What if Ritual was the future of brands?

Brands tirelessly seek to convince us of their uniqueness in order to attract and retain us. In other words, they create difference to create preference. Paradoxically, in marketing the consideration given to the brand ritual is still quite random.

On the one hand, the Brand Ritual is admired, cited as an example as a tangible contribution to the value of the brand. Starbucks with the customer's first name written on the cup is now a classic case study in business schools.

But when it comes to strategic thinking, the ritual is still underestimated, considered as incidental, a kind of superfluous coquetry. However, if a brand marks itself as unique, any interaction with it should be too. A strategic reflection on its rituals is therefore essential. Like all brand manifestations, the ritual should be designed as an extension of the strategy. It is an emanation, a deduction of the strategy, and not a simple decorative element. To give a concrete example, if a brand defends values of conviviality, its testing ritual [1] will certainly be based on sharing, like all the instruments created for this ritual. Conversely, if the brand cultivates secrecy and exclusivity, the trial ritual will be designed as a privilege reserved for a few the happy few. A quasi-initiation ritual.

So what's a ritual?

It designates regulated practices of a sacred or symbolic nature. Or even a set of prescriptions, gestures, which regulate the liturgy of a religion [2]. Although the ritual is also profane, the religious dimension is omnipresent.

For several decades, brands have extended their field of action, from a simple product to the one of ideology. They have metamorphosed into highly prescriptive devices of values of all kinds: ethical, aesthetic, hedonistic or even veridictory values, claiming to hold the Truth. Logically, some of them end up being compared to religions, sometimes arousing the same fervor and their shops to real places of worship (cf. Apple and Apple store). At this stage it becomes legitimate that they also have a liturgy: the Brand Ritual.

For a Brand, the ritual is above all the repetition of a habit, of a codified and singular or "proprietary" way of proceeding. The ritual is both a habit and something special.

“A rite is what makes one day different from other days, an hour from other hours” The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

A Brand Ritual brings together actions governed by a scenario with ad hoc instruments to accomplish it. The ritual also implies a transmission, it is explained or learned, it is in this that it enriches the cultural capital of the brand. To be legitimate, it will answer two essential questions: Why? (why it exists) and How? (how it is performed).

The ritual also summons distinction, Bourdieu's concept [3].

Take the example of Cire Trudon. The brand of candles has invented a test ritual with a glass bell as the instrument to accomplish it, used to protect the precious scented candles from dust, of course, but above all to show how to smell them. Indeed the error would consist in smelling by putting the nose directly on the candle (sacrilege). On the contrary, it is a question of delicately lifting the bell, of turning it towards oneself to feel inside. It is by watching others do that one acquires this know-how which is transformed into distinction, that of being among those who know how to do things. In short, insiders.

Extension of the domain of the ritual

The ritual should not be limited to the only external practices of the brand, and only to its customers. Its internal and external use are two sides of the same coin.

In both cases, the ritual makes it possible to federate by reinforcing the feeling of belonging, whether it is that of employees or customers.

Corporate ritualization invents particular ways of recruiting, of welcoming a new employee, of meeting for a convention, of innovating together and even of celebrating victories. Unlike the external ritual, it cannot be imposed. It must be co-created with the employees of the company so that they appropriate it. Under no circumstances it should be experienced as a constraint of an artificial nature.

External ritualization, for its part, can intervene at each stage of the costumer experience, from trial to packaging, to purchase, including delivery and all of the brand's cultural and promotional events. The ritual can also be invented by the customers themselves in their use of the product which gradually crystallizes, or even co-created with them.

Is the Ritual a social necessity?

How to explain this attraction for the ritual? The brands that have taken it seriously by integrating it into their strategic thinking are reaping the rewards in terms of differentiation and loyalty. Perhaps because the ritual re-enchants their daily lives by bringing a dimension of surprise and poetry, emancipating them from the predictable reflexes of marketing.

What if the reason for its success was deeper, inherent in the very function of the ritual? We live in a so-called secularized society, since the Age of Enlightenment faith has been gradually replaced by reason and the community by the individual. Our postmodern societies are subject to injunctions to happiness, entertainment and "being oneself", the latter seeming paradoxical to say the least.

However, we need the sacred and a symbolism of transcendence. Rituals, like their transmission, represent an anthropomorphic constant. They constitute a cement of our societies and found the community and the feeling of belonging.

So isn't the Brand Ritual a modest echo of the Sacred, in a society that has actually lost it?