How to turn a brand into a cult
In the world of branding, there’s a secret ambition few say out loud: We all want a following so loyal, they’d tattoo the logo on their skin.
Not just customers. Not even superfans.
We want believers.
This isn’t new. Humans have always rallied behind symbols — flags, totems, football teams, startup logos with vaguely circular gradients. What’s newer is the unapologetic desire in brand strategy to chase this kind of emotional grip. The “cult following” has become the main goal of marketing teams.
Of course, there’s a catch.
Every brand aiming for a cult following has to flirt with the actual cult playbook — a tricky dance when history is full of actual cults doing actual harm. The paradox is clear: we admire devotion, but recoil at manipulation. We celebrate brand tribes but forget how easy it is to tip from identity to ideology to extremism.
This article is about that line. Where it blurs. How it’s crossed. And what we, as designers and strategists, can learn — ethically — from history’s most powerful (and sometimes horrifying) movements.
We’ll look at how cults used basic branding tools — colors, logos, typefaces, slogans, leader personas — to broadcast a message, build community, and create a feeling. Some did it with uniforms. Others with YouTube thumbnails. Either way, the mechanics are strikingly familiar.
But before we dissect the visual language of the swastika or the marketing tactics of modern-day brands, we need to ask a basic question.
What is a cult, really?
And what does it have in common with... Apple?
10 Traits of Cult Mentality
Cult movements — whether spiritual, political, or technological — tend to share the same recipe. The details shift, but the bones are the same. If you’ve ever built a brand, some of this will feel familiar. Uncomfortably so.
Here are ten common traits of cults — and their branding parallels:
1. Charismatic Leadership
Elon Musk’s controversial salute during a rally celebrating Donald Trump's second inauguration on January 20, 2025, which many interpreted as resembling a Nazi or fascist salute.
A central figure who is worshipped, obeyed, and rarely questioned. Doesn’t it sound like the visionary founder? Think Steve Jobs in a turtleneck. Or Elon Musk with Twitter. A face, a story, a myth turned legend. They’re always weird, out of the ordinary, and above all — the charismatic brains behind it all.
2. Clear Ideology
A simplified worldview that clearly positions a brand - a mission statement on steroids, a noble cause for people to follow. Values so clear and simple that they fit on a tote bag. Usually framed as an “us vs. them” mentality, distinguishing the member from “others” through comparison - “Think Different.”, “Just Do It.”, “Move Fast and Break Things.”.
3. Symbols and Uniforms
Every tribe has its markings — some use body paint to show allegiance, others use crests, shields, flags, totems or… tote bags. This also goes for wearing identical clothing with an insignia, a.k.a. a uniform - a police uniform says as much as a “Patagonia” hoodie or a Manchester United jersey. You’re part of an exclusive group and you have a way of recognizing each other easily.
4. Controlled Language
Jargon’s purpose in thе context of an exclusive group is two-fold — on one hand to create the feeling of a tribe, with inside jokes, hand signals or handshakes to boot — like a family or a close-knit friends group. As part of the initiation, you could even get a new name, or a variation of your current one, that only the group would use, or get. On the other hand, this limits outsiders’ understanding of what’s going on — “If you don’t get it, you’re not in”.
5. Exclusivity
Building on top of point 4, exclusivity allows the brand to stay free of pleasing everyone — they bond tightly with people with a carefully curated set of traits that ultimately form the tribe. Boiled down to its core, every statement says, “Only we have the truth.” Outsiders just don’t get it — “You’re not a Mac person, are you?”
6. Rituals
Everyday activities can be considered a ritual once they’re done with a purpose and regularity. In a more traditional sense, they could be chants, ceremonies, or even shared meals. When we’re talking about modern-day brands, they’re more in line with grand announcements, annual conferences, or reveals. If you’ve ever queued for a new iPhone or gone to a CrossFit class, you’ve participated in a brand ritual.
