Cult is on a mission to make organizations rethink how they should connect with their audiences – a mission that begins with calling into question how marketing budgets are allocated, how leaders prioritize capital expenditures, and how margins are sacrificed in favour of ill-conceived promotions.

The way these questions are answered, now more than ever, has become crucial in the battle for relevance. In an environment where information is at everyone’s fingertips and new generations of consumers have become increasingly numb to the clamour caused by mass media, marketers need to challenge the status quo that has been supported by our industry for the better part of the last 70 years.

Marketers need to challenge the status quo that has been supported by our industry for the better part of the last 70 years.

For many organizations, this mission will depend on breaking bad habits born out of years of irresponsible spending and generations of leaders who have confirmed and even encouraged the safer route.  We talk at length about these bad habits, these addictions to price cutting and shouting, in our book Fix.

But what about the organizations who have yet to develop these bad habits?

What about organizations that have never needed to allocate serious budgets to big media spends but are still struggling to retain passionate employees or differentiate themselves from the mass of competition out there? What about non-profits with no difficult decisions to make about media, or price-cutting because the budgets aren’t there in the first place? What about start-ups that need to operate on tight budgets, and whose success depends on disrupting the market place by behaving intentionally different from their competition?

Organizations like these have never had the chance to develop the bad habits and addictions that so many of those who have gone before.

Just as Cult exists to encourage a revolution in how our industry approaches the problem of consumer engagement, Cult DNA exists to guide and nurture organizations who have never been exposed to these evils, and to help them to grow without having to sacrifice margins to compete on price, and without having to find some clever wording to trick someone into buying.

It starts from the foundation – examining the brand to define purpose, and the product to ensure relevance.

Our work starts from the foundation – examining the brand to define purpose, and the product to ensure relevance. By starting here, we give our clients a chance to establish good habits so that they never need to break bad ones, after all, rehab is a positive thing, but it’s probably better to never get addicted in the first place.