The Cult Brand Manifesto: How to Build a World People Fight to Belong To
Forget customer acquisition. Forget brand awareness. The real brands of the future will be cults, and cults are built differently.
There’s a certain kind of person who calibrates their espresso shots with a digital scale.
Who knows that 25–30 seconds of extraction is the sweet spot.
Who upgrades their grinder before their mattress.
These are not “coffee drinkers.”
These are believers.
La Marzocco built the Linea Micra for them.
Not for hobbyists. Not for gift-buying spouses. Not for the "I-need-caffeine-before-my-Zoom" crowd.
The Micra is compact, industrial-grade, counter-unfriendly, and it costs more than most couches.
It is sold like a religious artifact: obsessive, quietly excellent.
La Marzocco didn't study Keurig and say, "How can we make it faster?"
They said, "How can we make it feel like Florence at sunrise in a dimly lit café, even if it’s 6 AM in a cold Boston kitchen?"
The goal is not "better."
The goal is "more magical."
The Micra doesn’t try to win over everyone. It wins deeply with a few. And in doing so, it builds gravitational pull from everyone else.
This is what the best brands do.
People don't make decisions like machines calculating inputs and outputs. They make decisions based on emotions, symbols, rituals, and the intangible pull of belonging.
In other words: the best product doesn’t win.
The most meaningful product wins.
This weekend, I sat down and asked myself a deep question:
Am I building a brand... or a cult?
Because cults don’t grow through customer acquisition.
They grow through belief.
Through commitment.
Through irrational, unshakable love.
And that’s exactly why I created the Do Epic Sh*t newsletter in the first place: to actually do epic sh*t, not just talk about it.
And truthfully?
There’s nothing more epic than building a cult brand.
A brand people don’t just buy into, but belong to.
A brand that creates its own gravity.
A brand that matters so much it feels inevitable.
So I wrote this manifesto.
Because just like life commitments, when you publicly declare what you stand for, you’re held accountable beyond yourself.
You can’t back down quietly.
You are seen. You are bound.
You must live up to the standard you set.
This is my public commitment.
This is the standard I am building toward.
And if you’re reading this, maybe you’re ready to build the same way too.
THE MANIFESTO:
You are not building a brand. You are building a belief system
1. Logic is not your ally. Irrationality is your superpower.
As Rory Sutherland says in Alchemy (highly recommended read):
"The human mind does not run on logic any more than a horse runs on petrol."
People do not make rational decisions. They make symbolic ones. Emotional ones. Status-driven ones.
They choose what feels right, not what makes sense.
If you optimize your product for logic, you become invisible.
If you optimize for meaning, you become inevitable.
Build a product that feels like a magic trick, not a checklist. No spreadsheet ever built a cult.
2. You don't sell products. You sell identity.
Nobody "needs" a $3,000 espresso machine that takes up half their kitchen.
They need to feel like the kind of person who would own one.
Products are functional. Brands are tribal.
A cult brand does not solve needs.
It affirms dreams.
It says: You belong here. You are one of us.
3. Define your heretics before you define your followers.
A cult brand isn’t for everyone.
It is specifically not for everyone.
To create love, you must create exclusion.
You must make opting in mean something, because opting out is real.
If you can't say who your product is not for, you have no product.
4. Sameness is death. Character is life.
There is no neutral moment.
Every touchpoint either builds the myth or breaks it.
If your product feels just a little like everyone else’s, your brand is already dying.
Stay in character. Everywhere. Every time. Or don't bother showing up at all.
5. Culture beats category.
Categories are defined by competitors.
Culture is defined by believers.
You’re not fighting for market share.
You’re fighting for mindshare.
Forget the category "rules."
Play by cultural codes.
Where culture lives, brand power grows.
6. Rational improvements don’t make irrational loyalty.
Nobody falls in love with a “slightly faster” checkout flow.
They fall in love with the feeling of being understood.
Small logical optimizations do not create obsession.
Wild emotional differentiations do.
Double down on irrational value.
On status. On ritual. On myth.
Be less "efficient." Be more significant.
7. Build altars, not billboards.
Billboards shout at strangers.
Altars gather believers.
You are not marketing to sell a feature.
You are inviting people to join a cause.
Your product is not a product.
It is an act of worship.
Treat it like holy ground.
8. The job of your brand is to whisper: "You are not alone."
At the center of every cult brand is a simple emotional promise:
"There are people like you. You have found them."
That promise is worth more than a thousand discount codes.
You’re not selling to the mind.
You’re selling to the soul.
Building a cult brand means playing a different game entirely
The rational marketer optimizes for reach.
The cult builder optimizes for resonance.
The rational marketer chases trends.
The cult builder builds temples.
The rational marketer shouts at everyone.
The cult builder speaks quietly to someone, and is heard around the world.
It is better to be everything to someone than something to everyone.
It is better to make one person feel completely seen, than to make a thousand people mildly interested.
My commitment:
The world does not need another product.
The world is desperate for meaning.
Magic > Logic
Belief > Awareness
Identity > Utility
I’m not here to "build a brand."
I’m here to build a world.
A world someone will fight to be part of.
A world someone will proudly defend.
A world someone will be irrationally, unshakably, impossibly loyal to.
This is my public commitment.
Hold me to it.
If you're a founder, product builder, or product marketer working on something you believe could become a cult brand, I want to hear about it.
Disclaimer and why I write: This is not an AI generated article. It’s rooted on recent research about cult brands, Rory Sutherland’s books, my unlearning of marketing, and my favorite deep talks with my CEO. It’s written from the heart, not to sell, not to bring in subscribers despite the subscription button (after all, it’s free), but to move abstract thoughts from my mind into a concrete form. Inside the brain, ideas can be messy, overlapping, and unstructured. Writing forces me to translate these ideas into language, which requires a clear structure. But AI always help me with grammar (English is not my first language, you know).