How To Build Brand Obsession & A Cult-Like Following

You are a business or brand who is in a highly competitive market or industry, and you want to build obsession like that cult-like following with your consumer. This is one piece of advice I would really pay attention to that is to understand how to actually differentiate. A lot of brands and businesses have been fed the lie that if they make their product or position their product as different enough from a features or benefits level, that's how the consumer will choose their brand over someone else's. But there is a reason why you have a better product or service and people still aren't choosing your product or service against your competitor. That reason has to do with the way that our brain makes decisions. This is what I like to call like the neuroscience of kind of branded marketing. When most brands are speaking to a very small portion of the brain that makes fine decisions, the logical, rational side, you can emotionally differentiate and leverage and trigger the emotional part of the brain that actually dominates purchasing decisions. And I have found, both through my own research and studying other brands and working with my own clients, that people tend to actually just make habitual purchases after they've gotten to that place where the purchase is on autopilot. So if you are in a highly competitive landscape from a business perspective, and someone's already habitually buying from a particular business or particular brand, valuable to recognize that you can't just change or shift that habit from the consumer by talking about a feature or a benefit. What I encourage my clients to do, which I just believe is the most effective form of differentiation, is to build a brand and a reputation and kind of like an aura around their products or service that exceeds the feature or benefit focus outcome. Instead of it just being a physical outcome, it is a more emotional outcome that's driven by some deeper purpose in their life that is going to benefit them in some capacity. You see this a lot when a particular type of consumer chooses to purchase a more expensive version of something that they can get at like a drugstore for a fraction of the price. Typically buy brands because we have beliefs around them that also impact how we either feel about ourselves, how we think others feel about us, or just how it emotionally impacts our lives in some capacity.