TOP DRAWER BOOK REVIEW
by
HL Carpenter

 

The Culting of Brands
by Douglas Atkin
230 pages; hardcover; $24.95
The Penguin Group, New York, 2004

When actress Gwyneth Paltrow named her new daughter Apple, pundits quipped she was, perhaps, a bit too attached to her i-Pod.

You might agree, but author and marketer Douglas Atkin thinks this type of attachment is a good thing. In fact, he’d like you to achieve a similar level of cult-like behavior for your own company’s products.

In The Culting of Brands, Mr. Atkin explores the reasons people are willing to make an emotional investment in an item as cold as a particular brand of computer. The answer he comes up with is the basic human need to belong to a group consisting of family – people who are like you. If you buy into the image of a product, you assume others who also do share your outlook. In other words, they’re like you.

With the blitheness of a true marketer, Mr. Atkin dismisses concerns about ethics, the shallowness of an attachment based on a product and the societal impacts of brand-cults on community. He believes we ‘live in a spiritual economy’, where ‘brands are now serious contenders for belief and community.’

What he appears unable to grasp is that advertising is ephemeral, using the power of money and mass media to craft nothing more than a superficial, fleeting illusion. Times change, as do companies, and quickly. How often have you found a product you like, only to discover on your next trip to the store that it’s been discontinued? If you’ve become part of the ‘cult’, what do you do when your support group vanishes? This difference between societal institutions such as religion and the author’s idea of ‘brand cults’ is largely ignored throughout The Culting of Brands.

The book does offer interesting insights into the reasons cults exist and how they survive. But the thinness of the focus means lots of repetition, and probably more detail than you need about the brands illustrated as examples.

If you’re in charge of marketing at your company, you might want to read The Culting of Brands as a blueprint for knowing when to rein in your ad agency. Unless, of course, you’re interested in manipulating emotions and having children named after your product. In that case, you’ll find plenty of tips.

 

Review originally published September 2004.