Brand strategy explicitly tells marketers to be like cults.

Drug marketing can sell diagnoses first, creating demand that outlasts any single medication.

Shared “therapy speak” can build community while narrowing how people understand their struggles.

The Culting of Brands sounds like one of those polemical books about ad industry manipulation. It’s not. It’s a how-to.

In the early 2000s, marketers were contending with savvy consumers wary of advertising tactics. One marketer, Douglas Atkin, realized that some brands had managed to engender cult-like devotion in their customers that transcended advertising and products.

He studied these "culty" brands and actual cults to figure out how this could work. Cults ensnare smart, capable (and ideally influential) people, he argued, by offering a couple of core human desires: meaning and belonging. Cults enclose a worldview around their followers that pre-answers questions, arming devotees with deeply felt shared perspectives.

His book therefore recommends that brands provide ideologies and identities for consumers. Chapters include “You’re Different, We’re Different,” “You Belong,” “This Is What We Believe,” and “We Love You.”

Another brand strategy book, Lovemarks, asserts that tapping into emotion and helping people to tell the story of their lives through brand values (where disentangling from them would unravel the very story of the self) is key to obtaining loyalty beyond reason from customers.

I write about ways marketing messages have been conflated with medical ones in mental health, and how the emotional affordances of social media platforms enable spaces where we don’t just identify with common characteristics of disorders; we feel them.

Social media is invested in invoking and enlisting user moods, providing and platforming interpretations of those moods, encapsulating them in memes (and sometimes even selling them as user data). Using social........

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