7. Isolation from Outside Information
Every tech brand’s wet dream is to keep users from straying from its system of services and/or devices. That’s right — these can be walled gardens made up of devices working together in systems (a.k.a. device ecosystems). Think of moving your calendar from an iPhone to a Samsung phone. Hell, even moving your contacts is somewhat cumbersome and doesn’t always bring all your contacts over. This is not by chance, it’s by design — to keep you locked in, discouraged to leave “off of your own accord.” But how do they keep bringing you back?
8. Emotional Storytelling
Reaching deep into someone’s psyche happens through strong emotions, and stories are a great way to conjure them out of thin air. Personal testimonials, redemption arcs, miraculous recoveries, you name it, are what solidify the leader’s position in a way no facts or proof of merit can. This is exactly why brands proudly display case studies, founder journeys, or rebranding stories that resemble myth and legend — fighting evil in the name of the many.
9. Strong Visual Identity
Simple, evocative symbols work the best — they easily stick, and are even easier to spread. What makes a symbol truly effective, though, is consistency. A clean logo, backed up by discipline for color, shape, and form, a short and memorable tagline, and a clear set of rules to follow visually ensures that the brand’s message will shape beliefs. Think of the Coca Cola logo, their special red color, and the rigorous set of rules it needs to follow in bottles, cans, fridges, and even trucks.
10. Resistance to Dissent
Non-believers are to be shunned, doubters exiled. It’s still done the exact same way, but it’s also done digitally via social media armies, fanboys (and girls), and comment section crusaders. Try saying Apple has dropped the ball on design with their latest iPhone on Twitter. Go ahead. We’ll wait. And social media platforms love it.
All of these aren’t hypothetical. These are patterns. And once you see them, you start to realize: some of the most dangerous movements in history succeeded not despite their branding, but because of it.
Up next: how wildly successful movements across history and modern times — totalitarian regimes, and modern technological giants — used design, messaging, and symbol systems to build unshakable, sometimes terrifying loyalty.
Spoiler: They knew their color palettes better than most marketing teams.
Lessons from History’s Biggest Cult Brands
Branding, as a discipline, is often framed as a modern invention — the byproduct of capitalism, consumer psychology, and perhaps a little too much Helvetica (or Poppins in our case). But long before ad agencies and startups, some of the most extreme and dangerous movements in history were using the same tools we associate with marketing today: symbols, color palettes, type hierarchies, visual consistency, and founder mythology. They understood something many brands still chase — that if you can design belief, you can shape behavior.
Let’s start with the most visually disciplined and frighteningly effective example: one of the most influential totalitarian regimes of the 20th century.
Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, called for a march through London's East End, an area with a significant Jewish population via florentinoareneros.blogspot.com
Design Dictatorship
If modern branding owes a debt to anyone, it’s an uncomfortable one. Few movements fused symbol, color, ritual, architecture, and narrative as completely as the Nazis. They didn’t just create a party identity; they built an immersive environment where design was the air you breathed. The following lines won’t provide much imagery examples, but I’ll include links with more information for the curious.
Symbols and logos
Start with the mark. The swastika first appeared as early as 7,000 years ago as a sign of good fortune across Asia and Europe. Hitler seized it, rotated it, thickened its strokes, dropped it into a stark white circle, and set the whole thing against a red field. It read as ancient and “authentic,” yet graphic and new — an identity with instant authority. He was explicit about keeping the imperial tricolor (black-white-red) as the palette too and layering new meaning onto it: red for the movement’s “social” appeal, white for “national” purity, and the black swastika for a mythical “Aryan” ideal. Put differently: a ready-made color system wired to a story about blood, soil, and destiny. Doesn’t this resemble brand colour, and shape use guidelines?
