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Now Is the Time to Decide If Your Brand Is a Habit or a Ritual

When consumer habits fall apart, look for the rituals that remain.

Author

Jasmine Bina
May 19, 2020

When people or brands say, "We'll get through this together," or "After the Coronavirus has passed," they're revealing a lie in our collective words of encouragement. 

There will very likely be no "before and after" COVID. 

Instead, there will be a very slow tumbling of closures and business failures, amplified by a reshuffling of social norms and broken ideals. 

Today, grocery stores have begun installing plexiglass barriers and safe standing zones for checkout, while airlines have less and less direct flights and stewards ask travelers to raise their hands to go the bathroom. Tomorrow will bring us ultra-hygienic hotels and contactless restaurants. 

We won't really know when we're out of this, and that means we won't go back to many of the habits that characterized our pre-COVID lives.

As business slows, the retail landscape contracts, lagging companies rush to D2C and we unwillingly embrace uncertainty in the face of a global deceleration, now is the time to ask yourself what your brand actually means to consumers. 

Is your brand a habit or a ritual?

It's an important question because there's a good chance many habits will not survive the current climate, but rituals will. 

And most of our habits are centered on the products we buy.

But as brands large and small lose their customer base to manufacturing disruptions and retail closures, there is a segment of companies that is not suffering the same consequences - brands like cruise ship carriers (yes, cruise ship carriers), smart home gyms equipment, birthday planners - and they have one thing in common: they have ritualized the experience of their products.

Rituals fulfill our current needs in a way that habits can't.

They provide meaning in an uncertain time. They help us mark change, memorialize the passage of time, and understand who we are.

Even if your product is utilitarian in nature, or your brand is seemingly too inconsequential to be ritualized, there is a way to create greater context around your story so that you are no longer consumed like a habit, and in this article, I share examples of how some brands like Open Spaces, Dame and Oscar Mayer have done just that.

But first, we need to understand what makes rituals so powerful.

Truth tellers, skeptics and shameless liars.

Here's what we've been consuming.

For young people, emotions are highly contagious social viruses (Psyche): "When we hear the word ‘contagion’, our minds are immediately drawn to the viruses and bacteria spread through coughing and sneezing. [Yet] there is a growing body of scientific evidence showing that our internal mental states, including our emotions, might also be socially transmissible. Understanding the nature and dynamics of this emotional contagion is crucial in highlighting how social interactions might impact on our wellbeing."

How anxiety changes political behavior (Vox): "While the reaction to 9/11 was transformative for millions of Americans, it didn’t have the same economic repercussions as the coronavirus pandemic, but the differing attitudes to terrorism and pandemics were obvious well before the stay-at-home orders were issued. Researchers on how anxiety impacts our politics argue that our different responses to terrorism and disease are the result of the politicization of anxiety, an emotional reaction to a perceived threat."

Medical Researchers Worry Silicon Valley Could Screw Up Psychedelics (OneZero): "Looking back on this moment in time, we might see it as the tipping point between psychedelic research and psychedelic commercialization. The argument is at least partly over who — medical professionals or scrappy entrepreneurs — is best equipped to build the structures. “They call it a psychedelic renaissance,” Arnold says. “But what is a renaissance without artists, without creators?"

The Prophecies of Q (The Atlantic): "QAnon is emblematic of modern America’s susceptibility to conspiracy theories, and its enthusiasm for them. But it is also already much more than a loose collection of conspiracy-minded chat-room inhabitants. It is a movement united in mass rejection of reason, objectivity, and other Enlightenment values. And we are likely closer to the beginning of its story than the end. The group harnesses paranoia to fervent hope and a deep sense of belonging. The way it breathes life into an ancient preoccupation with end-times is also radically new. To look at QAnon is to see not just a conspiracy theory but the birth of a new religion."

(Bury your head in the sand.)

Strategy Thought Of The Day

This is the time to take big swings and try new things as a brand. Brave ideas will be celebrated and well-intentioned failures will be forgiven.

Jasmine Bina
Founder & CEO
Concept Bureau, Inc.