What we do
Create more deeply engaged customers, prospects, and staff
Change is hard; bad habits are hard to break, and legacy thinking is difficult to overcome. That’s why our approach is empathetic, but also firm. We know what good looks like, what we’ve seen, what’s truly possible, and we are committed to doing whatever is necessary to help our clients organizations achieve their fullest potential.
A methodical, time-tested approach to improving affinity, loyalty, and advocacy among customers, prospects, and staff.
Cult helps brand leaders reap the benefits of brand advocacy by converting casual shoppers into raving fans. The Cult Brand Advocacy System applies specific principles and intellectual properties we’ve uncovered while studying the world’s most cult-like companies, then implements proven methodologies resulting in category-leading business performance.
The BAS is best implemented as a holistic, cross functional, enterprise-wide initiative. It enhances multiple aspects of internal and external engagement. However, some components can be deployed independently, and built upon over time in order to accommodate different priorities and resource allocations.
To succeed in any type of audience engagement, begin by learning the most important thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and behaviors of thoseaudiences. In most cases, your audiences are patients or customers, but sometimes they are employees. Occasionally, key audiences also include internal associates, strategic partners, investors, or donors. During Phase 1, we will rely on the comprehensive market studies you’ve recently completed, or leverage our proprietary “Emotional Quotient Insights Tools” which collect primary research. For customers, our process is called CEQ (Customer Emotional Quotient), and for Staff, our process is referred to as EEQ (Employee Emotional Quotient). Both involve sophisticated statistical models requiring very small sample data sets of recipients to complete a short online survey. The entire process takes 2-3 weeks.
Our sampling methodology, similar to the simplicity of Net Promoter Score’s methodology, asks two simple questions to reveal a significant amount of actionable information. Our questions expose emotional and rational attributes that consumers have for your brand and your category. The insights gleaned from EQ scores are very powerful in guiding our recommendations for enhancing your brand, value proposition(s), and go-to-market strategies.
In addition to our EQ tools, Phase 1 also involves co-creating a Cult Brand Scorecard. Our Cult Brand Scorecard is the best way for us to mutually evaluate the current and desired state of internal stakeholders, such as your C-suite and Marketing leaders. By identifying the delta between current beliefs and behaviors and the most optimal beliefs and behaviors, our Cult Brand Scorecard helps us properly evaluate your organizational beliefs and behaviors. The Scorecard evaluates eight proven Cult Brand Principles that deal with your Brand’s resonance in the marketplace, your marketing strategies, your customer service, your operational excellence, and other factors tied to service delivery.
Our Scorecard benchmarks you against some of the most iconic brands in North America because they set the expectations for what consumers demand when receiving different types of goods and services. We use your Cult Brand Scorecard to assess your internal cultural readiness to improve key functional aspects of the customer experience and redeploy discretionary resources. This process takes about 4-weeks to complete and goes hand and glove with EQ insights to help us prioritize decisions and determine how far and how fast to institute change.
The third and final deliverable of Phase 1 is a customer experience mapping exercise. We audit and analyze every branded touch point and every opportunity to inform the buying decision, including people who are unaware of your current offerings, those currently considering you against a set of viable alternatives, and perhaps most importantly, those within a relevant post-purchase period. Post-purchase is where many consumers form lasting opinions about repurchasing and referring others. The post-purchase phase is often the most neglected and frequently represents the lowest-hanging fruit for immediate performance improvement.
Experience mapping varies in terms of time and cost based on the complexity of your customer experience. Our mapping exercise not only audits each touchpoint but also prioritizes them. We identify the most important inflection points – what we call “Moments that Matter Most” – so that we can deploy a disproportionate amount of resources to affect a handful of tactics that produce the greatest outcomes. We must be disciplined and avoid trying to improve a host of tactics that will only provide marginal improvement.
After Phase 1, you will be armed with a suite of unfair competitive advantages associated with consumer intelligence and employee insights. Together, we’ll know how to create greater relevance more quickly.
CUSTOMER ADVOCACY
EMPLOYEE ADVOCACY
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>95% of decisions are made emotionally then rationalized after.
Our Customer Emotional Quotient or CEQ™ methodology yields an understanding of the most important feelings and beliefs that lead to affinity and advocacy and turns them into actionable insights.
CEQ is the foundational research that CULT uses to build strategic insights across brand and external communications for both short and long term results. It identifies not only how current customer loyalty is established but it also uncovers untapped advocacy potential that is yet to be actioned.
Through a short, four minute survey, CEQ informs immediate opportunities and is designed to continually measure and index customer sentiment and relevance across brand and marketing activities, projects and business goals.
Unlike the Net Promoter Score (NPS), CEQ reveals the most important attitudinal levers of loyalty based on the eight feelings and eight beliefs that behavioral science has determined to drive decision-making through normative decision theory.
This means our clients get crystal clear direction on how a brand needs to show up in how it looks, what it says and does in order to build deeply engaged and loyal audiences.
Brands that achieve top levels of customer engagement get to reap incredible customer behaviors.
spend 6x more time on branded web and social properties
click on 9x more brand adsspend 76x more on advertised products + services
are 6x more likely to increase monthly in-store purchases
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Our Employee Emotional Quotient or EEQ™ methodology yields an understanding of the most important feelings and beliefs that drive employee affinity and advocacy and turns them into actionable insights to deepen employees’ levels of commitment and contribution.