8th-century wolf hook from the Carolingian-era Villa Arnesburg in Lich, Germany via Wikipedia
Reconstruction of a wolf hook (Z-shape) chained to a wolf anchor (crescent bar) via Wikipedia
Then came the sub-brands. Inside the regime, each arm carried its own sigil, creating a hierarchy of fear that was visually legible from across a street. The SS adopted the double Sig-rune — two lightning bolts — drawn from an invented “Germanic” rune mystique and adapted by designer Walter Heck. It conveyed speed, will, and victory while doubling as an acronym that could be read without letters. The “Wolfsangel” (wolf’s hook) — a stylized wolf trap with medieval roots—surfaced on unit insignia and banners; once a folk emblem of independence, it was repurposed to signal militant nationalism. Other runic marks — Odal (for “heritage/bloodline”), the sunwheel variants — extended the same mythic vocabulary. My personal favourite is the Týr rune — named after the Norse god of war, who once played a very important role in the Germanic pantheon. In short: a modular icon system, ruthlessly coherent, that tied the present to an imagined Northern past.
A heraldic part of the Wolfsangel in the arms of the von Stein family via Wikipedia
Municipal arms of Idar-Oberstein, Rhineland-Palatinate via Wikipedia
Iron Cross – military decoration, Kingdom of Prussia via Wikipedia
Most of the symbols aren’t new. The Iron Cross — Prussian in origin — carried centuries of martial prestige. The Nazis didn’t have to invent credibility; they licensed it from history and saturated it through medals, aircraft, and posters. The result was a layered semiotics: modern radicalism wrapped in antique legitimacy. It works just as well in modern times. Successful sports people, pop and movie stars are all subject to interest from political parties and movements. Credibility is built through a build-up of positive images in people’s minds. It shouldn’t, but it works.
Use of color
Color did as much work as the marks. Red/white/black wasn’t merely contrasty; it was identity shorthand. It echoed the imperial flag, indexing continuity for those who resented the Weimar years, while the red field pumped urgency into every surface— flags, armbands, podium backdrops, street banners. The set dressing of daily life (shops, schools, parade routes) became a rolling brand activation. Repetition wasn’t a tactic; it was policy. And it worked the way all disciplined palettes do: it compressed cognition. From a distance, you didn’t read; you recognized. From up close, you didn’t consider; you conformed.
Typography
Typography played its part too. Early on, the regime leaned into blackletter fonts — traditional, Germanic, weighty. But as the war machine modernized, so did its type — sharper, cleaner, more authoritative. Even the architecture served as branding: Albert Speer’s massive stone coliseums weren’t just buildings, they were physical expressions of ideological permanence. Walk through one, and you didn’t just feel small — you felt owned.
Architecture
Architecture scaled that feeling to the body. Albert Speer’s stripped neoclassicism — colossal columns, granite planes, axial vistas — did not invite contemplation; it staged obedience. The Nuremberg rally grounds were the pinnacle: processional ways that funneled crowds into geometry, grandstands that framed the Führer as the vanishing point of the nation. When the stadium wasn’t ready, Speer lifted the “Cathedral of Light” — 152 anti-aircraft searchlights blazing vertical walls of luminescence — so that even the sky seemed recruited to the cause. Monumentality became a user interface: your legs felt small; your will felt spoken for. (Side note for design nerds: this wasn’t Brutalism — post-war concrete minimalism — but a consciously archaic classicism tuned for spectacle.)
Clothing
Uniforms, armlets, pennants, eagles, standards — every inch of the visual field synchronized. Even the bureaucracy had badges and triangles for camp prisoners, color-coded to sort, control, and dehumanize at a glance — a horrifying demonstration of information design deployed for oppression. The system’s power wasn’t complexity; it was legibility. Everyone could “read” who belonged, who ruled, and who didn’t.
Effect on the Public
So what did all this do to people? At scale, it collapsed nuance into signal. The mark said who you were. The colors told you what to feel. The buildings taught you where to stand. The lights said when to cheer. By creating an environment where everything — buildings, art, signs, and clothes follows the same set of rules, the regime manufactured inevitability — the sense that this was not one political option among many but the only possible order. As Susan Sontag later observed (and as design historians like Steven Heller have traced), the aesthetic didn’t just persuade; it seduced.
It’s grim, but it’s also instructive. The Nazis modeled how a tightly integrated visual system can move a population — from palette choice to plaza design. After 1945, many of the designers who fled totalitarianism helped pioneer corporate modernism in the U.S., where unified identity systems, rigorous guidelines, and environment-scale graphics became business as usual.
