How to get people to love your business: Junkee founder Tim Duggan shows us how to achieve cult status

Tim Duggan’s Cult Status is a literary roadmap for prospective entrepreneurs seeking to navigate and make an impact in today’s business climate. Cult Status takes incredibly complex and nuanced concepts and distills them into seven simple and cleverly communicated steps.

These seven steps provide guiding principles for all entrepreneurs to create a meaningful “cult status” brand. In describing these seven steps, Duggan articulates and reveals an unspoken change in societal expectations of businesses and the role that consumers expect a business to play in their community, all while providing legitimate and proven measures for success.

Duggan’s seven steps to achieve cult status branding

1. Think impact first

   Businesses must reckon with the changing tide of social expectations. Impact and mission must supersede the pursuit of profit if you are to have any hope of establishing a cult status brand.

2. Question all the small things

   It’s not enough to just be original and unique. Businesses must unravel and undo old ways of thinking through effective and thoughtful management. Whether this be non-hierarchical company structures or flexible branding and tone of voice, the small details matter.

3. Refine your superpower

   Refining your superpower is Duggan’s way of instructing entrepreneurs that your focused expertise and passion are far more powerful than just sheer scale in terms of building a much loved brand.

4. Define your altar

   Any passionate cohort of people requires an outlet to express that love. In the context of a business, this means creating an event, online community or physical location where your brand can be appreciated, spoken about and ritually loved by customers.

5. Drop the bullshit

   This is fairly self-explanatory. Customers are smart and can easily see through even the craftiest attempts to appear genuine. Good businesses and good brands are honest and human.

6. Lead from the middle

   Leading from the middle requires that, as a business, you bring your customers along for the ride. Their input and their voice plays just as important a role as your most senior executives. Create a sense of belonging in your brand through effective communication and master the customer feedback loop.

7. Strap yourself in

   There is no perfect brand. Businesses are human constructs and are inevitably prone to ups, downs and errors. Steer into this universal truth and prepare yourself for any challenge.

Duggan’s style of writing is clever, blunt, and full of genuine insightful anecdotes. Tim writes as if a long-time friend is cleverly explaining the new unspoken laws of business, as he weaves in and out of tales of world-renowned business’ who have reached the business nirvana that is “cult status”.

Take Allbirds for example. The sneaker company has placed its purpose and mission above its pursuit of profit. This elevation of purpose above profit is borne out in their pursuit of carbon net neutrality and willingness to create materials for their sneakers that are as comfortable as they are environmentally friendly. On top of this, after creating the world’s first carbon negative EVA polymer for their shoes, the technology was made open source for all manufacturers to adopt easily and readily. A far cry from the traditional cutthroat competition the sneaker industry has come to know.

Cult Status forces a reassessment of business principles, a reshuffling of priorities where a business’ only hope of thriving is by creating a genuine, effective mission and impact where their purpose can be marketed and engaged with. We sit at the edge of a business revolution where companies are beginning to understand that the tides of business and society have shifted to a point where profit now flows from effective and engaged purpose with consumers.

Whilst only a short read, Cult Status is still well worthy of a place on any business bookshelf. It’s brevity and well thought out steps for “IRL” as Duggan explains, make it a perfect reference book and guiding manual for any would-be founder/entrepreneur seeking assistance as they prepare to take their first steps in business and creating a brand.

Throughout the book, Duggan questions the foundational motivation of business and offers a roadmap to the future where profit and purpose are harmoniously engaged. Any millennial entrepreneur or prospective business owner, whether you are seeking profit or looking to instill a purpose in your community, would be well served to read and apply the teachings of this book.

For interested readers, Cult Status is available for purchase here.