Chris Kneeland is the cofounder and CEO of Cult Collective. He helps brand leaders develop better ways to engage with customers, prospects, and staff by applying eight common characteristics discovered while researching the most iconic, “cult-like” brands on the planet.
Chris has held marketing positions at John Deere and The Home Depot. He was also previously the Head of Retail Marketing at RAPP. He has consulted with brands like Harley Davidson, Zappos, Best Buy, Canadian Tire, Keurig, GoDaddy and more. He believes advocacy trumps awareness and that most brands have an unholy addiction to mass advertising and markdowns.
Chris has a Master’s Degree from Northwestern University and a B.A. from Brigham Young University. He’s worked extensively throughout the US and Canada and has spoken globally about the principles of Cult Branding. Chris is also the co-founder of The Gathering, a Forbes top-rated business conference that hosts 1,500 business executives annually in Banff Alberta.
Connect with Chris on LinkedIn.
What You’ll Learn In This Episode
- Cult branding
- The top cult brands in N. America
- How businesses convert more customers into cult-like followers
This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix
TRANSCRIPT
Intro: [00:00:02] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Coach the Coach radio brought to you by the Business RadioX Ambassador Program, the no cost business development strategy for coaches who want to spend more time serving local business clients and less time selling them. Go to brxambassador.com To learn more. Now, here’s your host.
Lee Kantor: [00:00:33] Lee Kantor here, another episode of Coach the Coach Radio, and this is going to be a fun one today on the show, we have Chris Kneeland with cult collective. Welcome, Chris.
Chris Kneeland: [00:00:42] Hey, thanks, Lee. Great to be here.
Lee Kantor: [00:00:43] Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us a little bit about cult collective. How are you serving, folks?
Chris Kneeland: [00:00:48] We’re we’re what we refer to as an audience engagement firm. That’s a sort of a hybrid if an ad agency and a business consultant had a baby. We meaning we do business advisory services, but all within the construct of the customer experience. So we don’t get into things like supply chain management or M&A work or things like that. We really try to look at creating customers who can not only buy more product more often but be converted into cult like followers and cult like adoration or raving fans is sort of the pinnacle of audience engagement. And we’re fascinated by businesses that have sort of transcended that category and have spent a lot of time trying to reverse engineer what they do, how they do it so that everybody else can can copy it.
Lee Kantor: [00:01:36] Now is that something that can be reverse engineered for any company? Is it any company kind of cult worthy?
Chris Kneeland: [00:01:43] I don’t think every company is cult worthy. The two biggest disc qualifiers is an uninspired C-suite, so businesses that are just content with some form of financial performance don’t make good candidates because cult brands aspire to not only be successful, but they want to be significant in some way. It could be culturally significant, like Converse or vans, or it could be socially significant like, say, a Patagonia that’s trying to save the planet. So if you have a purpose beyond profit that makes you cult eligible, and then there are certainly some categories that are just so commoditized, home utilities comes to mind where it’s like, I don’t want to think about it. I have no affinity for it. I don’t know. Don’t care. Maybe business copy machine salesmen. They may have a hard time, you know, trying to create some noble purpose behind their business. But the flip side, Leigh, is that many businesses have sold themselves short. We our problem is not finding businesses that want to be cult like that can’t be our businesses. Our problem is finding businesses that should be more cult like, but aren’t.
Lee Kantor: [00:02:53] So you think that this could be a limiting belief for some organizations that they just think, Hey, we’re an accounting firm, so they all look alike. They have different names on the door, but we’re not kind of eligible for being a cult when you’re saying that. Maybe they are.
Chris Kneeland: [00:03:09] Yeah, I mean, take lots of different industries, nonprofits, colleges, health care be to be even accounting services. Yeah, it is rare that we would run into somebody that’s trying to find. I mean, really, it comes down to how were you overcoming commoditization? How are you choosing to compete beyond price or convenience? And so if you have a C-suite that says we don’t want to win on price or convenience, we must compete differently. I think we’re going to have a 90 plus percent success rate finding a way to let them use some principles from cult brands.
Lee Kantor: [00:03:42] So, so mindset is at the heart of this. It’s this if leadership doesn’t have the right mindset that it’s going to be difficult, but if they have the right set, then it’s possible.
