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Cult Brands Every company wants a hot product in the hands of ecstatic consumers who spread the gospel. But watch out for that lunatic fringe. The sun beams down on a tiny glen in Pennsylvania s Pocono Mountains a radiant afternoon for an outdoor wedding. A light breeze stirs as the Reverend James S. Massie Jr. looks out over 250 love struck people assembled for a mass ceremony. After reading the vows, miami heat jerseys Massie, an Episcopal priest, takes a deep breath and leans toward the microphone: "By the power vested in me, I pronounce that you are car and driver."These people live for the $21,000 moncler jackets from china roadster, and Massie eggs them on. in his white 1996 Miata, the Hallelujah chorus blaring over his CD player. "It s not just harmless fun," confides Massie, 58. "It s a spiritual endeavor." Maybe it is. Peter Warrick, the 53 year old president of an advertising shop in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., owns 28 Miatas and credits his passion with keeping him alive after a heart attack in 1994. "People own these brands," says James Twitchell, who teaches advertising at the University of Florida at Gainesville, "just as we used to own knucklebones of saints." People used to make pilgrimages to shrines. Now, as many as 85,000 fans make a pilgrimage to the MacWorld expo, the annual four day event at San Francisco s Moscone Center. It s a chance to check out the latest devices and products and, more important, to "touch" Steve Jobs even if only by viewing him on a giant screen the man who democratized technology by putting computing power in the hands of ordinary people. Geeks, musicians and artists pack the hangar like ballroom for the highlight of the show, Jobs speech, and cheer his every word. If you doubt the existence of cult brands that stir strange passions, watch for an opening of a new store and the throngs of people, some camping out overnight, queuing up for that first bite of a soft, sugary doughnut. Or attend the Napa Valley Wine Auction. Last year one participant bid $500,000 for a 1992 bottle of, an obscure California label. What, besides cult like devotion, accounts for the appeal of shoe designer , whose creations sell for as much as $3,400 a pair? "Once you get addicted, it s hard to buy anything else," says Kim Kassel, a former New York fashion publicist who owns more than 100 pairs of Blahnik shoes. Blahnik, 58, sounds a bit mystified. "Sometimes," he says, "I m not able to understand all this madness and love." Love and madness any marketer s dream and nightmare. A cult brand seizes the imagination of a small group who spread the word, make converts, help turn a fringe product into a mainstream Moncler Down Jacket Red BRANSON name. Krispy Kreme spends less than 1% of revenues on advertising. Still, sales more than doubled between 1997 and 2001. But fanaticism can be dangerous. The most loyal fans can hijack a brand and make serious trouble for a company. Consider the fate of Tommy Hilfiger, which is reorganizing after sales plummeted last year. The same hip hop crowd that made the clothes famous eventually helped to sink the brand, after white suburban kids once drawn to the style in large numbers decided they d had enough of the gangsta look. A cult brand is not to be confused with a fad. jumped from 13,558 in 1980 to 48,250 in 1986, before tumbling to 18,784 in 1993, when that crowd lost interest. Cult brands, by contrast, usually start out small and build a steady following, girls moncler coats sometimes over years. The multilevel sales organization(a unit of Alticor) took decades to get established. These days it s a $5 billion business. Why are people drawn to cult brands? Because they want to belong to something, and if religion doesn t fill the role, then something more materialistic takes its place. That may explain why diehardfans meet every Sunday in Manhattan for brunch and a ride on their funky Italian scooters. Take that sense of community one step further and you enter the realm of theology. "If you re part of, say, Harley Davidson, you can feel that this movement has existed before you were born and will continue beyond your finite life span." is the archetypal cult brand. The 100 year old moncler online uk Milwaukee based motorcycle maker didn t really take off until disengaged World War II veterans came home and took to the road on the powerful macho bikes. The most loyal consumers formed an organization named for the 303rd Bombardment Group, aviators who flew missions in France and Germany the Hell s Angels. The outlaw group helped boost the bike s exposure: Its members were hard to miss on highways and occasionally popped up in the news because of criminal activity. Still, the group s bad boy image resonated with middle America. It s the motorcycle of choice for otherwise mild mannered corporate executives and school teachers who want to borrow Harley s hell raising image on weekends. "I m very into the Harley myth," says Alvin LaSalle, 63, an electrical contractor MONCLER chatelin junior A Collar Buttons Kids white jackets from Cathedral City,Calif., who has Harley s trademark wings and the word "Free" tattooed on his arm. And it s still the preferred brand for Hell s Angels, who supposedly use the Harley owners manual as a bible in wedding ceremonies. Cult status can sustain a product even if it never catches on with the general public. The great irony of Apple Computer is that the very posture that won Steve Jobs a cult following creating an exclusive group of iconoclastic techies who stubbornly refused to bow to Microsoft or IBM hobbled his company. With computer networks compatibility Moncler Mens down jackets Hooded Buttons Gray is everything and being out of the mainstream exacts a cost from the users. In the heyday of the Apple II, Jobs bestrode a $1 billion enterprise the largest desktop computer maker in the business in 1982. Over the next couple of years Apple introduced user friendly computers with the Lisa the first PC with a mouse and a menu bar and the Macintosh, which was pitted as a human alternative to the mechanical juggernaut IBM. The Apple fanatics remember Apple s "1984 commercial that aired during that year s Super Bowl, wherein Big Blue was featured as Orwell s Big Brother. That was not enough to deliver the critical mass Apple needed in its battle against the IBM compatibles. Ceding the corporate market to IBM, Apple went into decline. Its stock price fell from $63 Moncler leon jackets waspie with hats in 1983 to $14 in 1985, when Jobs was pushed out. The triumphal return of Jobs in 1997 and the launch of the "ThinkDifferent" ad campaign sparked a revival among the cult followers. The cult is still not part of the mainstream. The Mac fan club consists of a minority of home users plus a small clutch of creative people in advertising, publishing and Hollywood. Altogether they give Apple a teeny 6% share of the desktop and laptop market. , the "open source" PC operating system, has a different sort of cultism, one more disposed to compatibility. Not long after Linus Torvalds, then an undergraduate at the University of Helsinki, created the software in 1991, it was adopted by influential programmers and moncler polos hackers. As Torvalds rolled out new versions of, more people embraced it as their own because they could tinker with and customize it. stood for more than free software. It became, says Torvalds, a "sociological phenomenon."

Text and images are provided by National Palace Museum