No, modern branding is not “descended from Nazism.” But the 1930s proved, in terrifying clarity, how formal discipline (symbol + color + ritual + space) could influence mass behavior. That insight — stripped of its ideology — fed both propaganda and, later, commercial identity work: consistent marks, limited palettes, environmental graphics, event choreography, even the logic of the “brand book.” The difference, ethically, is everything — but the mechanics of attention, recognition, and belonging are recognizably the same.
If you’re building brands today, that’s the lesson to hold with care. A logo can rally. A color can accelerate. A building can preach. The question isn’t whether design works. It’s: to what end — and at whose expense?
How Modern Brands Cultivate Devotion
If the 20th century proved how design can conscript a nation, the 21st has shown how it can convene a congregation. Today’s most beloved brands don’t merely attract customers; they assemble believers who organize their lives — habits, purchases, even friendships — around a shared aesthetic and a common story. The mechanics echo what we’ve already seen: symbols that compress meaning, leaders who embody myth, rituals that rehearse belonging, and architectures that stage awe. The difference — when done right — is consent and choice.
Apple store in Las Vegas
Harley-Davidson store in the UK
Patagonia store in Hong Kong
The “Apple” of Eden
Start with Apple, the most brazenly successful case of a commercial faith. Its visual language is so disciplined it borders on liturgy: restrained palettes (white, black, soft metals), product photography that floats objects in voids, a typographic voice (San Francisco) that speaks with the calm authority of a high-end manual. The devices themselves behave like sacred objects of power — small and beautiful that promise transformation through touch. Even the retail experience reads like a secular temple. Those glass facades and long stone tables aren’t just “stores”; they’re sanctuaries where light is carefully managed, noise is softened, and the choreography of staff and visitors feels pre-decided. The keynote remains the movement’s high holiday: a carefully staged ceremony where the leader narrates salvation through silicon, punctuated by applause and the ritual reveal. If you strip away the product details, the form is ancient — call to action, revelation and response.
Masculinity embodied
Harley-Davidson flips the polarity. Its power isn’t in minimalism but in mythic rebellion. The “uniform” is explicit: denim, leather, patches, engine noise. The logo marks flesh as often as fabric — literal tattoos as lifetime membership cards. Rides function as pilgrimages, dealer meetups as parish life. The story—the American road as personal redemption—has stayed astonishingly stable for decades because the ritual is the product. People aren’t buying a bike; they’re buying a rite of passage.
Freedom and conscience
Patagonia drafts a different covenant: conscience. Its visual and verbal systems (earth hues, utilitarian typography, direct language) underscore a moral bargain — buy less, keep longer, repair often, and we’ll put a percentage toward the planet. Stores and campaigns act as classrooms; tags and care labels read like marginal notes in a handbook for better living. The brand’s power isn’t just in what it sells but in what it’s willing not to sell. In a cynical market, abstinence itself becomes a ritual, and the fleece vest becomes a flag for “I’m trying.”
Once you start viewing these brands through the cult lens, small details light up. Uniforms? AirPods dangling like subtle membership pins. Tech-bro Patagonia vests functioning as corporate vestments. The finance world’s tote bag pecking order.
And yes, even the dreaded green bubble in iMessage — a carefully picked design that instantly sorts insiders from others at the edge of a screen. Rituals? Reveals, queueing for drops, morning runs logged on Strava, the annual developer conference, Harry Potter fan shops, and Nike’s temple-like flagships — spaces that compress a worldview into materials and circulation paths. Scripture? The brand book, of course — guarded, distributed with care, updated like a living canon.
There’s also the tagline: short, repeatable phrases that compact belief into breath. “Think Different.” “Just Do It.” “Built to last.” The content matters, but so does the cadence; these lines are engineered to be said back to the brand by the brand’s own people and its fans. And communities absorb them the way any congregation learns hymns — through repetition, context, and the quiet pressure to belong.