Chris Kneeland: [00:03:52] Yeah, because then it gets into both courage and creativity, right? If you have the ambition, then you’re going to maybe have the courage to try something scary and buy scary. I mean, doing something that maybe, you know, your competitors have ever done before and then also just creative. And I just think that there’s too many businesses that have settled into mediocrity that are just failing to display appropriate levels of creativity to solve problems by applying different sorts of models or benchmarks.
Lee Kantor: [00:04:22] Now is it something that only kind of the largest organizations can take part in? Or is this something that if you’re a scrappy startup that you can say, you know what, instead of going the traditional marketing, I’m buying AdWords and Facebook, I want to kind of lean into this cult branding initiative. Is that something I can do? Or is it something only for the big boys?
Chris Kneeland: [00:04:44] I think the newer your business and the smaller your business, the bigger advantage you have for two reasons. One, the bigger you get, the more bad habits you start to embrace, the more you stop playing offense and start playing defense. You stop trying to to challenge and you start trying to protect. So big is usually bad, not good. As well as you know, a lot of these brand principles don’t require big investments in things like paid media, you know, so it’s if you don’t have a lot of money, you should be even more open minded to coach brand marketing because the answer is not ever going to be by Super Bowl commercial or, you know, maybe even not not even doing some paid media at all. Brands, some of our favorite cult brands that we run across Lululemon, Spanx, Costco, you know, they’re not they don’t do any advertising. And so if I’m a small business owner that’s trying to count my pennies, I’m thinking, Well, why wouldn’t I do that if I don’t have to then spend a bunch of money to Google or to some media publish?
Lee Kantor: [00:05:51] So now what are some ways we have a lot of coaches that listen to this show? What are some ways like a business coach where that could be a commodity type business can kind of create that cult brand around themselves? Is there any low hanging fruit that they could be doing today?
Chris Kneeland: [00:06:10] Well, yeah. I mean, the first thing we like to do if we talk to somebody that’s been doing it for a while is to assess their activities and question why are they doing anything that they were doing five years ago? So, you know, like I mentioned, one of the biggest challenges is legacy thinking and bad habits, and the world has changed so drastically, not just with the pandemic, but with options around how consumers are making buying decisions that, you know, 10 years ago, Harvard and McKinsey partnered up and completely obliterated all of the paradigms around the purchase funnel. And yet we still talk to B2B professionals that are talking about this funnel metaphor, about filling the top of the funnel. And it’s like, guys, the world has moved on from that a decade ago. And so if that’s still your guiding framework, that’s low hanging fruit to just rethink differently about, you know, lead generation and conversion. Obviously, there’s been macro shifts away from paid media into content marketing and inbound marketing. And then, you know something it doesn’t even exist on the purchase funnel that is so critical for today’s brand. Leaders and marketers is post-purchase. You know, the purchase funnel ends with getting someone who purchases and and we would argue at least 25 percent of your marketing effort should be spent on people who have already bought to not only get them to rebuy, but so that they become a noncommissioned sales force and start referring your business business to you.
Lee Kantor: [00:07:39] So now what’s been your most maybe favorite? I don’t want to say the most successful, because that’s probably in the eye of the beholder. But for you, a personal favorite of a brand that you work with that was struggling and maybe you took them to a new level and maybe they exceeded their expectations.
Chris Kneeland: [00:07:59] Um, well, it is true, it’s interesting you mentioned the brands that are struggling, unfortunately, most people that call us or businesses that are sort of in cardiac arrest. Maybe a new C-suite has come in the board kind of cleared house and they they need to make drastic measures. But that’s not always the case. I mean, some of our favorite engagements. I’ll share one with Home Depot. I mean, Home Depot was not in trouble. Home Depot was a, you know, over $100 billion in sales, but Home Depot wasn’t content to rest on their laurels. And Home Depot is looking in their crystal ball and realizing that what was shifting in consumer behavior was they do it for me, mentality. So Home Depot was built in the late 80s, early 90s on this idea of a do it yourselfer. And this, you know, that classic campaign, if you can do it, we can help. And all of their money came from selling products through their stores or their website. But what they saw with the rise of Angie’s List and Thumbtack and the pro referral was was this idea of I just want somebody to do it for me.
