Brands are currently driven by the consumerist profit-motive. But, they don’t have to be and we can look at cults for some inspiration.
Credits: Life After Lifestyle
brands-form-identities, but cults show us that identity-forming is about more than consuming content and goods. Cultural participation is about action, and owning products is an insignificant form of participation.
Example: Buying Nike shoes doesn’t mean that you are fit
What people crave are forms of true cultural membership, meaningful narratives, but DTC brands were never incentivized to meet those needs. Some quotes from Life After Lifestyle:
The Lifestyle era was not about creating culture; it was about attaching brands onto existing cultural contexts.
For some organizations, culture has become the product itself, and products have become secondary, auxiliary, to the production of culture.
Their job is not to drive value, but to add another layer of depth to the community, to enshrine the practices.
Some current examples include SoulCycle ,The Nearness and CrossFit.
Today, culture-is-a-service. But it doesn’t have to be and it is evolving.
Just like how in the 2010s, the API-fication of supply chains opened up lifestyle brands, in the 2020s, crypto-currencies open up the space of incentivized idealogies, networked publics, and co-owned faiths.