EEQ is the foundational research that CULT uses to build strategic insights across employee experience and internal communications for both short and long term results. It identifies not only how current employee loyalty is established but it also uncovers untapped advocacy potential that is yet to be actioned.
Through a short, 2 minute survey, EEQ informs immediate opportunities and is designed to continually measure and index employee sentiment and relevance across internal brand, communications and engagement activities and business goals.
Unlike the Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS), EEQ reveals the most important attitudinal levers of loyalty based on the nine feelings and nine beliefs that behavioral science has determined to drive employee engagement.
Brands that elevate their scores to the top 75-80th percentile observe the benefits of having deeply engaged audiences.Come prepared for meetings 48% more oftenShare new ideas with their teams 41% more oftenHave 60% less unfocused work time during the weekLook at 92% fewer job ads in a week
The second phase of BAS deals with strategic and creative ideation. Insights are only valuable if you know how to action on them and execute them with excellence. The first deliverable within Phase 2 is CX and EX ideation – meaning deciding why certain components of the experience map are deficient, or worse, identifying areas that are completely missing and should be added to the journey.
The second deliverable of Phase 2 is a Marketing Impact Analysis where we evaluate the effectiveness of your existing branding and advertising efforts, and benchmark them not just against each other, but against industry best practices. For example, your data may guide us to the conclusion that your business is better served by reallocating the budget away from out-of-home advertising and shifting to a TikTok organic and paid strategy. The holistic nature of our analysis considers the entirety of the marketing mix and not just the media mix. Too many attribution models exclude factors that are far more influential and paid channels —urs doesn’t. For example, we have helped Healthcare clients take dollars away from paid media to improve their lobbies/waiting room areas or reallocate dollars away from acquisition-based ads to improve things like post-diagnostic literature providing cancer patients with additional information regarding their next steps and recovery protocols. Our clients appreciate that we don’t ask them to spend more money, but we advise them to spend existing budgets more effectively.
The final deliverable within Phase 2 deals with go-to-market recommendations. We don’t just want to spend money smarter, but we also want to execute better, improving things like your creative platform, your messaging hierarchies, and your visual assets (i.e. videos, imagery, brand identity system, etc). We help ensure your brand comes to life in a way that is distinctive and desirable. This line of work is something that can be wholly developed by our team or in close collaboration with your internal resources and stakeholders.
In Phase 3, the ‘rubber meets the road’ because this is where the implementation of all of our data-led recommendations comes to life. We excel at the creation of assets, the planning and purchasing of media, and – perhaps most importantly – the project management of cross-functional, fully integrated, multi-channel solutions. We ensure consistency of assets and the on-time, on-brand, on-budget, and on-brief deliverables associated with a robust campaign or new program.
Unlike many of our competitors, included in our Phase 3 is a ‘Marketing Operating System’ evaluation. This evaluation is less concerned about what is being produced and instead focuses more on how things are being produced. We work closely and collaboratively with our clients to evaluate their processes, personnel, technology, and policies to make sure that they are well-oiled machines. We are passionately interested in marketing effectiveness, but we know that better ROI is also a function of better efficiency. If we can lower costs, reduce time to market, and/or simplify the way that deliverables are produced, then we can have an even greater impact on marketing performance.
In addition, during Phase 4 we do all the traditional marketing measurement and reporting. If dollars are spent on specific campaign elements, we will measure the ROI of those investments to ensure that they are converting at acceptable levels. We are experts at data visualization and are particularly proud of the way we partner with clients to socialize results and ensure all stakeholders understand and are brought into the decisions that have been made, and the results that are being achieved. Finally, unlike most marketing agencies, we not only concern ourselves with the performance of specific campaigns but also with the performance of the business at large. We don’t want to over-optimize a particular tactic, such as email marketing or paid social media ads, while ignoring the overall health of the business. Our overall business performance tracking includes things like stock price performance, market capitalization, and business valuations. We have learned that some of the most impactful results we contribute to aren’t just monthly or quarterly revenue gains but the overall health of the business making it more valuable for its stakeholders. We work together at the onset of each engagement to determine, “What does good look like?”, and then we ensure that we’re measuring all our activities against both micro and macro goals.
In summary, our Brand Advocacy System is a powerful tool that gives its implementers unfair competitive advantages. We help our clients excel by increasing brand awareness and acquiring new customers, and helping them achieve brand advocacy, which results in greater repeat purchases, greater word of mouth, and improved overall business performance.
BAS in action
We help our clients excel by increasing brand awareness, acquiring new customers, and helping them achieve brand advocacy, which results in great repeat purchases, greater word of mouth, and improved overall business performance
Ensure your brand is performing at the highest level
Enhance customer engagement and business performance by fostering deeper connections among customers, prospects, and staff. Discover how to apply specific Cult branding principles derived from years of experience studying, and working alongside some of the most fervently adored brands in the world.
In the post-Covid era, many companies are rethinking how to rebuild their marketing capabilities.
Enter a game-changing option
Fractional Marketing Leaders (CMOs), powered by our 8 Cult Brand Principals. At CULT, we’ve always excelled in brand strategies, marketing plans, and creative campaigns, helping hundreds of clients achieve their goals, helping them earn billions in revenue.
Now, we offer Fractional CMO services to provide strategic guidance and leadership on a part-time basis.