Chris Kneeland: [00:09:07] I don’t want to paint my house or mow my lawn or build my fence. I’m looking for a contractor, so they used us to help them birth and really exploit this idea of home services. And they didn’t want to use the same playbook. They didn’t want to create brand confusion. They didn’t want to use the same ad agencies. They didn’t want to use the same reliance upon fliers and discounting and promotions. They wanted to create a new entity that could be almost like a standalone business Home Depot Home Services, but certainly leveraging the brand equity that the strengths of the Home Depot brand. So we worked with them for many years to try to turn that into a multibillion dollar company, and it not only had elements of consumer understanding and appeal, but also we had to attract suppliers. We had to get professional roofers, window installers, painters, landscapers to come and join that Home Depot network and so called brand principles, I think was a much more effective way for them to get, you know, from zero to billions faster than if they had done more of a traditional approach.
Lee Kantor: [00:10:11] Can you share a story like that? But maybe with a smaller entity rather than somebody who like, I’m hearing you say that it can work for anybody. But when you have a pocketbook the size of Home Depot, you can take certain risks, even though culturally or politically it’s more difficult. But is there an example from a smaller company that you can share that there were some tactics or some principles that help them kind of grow?
Chris Kneeland: [00:10:36] Yeah. So I can think of a company that’s in Alberta, Canada, called F12. They’re in the B to B tech support to kind of managed I.T. solutions business. So if you’re a dental office or an auto mechanic shop and you don’t want to deal with your I.T. issues, you can outsource your infrastructure to f 12 and they’ll hook your team up with laptops and make sure that everything’s working and that the right software is downloaded and that you’re protected from malware or whatnot, right? So they had about 40 employees when they called upon us, and it was it was the CEO’s desire to stand for something more than what they call the break fix model. They didn’t just want to be known for. When you know when your computer crashes call us, they really wanted to be in the business of helping entrepreneurs grow big businesses. They wanted to be a partner and they wanted to take away all of the headache and the hassle that, you know, most people that start companies don’t have a clue about what their I.T. or network or server infrastructure should be. And so it’s kind of this necessary evil, and it’s a huge cost and a huge risk for many businesses. They just undervalue and under appreciate that. So we work with F12 again, leveraging these brand principles to create extreme differentiation of why you would choose to work with F12, then just going through any other sort of tech support provider that they might find on Google if they were looking for a vendor and they got into solutions that not only made them more, obviously, you know, distinct and different, but also it had huge implications on the people that they attracted. So they attracted a better caliber of employee. They attracted a better caliber of of tech support agent. And so they had huge cultural benefits as well, which was a wonderful sort of secondary side effect besides just creating more revenue and market share.
Lee Kantor: [00:12:38] So what are some of the tactics that are used to help that business person kind of convert more of their customers into this, like you said, raving fan?
Chris Kneeland: [00:12:48] So a lot of it was, you know, again, if you were to hire an ad agency, you’re going to find people that would start to find better ways to communicate. You know, maybe they would do something. Funny or clever or emotional to create some sort of resonance, but when you’re using a brand playbook, you’re getting into the value proposition itself. So we actually created products and subscription services and price points that were far more attractive and empathetic to specific types of audiences. That was another big part of, you know, brands don’t try to be all things to all people. They get very, very clear on who what we call their predominant and opportunity audiences are. So they get more narrow, they elevate their positioning, they become less of a generalist and they become more of a specialist to a very discrete group of people. And then what they’re selling is something that’s a lot more thoughtful and very, very rarely. I remember we did a project in Harley Davidson back in the day, and now we’re back to big companies. But Harley needed to attract a younger audience, and they’re not going to do that through an ad campaign. They can certainly buy media on channels that young people watch, but what Harley needed was a bike that was under $10000. No young person is going to go buy a cruiser for thirty five thousand dollars, and so Colt Brands think about their solutions, their offerings, their product mix in ways that non-core brands just think about. Well, this is what I’ve got. Let’s keep coming up with, you know, communications strategies to make it seem better versus, we don’t know, let’s actually go make something that’s that’s that is better for the market.
Lee Kantor: [00:14:22] So you mentioned the importance of kind of leaning into specialization and to really attract the folks that kind of resonate with your message. At some point, though, don’t you have to communicate whatever that is to these people? Like how do you kind of get in front of those people to let them know that this offering even exists?
