff is truly appreciating the distinction between a consumption ritual and a routine or habit. Habits and routines, like how one prepares ones tea, are typically created by the individual or by society (e.g. how to shake hands).
In addition, routine behavior is typically subconscious behavior, whereas ritualized behavior is conscious and has a higher degree of involvement by the consumer. Ritualized behavior also sends a more intense signal to others, and stimulates a more conscious response (Wassup! Wassup!).
For example, Jeff's tea routine will likely not have an affect on others, since their is no collective or shared meaning built into the the routine (this is where the brand comes in, to energize the ritualized behavior). Also, since it's not a ritual with meaning attached, Jeff can easily change his tea routine to better suit his desires. Not so with rituals, which are much more resistant to change. They have been purposefully standardized and introduced into specific social occasions to exert a powerful influence on collective behavior (pour Gatorade on the winning coach's head, shake and pop champagne bottles, etc.).
Great post, and I agree that providing consumers with rituals in which they can participate adds emotional value to the experience, which is what brands are all about.
While this is not new with respect to products – the champagne cork comes to mind – it does seem like we're seeing more of it as consumers seek to participate more in brands. One dimension of this phenomemon, at least initially, is to create insiders and outsiders among those who know and do not know the ritual. Learning the tequila shot ritual – salt, shot, lemon – is a freshman year right of passage for most people. Oreo splitting is another, which we hand down to our kids.
In a way we're seeing this mutate to go beyond the ritual to the 'Temple.' Witness the Apple Store, which Microsoft announced last week it intends to emulate. BMW just spent several hundred million dollars on a German-based museum and overseas delivery headquarters, where new drivers can pick there cars up in person.
I would agree as well. Providing emotional value is important. I see the opportunity to own an experience, to own a brand. When there is a ritual to adopt, master, or adhere to, it puts you inside a group, a club, an "in" with knowledge to how things were intended to be done. It can even be extended to more powerful traditional and cultural preferences. That is something you can own, which breeds emotional attachment.
A frosted glass would be an accessory to a beer, Corona drinkers never ask for a glass, but they always ask for a lime. To me, that is the difference between ritualistic behavior and merely accessorizing a product. Adding an extra cup outside the coffee cup is compulsion not ritual. Damn, now I am thirsty……….
I thought I would share a few more examples that we received through conversations and email submission.
Polaroid:
Shaking the photo so it will develop faster
Tootsie Pop:
Counting the licks it takes to get to the center
Kit Kat:
Breaking the chocolate cookie apart (considered good luck in eastern cultures)
Popsicle
Breaking the double stick into two, single popsicles
Mobil:
Speedpass payment
Olympics:
Carrying the torch and the lighting of the flame
If you have others, please share!
Cheers,
Laura Savard
Brand Expressionist®
love your website…is it a wordpress template? or did you craft it from scratch or?
i won't copy i promise…i just love the innovative approach and am curious …if it is a template it's a good one.
your articles are wonderful by the way.
Niya,
I'm glad to hear that you like our blog. And no, we did not use a template.
Cheers,
Mark Gallagher
Brand Expressionist®