Blink Twice
How to Build a Cult Brand in Eight Moves
The order we use with every client, and the sign each move is missing from your brand.
A cult brand is one people buy on purpose. They pay full price, come back without being chased and bring their friends along. Most brands never get there, because they jump straight to the look and skip the thinking underneath it.
Cult brands are put together in eight moves, in order, across three pillars: Story, Signal and System. Each move has a tell, the sign it's missing from your brand. This is the quick version. Brand Eye 26 goes into every move in full.
Story
Map the Red Ocean
The tell: you look like everyone else on the shelf. Before you write a word about yourself, map how every rival looks, what they say, how they sell and what they promise. Those are the unwritten rules of your category. Liquid Death started here. Every bottled water brand promised purity, so purity had stopped meaning anything.
Find the Unfair Truth
The tell: when people ask why you, the answer is quality. Look for something true about you that a rival can't claim without admitting their own product is the compromise. Three quarters of a gin and tonic is tonic, so Fever-Tree said: if three quarters of your drink is the mixer, mix with the best. Schweppes couldn't follow without calling its own tonic second best.
Make the Blue Ocean Move
The tell: you're competing on price and paying for every sale. Turn the truth into a position nobody can follow you into. Dip could have tried to be the greener laundry brand, or the cheaper one. We positioned it as the first home wellness brand instead, and used this method to help it scale from £1m to £10m in 24 months.
Write the Story
The tell: ask five people on your team what you stand for and you'll get five answers. Write the story down in full so the whole team can say it. Then boil it down to one line, your North Star. Rains never starts a brief from scratch, because every brief centres on rain.
Signal
Build the Signal
The tell: you changed the look and nothing else changed. This is the only move about how you look, which is why a new look on its own rarely does much. Build one hero asset that tells people who made the product and something true about the brand. On's CloudTec sole does both, and you can spot it from across the street.
System
Install the System
The tell: the brand only holds when you're in the room. Set the rules that keep every touchpoint on story as you hire and scale. Jellycat's toys live where they're sold, so it built a system for that: fish and chips at Selfridges, a diner at FAO Schwarz, a patisserie in Paris.
Break the Story into Pillars
The tell: you pay for content that never adds up to anything. Split the story into a handful of content categories and series, and rotate between them. Ffern's Cloud Orchard release ran on four: the film, behind the scenes, the ingredients and the people who make it.
Plant the Brand Trojan Horse
The tell: customers buy once and forget you. Give them something they keep and use long after the sale. IKEA's blue FRAKTA bag turns up at laundrettes and house moves, carrying the brand everywhere it goes.
The order matters
Most brands break at one move and build everything else on top of the gap. A new look can't fix a story that was never written, and a story can't hold without a system. Doing them in order on your own brand is harder than knowing them.
The Brand World Score is eight questions, one for each move. It gives you a score out of 10 and shows exactly where your brand world breaks.