Chris Kneeland: [00:14:42] Yeah, of course, you have to make sure that you have a a compelling storefront or a compelling website or a compelling sales force or a compelling, you know, a marketing or advertising campaign. I think what we’re disappointed by, though, is simply the the balance of that because, you know, nobody I didn’t get on to tick tock because I saw an ad for tick tock. I got on to tick tock because everybody in my circle started sharing videos with me about this crazy new thing called tick tock. That’s frequently how I find out about new restaurants in town or new movies to go watch or some streaming service. So I think that we’ve underestimated the power of word of mouth. It has always been and will always be the most persuasive form of business. So if we work with a brand new company, we’ll talk about what are you doing for the first hundred customers that will be completely unsustainable and scalable. But I need each of those 100 customers to be more than customers. I need them to become evangelists for what I’m doing, so I’m going to over invest in that experience. I’ll give you an example with trigger grills. Check your grills is a is a small and when I say small, I mean, there are a couple of hundred million now, but they used to be twenty five, $30 million and they were for sort of the extreme barbecue enthusiasts that wanted to smoke meat instead of grill it. And, you know, one of the missed opportunities that they stole from Apple, one of the world’s best cult brands, is that when you get your iPhone, it feels like Christmas morning.
Chris Kneeland: [00:16:19] The packaging is done right. The phone is already charged and ready to go. The onboarding app in terms of, you know, how it welcomes you and downloads all your stuff from the cloud, it just makes it sound so easy. Somebody was so thoughtful. Tesla is the same way. So Trager took the box that the grill showed up in and completely reimagined the way that the grill is assembled and how you actually would invite friends over. You know, there’s cupholders for beer cans in the Styrofoam of the box so that you’re having a little assembly party. And then when you’re done, you undo the box. You flip it inside out and it’s a log cabin playhouse for your children and the number of people that will then take a photo of the box and say, Look at this cool thing that Trager did when I mowed my thing. That’s what creates social conversation and the and the sort of we call becoming remarkable. Being remarkable doesn’t mean you’re exceptional being remarkable. It means that you’re giving people things to remark about. And not enough businesses are sitting down thinking about the entirety of their buying cycle to say, What would I expect somebody to say as a result of having visited my website? Talk with my sales, know, come into my store. It’s just all too ordinary. So therefore people don’t say anything. But if you can make it extraordinary, then all of a sudden you’re part of the conversation.
Lee Kantor: [00:17:39] So now when you’re working with a new client, what does that initial conversations look like? Is there some sort of an assessment to see where they’re at, where the opportunities lie? Like, how deeply do you have to really kind of immerse yourself in order to find that hidden gold that might be right there?
Chris Kneeland: [00:17:55] So we’ve identified eight areas that cult brands exceed their mediocre peers in. So yeah, that’s exactly what is. It’s a bit of an audit of how well are you living up to each of those eight areas and we just plot your sort of current state and the desired state desired could be either the ambition of the C-suite or desired could be benchmarked from what the best competitor in the category is doing. We’re looking at that right now for oil changes. As an example, there’s just a huge missed opportunity for how pedestrian, how boring, how inconvenient, how unexciting going to get your oil change could be. So the bar is so low that if you had a C-suite that said, I no longer want to compete instead of being forty nine, we’re going to be 39, which is what everybody is doing. They’re bombarding the marketplace with coupons to just become a cheaper oil change versus what if you could actually become a better oil change? What could what could the consumer be doing in the 20 minutes while they’re waiting for their car to be, you know, to have the oil changed on it? How might the appointment scheduling be handled? What might be happening after they leave now that you know, some information about that car and about that consumer? And so there’s just, I think the day it’s just thoughtfulness about some very specific areas. You don’t have to think about everything. We’ve kind of whittled it down to eight. And then with that, then you just create a prioritized list. Which ones are we going to tackle first?
Lee Kantor: [00:19:20] Now is there things that over time that you’ve learned like this is kind of the biggest bang for your buck? This is kind of where a lot of the opportunity is for folks like missed opportunity that they have it right there. They just have to do more of it. It sounds like some of it is around those kind of early people who are your clients that just lean into that and really understand what. They like about you and then how to kind of just wring more juice out of that.