Does this make modern brands cults? Not in the pejorative sense. The crucial distinction is posture and power: in healthy brand communities, participation is revocable and plural; people can come and go, remix, dissent, create fan art that critiques as much as it celebrates. Still, the similarities are instructive. Founder-as-symbol maps neatly to leader-as-logo. Ecosystems resemble social enclosures. Drops and keynotes mirror seasonal festivals. A consistent color/typography system creates the same cognitive shortcuts propaganda once relied on: faster recognition, less deliberation, more feeling.
This is where ethics reenters the chat.
The tools are neutral; the intention is not. You can use scarcity to goose resale prices or to minimize waste. You can use brand voice to clarify or to obscure. You can design a store to welcome — or to intimidate. In the short term, manipulation and meaning can look identical in a metrics dashboard. Over time, only one sustains trust.
For founders and designers, the takeaway isn’t to avoid devotion; it’s to earn it without engineering dependency. Unify your symbols and spaces, yes, but leave your exits visible. Craft rituals that deepen competence and connection, not compliance. Let your community teach back what the brand means instead of only memorizing what you say it is. If your brand’s “uniform” makes people feel more themselves — confident, capable, curious — you’re likely on the right side of the line. If it makes them smaller or more afraid, you’ve crossed it.
And for anyone tempted to dismiss all this as superficial, remember: the surface is where humans first make sense of things. The logo invites the glance; the product earns the second look; the community justifies the stay. Today’s strongest brands work because they understand that sequence — and because they design every step with the seriousness of a belief system. The lesson isn’t that branding is a new religion. It’s that belief — social and messy — has always been the substrate. Modern brands are simply fluent in the grammar.
As brand strategists, designers, founders, we’re not just making pretty things. We’re building meaning systems. To quote Apple’s latest video “Design is not just about how it looks, or how it feels. It’s also about how it works.” Every logo, every color, every tagline is a decision about how someone will feel. And how they’ll behave.
So, what makes the difference between a cult and a community?
It might be these five things:
5 Must-Haves for Cult-Worthy (but Not Cultish) Branding
Clarity
Know what you stand for. Say it simply. If your mission needs footnotes, it’s not a mission — it’s a mess.Consistency
From logo to tone of voice, make sure every part of your brand tells the same story. But leave room for evolution.Conviction
Be bold. Not arrogant. Stand for something that matters — even if not everyone agrees.Community
Build two-way streets. Let your audience shape the brand with you. Give them tools, not commandments.Conscience
Ask ourselves: would I still run this brand if I had to say everything out loud in public, without spin? It’s called integrity.
These aren’t soft principles. They’re design criteria. They protect your brand from slipping into something unkind, untrue, or simply unsustainable.
Because if you’re going to lead people somewhere, make sure it’s not off a cliff.
And Remember: Lead a Movement, Not a Mob
Here’s the thing about building a devoted audience: there’s a fine line between community and control. Great brands don’t just talk — they listen. They create spaces where people feel part of something bigger, but still feel like themselves.
If your audience is only repeating your words, you’ve created an echo. If they’re building on your ideas, you’ve created a culture.
A brand should inspire — not intimidate. Elevate — not isolate. Invite curiosity, not blind loyalty.
Lead with values. Share the spotlight. Make space for dissent, growth, even contradiction. That’s not weakness — that’s how trust is built.
And when in doubt: if it feels like you’re demanding devotion instead of earning it, it’s time to pause.
Outro: Brand or Belief?
The line between brand and belief isn’t just thin — it’s often invisible.
Symbols move people. Messages shape memory. And the more consistent the story, the more real it becomes. That’s your power. Use it wisely.
Whether you're building a business, a movement, or a milk brand, your design choices can rally armies — or summon ghosts.
Design consciously. Or someone else will.
About the Author
Todor Hlebarov is a motion designer and the co-founder of Cosmonavt. Endlessly following up on the latest technologies, Todor animates brands into life through the magic of Cosmonavt, utilizing the most advanced software suites available.
His passion for animation brought him to SoftUni Creative, where he’s led over 4000 students in their first steps into the world of Adobe After Effects.