Cult status (and what not to do with it)

Krispy Kreme once had something most brands would kill for: a cult.

There are, roughly, four ingredients that build a cult brand.

A unique product. Something you genuinely can't get anywhere else.

Insider knowledge. Think In-N-Out's secret menu. You feel like you're in on something the other customers aren't.

A sense of partnership. Tesla does this one well. Elon hands out beta access to features, factory tours, makes you feel like you're building the thing alongside him. Plus the whole “environmental mission” thing.

And scarcity. It has to be a little hard to get. Supreme drops. Tesla waitlists. The wanting is the whole point.

Krispy Kreme had all four, whether they knew it or not. Right up through the dot-com boom, they were untouchable.

Then the company was traded among food conglomerates, went public, and changed hands. And somewhere in there, the people running it forgot how any of it worked.

The way they killed it was almost impressive: they put the donuts everywhere. Gas stations. Grocery aisles. McDonald’s. Every checkout counter in America.

And once a cult product is sitting on every shelf, it stops being a cult product. It's just a donut.

I don't know whether it was public-market pressure or they just didn’t get it. But either way, they traded a cult for a commodity, and the market smacked them down.

Here’s the thing to remember:

Every mistake you're about to make has already been made by someone else.

Business history is where the lessons are sitting, already written down, if you bother to read them.

Look at your own business. How many of the cult ingredients do you have? Unique product, customers feel like they have insider knowledge, a sense of partnership, scarcity.

Most businesses have one, maybe two.

Not every business should try to be a cult. (I don’t want a sense of scarcity from a garbage collection company.)

But if you have any of these, protect them. Or at least, don’t trade them away lightly.

If you want to go deeper on the psychology, there's a book called The Culting of Brands by Douglas Atkin. Tons of usable insights in there.

Hope this was interesting. Thanks for reading.

Michael

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