Atkin, Douglas

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Atkin, Douglas

PERSONAL: Male.

ADDRESSES: Home—NY. Office—Merkley & Partners, 200 Varick St., New York, NY 10014.

CAREER: Merkley & Partners, New York, NY, partner and chief strategy officer.

WRITINGS:

The Culting of Brands: When Customers Become True Believers, Portfolio (New York, NY), 2004.

SIDELIGHTS: In his The Culting of Brands: When Customers Become True Believers, Douglas Atkin studies customer loyalty to consumer brand namess. Atkin, a partner and chief strategy office of New York advertising agency Merkley & Partners, has worked to build customer loyalty to such well-known clients as American Express, Cadbury, MasterCard, Heineken, Novartis, Procter & Gamble, Pfizer, Smith Barney, Fila, Mercedes, and JetBlue.

Atkin maintains that cults are groups that tend to be made up of intelligent people with similar interests and belief systems, who generally join together because they are looking for community. In studying cults, he researched fan clubs, religious cults, and closely knit military groups, as well as cult-brand companies. He notes that although they attract followers for similar reasons, unlike many religious and other communities brand cults have no geographic boundaries. Brands that benefit from cult followings are able to use that loyalty in expanding their businesses and customer bases. "This is a novel concept, and Atkin's research is persuasive," wrote Stephen Turner in Library Journal, while a Publishers Weekly contributor noted that "more conservative readers may balk at his notion that the decreasing power of our culture's traditional institutions is an opportunity to exploit those emotional drives for profit."

Atkin told Boston Globe interviewer Joshua Glenn that "Mac users, Harley riders, people who fly on Virgin Atlantic—they can be more fanatical than many religious cult members. They've bought into an ideology—Apple stands for being creative and nonconformist, Harley-Davidson for being rebellious, Virgin for being almost piratical—and whether or not they actually spend time with fellow brand devotees, they feel very close to one another and mutually responsible." As he told a Frontline interviewer, the growth of cult brands has increasingly resulted from word-of-mouth rather than traditional advertising.

Atkin also remarks on the popularity of the Saturn automobile and the thousands of families who spend their vacations at the manufacturing facility in Spring Hill, Tennessee, where they meet other Saturn owners and the workers who built their cars—essentially their Saturn "family." Atkin explained that in some instances—for example, the BMW motorcycle—the people who produce the items have had very little to do with the cult that has been created around it. In fact, if they try to interfere, the cult would resist it." He concluded his Frontline interview by saying that "the brand consumer is looking to brands to give a sense of fulfillment that society and religions used to offer. They want brands to take stands on things. Brands have values. Brands have points of view. Brands have personalities. Brands are whole societies in which they participate. If you don't have those things, then you're likely to fail, or at least not be as profitable as you could be." Booklist contributor Mary Whaley wrote that The Culting of Brands "is an insightful and challenging perspective on marketing for everyone, even those who may not agree with the author."