From a cultural perspective, how would you distinguish a ritual from a habit or routine?
I define it in three different ways: One, personal characteristics, including gender and sexuality and inherited culture. Where you're born, your religion, the codes of your birth and heritage are part of this. For example, if you're born Muslim, you have your five-prayers-a-day ritual. If you're in New Zealand, you have the Haka as a ritual. These things can also be connected by place, like New Zealand, so these are non-selected characteristics.
The second is selected cultures or fandoms. So sneakers, music, the things that you choose that say something about who you are and adds to your inherited identity. It can go from overarching cultures like sport to specific cultures like K-Pop. These intertwined cultural lenses impact how your consumers see your brand but it's hard for brands because you can’t put these into neat little boxes. This is where culture-led brands, cultural marketing and cultural ways of doing things are nuanced.
The third is internal culture and rituals that are selected for you. For example, work processes and policies.
In all of these there are rituals and habits. Rituals can be personal and/or can be through fandom - these feel more emotional. Habits are more process-driven or part of routine. These help your life but aren’t connected emotionally. That's how I would differentiate between rituals and habits. I always question habits. I reflect and relook at them to ensure they aren’t there just for the sake of being there. You have to look at habits and routines all the time, making sure that they’re optimised, whereas rituals feel more considered and purpose-orientated.
What impact do different macro and micro contexts have when you're thinking about rituals and how they influence behaviour?
I don't think people realise the impact of politics and policies, nor of the adoption of technology and the media, which can add to ritualistic behaviour. These impact and influence behaviour and mindsets. People don't give this enough weight when it comes to marketing. Sports fandom is an example of this. On the other hand, today with the speed of tech adoption, new gen rituals are being formed and shared at the speed of light.
That's what a cultural brand is. They’re not only looking at the consumer insights and data on how people are shopping and buying; they’re exploring the context around them culturally and the lenses they look through to discover why they choose what they want to buy. These macro situations aren't as macro as we think. What our government decides impacts us all. Politics and laws impact policies that further affect people’s day-to-day lives. That’s not as far away as people always think it is from actions on the ground.
Do you see any differences between some of the more modern rituals that have emerged in the last decade, versus some of the more traditional ones?
I say many new ones are technology-based because new technologies are shifting ritualistic behaviour from real life to online. They’re also impacting how they intersect, support and enhance each other. The pandemic forced us all to evolve our rituals, because suddenly everything shifted in terms of behaviours. Whether it was people working remotely versus not, for example. Some of these shifts are still relevant today. Everything is also much faster at the moment. We're seeing rituals being developed, at scale, versus 10 years ago when they’d take longer to settle down. We didn't have the shareability and communication to do things like developing rituals in real-time.
Thinking about how rituals catch on, how do they influence consumer purchase behaviour?
Rituals are really important because it adds an emotional or cultural connection to the functionality of the product. It also connects fans together and attaches a storyline to it. If that’s a positive impact, it will be shared wider and as we all know, people trust people. And that means that if your brand is relevant, and people share it positively, it definitely helps with that purchase decision. This works in most categories where fandom or connection thrives. Brands can also both create new or enhance fan created rituals - both have to be done with deep insider knowledge of that culture.
How can marketers apply some of these ideas around rituals in their planning, research or thinking?
Sometimes, within our industry, there's a lack of real-world insights. Ethnographic, digital observations and conversations can get you into a much richer territory than reports of learnings from past behaviour (consumer focused only).
It’s not just about the behaviour, it’s about why it’s like that. Marketers need to be able to dig deep into this, beyond the consumer data or traditional consumer insights. You can only do this well by talking to and working with people who have life experience and have real-world insights and figure out the rituals that connect them together – we call this cultural intelligence.
For anything that we do for any of our clients and brands, we curate the team making sure that there's lived experience in the research and strategy. Everything is rooted in the audiences and the cultural communities that they want to talk to. No assumptions are made – sometimes a simple conversation with people within that community can really make the difference.
Are there any differences in how you observe rituals in our modern digital media and social media landscape?
We've recently been exploring digital semiotics for a variety of passion areas and the differences for new generations. This involves looking at how fan culture is changing through online communities, enabling scale and crossing over of cultures. Today, fans are no longer passive - they are creators developing new rituals all the time. Take football - what people paint on their faces, the flags they fly, the jerseys they wear and where they watch and engage with the game has changed significantly.
How do rituals catch on differently today in the digital and social world versus how they used to catch on before?
It's interesting because we see today that rituals happen with people. Sometimes, you didn't know that they used the brand a certain way. Making sure that you've tapped into what your audience is doing with your brand is interesting. Sometimes it's not the brand saying ‘This is going to be the ritual’. Sometimes it's already created and you have to identify how you can enhance that ritual. Sometimes, your brand's ritual has been created without any strategy or thought, and that's fun too.
It's a two-way street. If you've tapped into cultural intelligence and your audience in a real-world way, they are probably doing something with your brand that you haven't even thought of. And with fandom, being global and online, these rituals, if they work, can catch on, almost overnight.
How can marketers create new rituals as well as identify existing rituals to tap into? How would you advise marketers who are trying to evaluate these two options?
It’s a case of how you bring these two things together.
It’s back to that cultural positioning. The starting point to answer: What are those deep insights that are important to your community and cultural audience? What do they need your brand for, and how do you bring them together? You want to have a conversation with people who are fans of your brand. They want to be involved in co-creating new rituals. That's the future of brands and their consumers. Talk to them, and create something together. Then it's already got the weight of the audience you're trying to talk to.
What are the risks or rewards for marketers who participate in rituals?
I think the risks are far and wide and exist everywhere for marketers. I would be careful when it comes to assumptions. Being able to have the right people in the room is going to mitigate risk.
Sometimes you see that creative and strategy teams don’t have the people in the room that they want to talk to. These people constitute those with lived experience of what you're trying to do, the audience you're trying to reach or the product you're trying to promote. It’s important to make sure that their input is taken on board because they're the ones who are going to be not only consuming your goods but sharing it widely too within their communities.
We call these people cultural voices. We use them because they’re the voices that influence cultural difference. They are voices who are shaping and shifting that community or whatever that culture might be. Having them in the room up front means you get the required nuggets of gold to create rituals that are truly representative of the brand community.
What examples have you seen of brands who understand rituals and have that all important cultural intelligence you mentioned?
Guinness is a great example. You wait for the surge and that slows everything down. That can become a really beautiful place to slow you down, to connect with yourself or someone. Where it wins, is where you find the sweet spot that only that brand can do. I call it a cultural positioning and it's where I start all my work. That was specific to that brand with the Guinness Surfer ad which doubled down on ‘Good things come to those who wait’. It is still one of the best ads ever made. For me, this is still a type of ritual – about taking a breath while you wait for your Guinness to settle – it’s cultural and emotional.
In a post 2020 world, inherited culture has become much more important and in our diverse world, things like dual heritage and what that means from a ritualistic point of view is as important as representation. It’s important to do this authentically. The context and nuance really matters when it comes to rituals.