Chris Kneeland: [00:19:47] Yeah, I think probably the biggest missed opportunity is around the customer experience. We do a lot with health care and, you know, just everything, particularly in the states, but also in Canada. The difference is it’s equally bad, but in the states, you’re paying more, obviously through it versus in Canada, it’s more of a social service. But you know, the waiting room experience absolutely sucks the the ambiguity around who you’re seeing, the credentials of the practitioner, the course of treatment or action afterwards, the access to a community of people that are suffering from the same thing that might have the same concerns, like the health care experience should not feel like the DMV experience, right? And yet it oftentimes does. And so if you’re trying to become a health care institution like the Mayo Clinic, for example, that’s going to stand out above the rest where, you know, people will fly across the country and pay premium dollar to access the Mayo Clinic. They’ve built that brand partially, certainly through the expertize of the things that they’re that they specialize in, but also just the thoughtfulness of the customer experience. Soup to nuts. And so, you know, yeah, if I was to say, the easiest place to start is not to assume that what you’re selling is good and you just need a better way to communicate it. Assume that what you’re selling could be radically enhanced so that you can actually create greater demand. And if you do it well enough, you know, the founder of Geek Squad and other tech support company that we worked with years ago said that, you know, advertising is a tax that brands pay for being unremarkable. You’re going to pay the money. Either way, it’s not about cost savings, it’s about are you going to pay the money and a bunch of paid media? Are you going to pay the money into putting something into the experience that makes it memorable and buzzworthy?
Lee Kantor: [00:21:35] So now when you’re working with your clients, do you have the the niche? You mentioned that anybody or a lot of companies that don’t think they’re eligible are eligible to be a cult if they kind of lean into this and open their mind to the opportunity there? That’s right in front of them. Do you have a sweet spot in terms of the types of clients you have like, are they enterprise level only at this stage of your growth? Or are you working with companies of all sizes?
Chris Kneeland: [00:22:04] You know, our sweet spot is sort of the fifty to four hundred million range, you know, the early stage, I think we can certainly add value, but what you’re doing is giving them ideas that they’ll need to execute as their business grows. And then, as I mentioned, kind of went you over five hundred million and maybe a billion. We’re kind of uninspired by you. I see a lot of people take their foot off their gas at that point, and they’re just trying to maintain. But if you’re like a yeti as an example, that kind of came out of nowhere and comes out with this $400 cooler where the next option was a fifty dollars Coleman from Walmart is like, Where is it? What’s this all about and how did this happen? And then they just kind of become this iconic brand for the outdoor enthusiasts that we work really well with businesses that have achieved a level of market fit. And now they’re trying to say, How do you scale this? How do you take it and make sure that we don’t ruin what we’ve got because we seem to be having something very special here?
Lee Kantor: [00:23:05] And then on your website, you have there’s opportunities for the smaller brands to get those ideas. You have ways for a smaller brand to learn about what you gained as well, right?
Chris Kneeland: [00:23:17] Yeah. We’ve, you know, lots of things and we were doing our best to keep not keep this a secret. So we’ve written a book. We host an event every year called The Gathering, where we put these iconic cult brands on stages and let people understand how they started and what bold things do they do. We do classes every month for two hundred bucks. You can come and participate in a workshop to understand how the brand principles can be applied. I go on every podcast and radio show like yours, Lee, that I can like. You know, the goal here is not to keep this close to our vest. The goal is to get people from to a be curious about, is there a better way and then be to start practicing, testing, applying, you know, you don’t have to go all in. You can take some product line, some regions, some new new division and experiment with it in a really safe way.
Lee Kantor: [00:24:11] And if somebody wants to learn more, what’s the website?
Chris Kneeland: [00:24:15] It’s cult ideas.
Lee Kantor: [00:24:18] Well, Chris, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.
Chris Kneeland: [00:24:23] Yeah. Thanks, Lee. Appreciate the time with you.
Lee Kantor: [00:24:25] All right, this is Lee Kantor. We’ll see, y’all next time on Coach the Coach radio.
After being raised in New York City by artist parents, 
Wesleyne Greer understands being at the top of her game. Having managed multi-million-dollar teams, she marries her love for sales and her passion for coaching at Transformed Sales.
