Building Consumer Rituals

Whether it’s the Guinness two-step pour, the Cadbury’s Crème Egg ‘how do you eat yours’ campaign, or your before bed skin-care regime, building ritual into a brand experience can be a powerful way to strengthen positive emotional associations with a product and embedding it in daily life

Habits and routines are repetitions of the same action, they can be an important element in consumer consumption patterns and product choices. Our brains like repetition. It triggers feelings of safety and reward, it can activate memories and even help build trust. But a ritual goes further; a series of actions with added meaning and emotional depth. The associated ceremony of rituals adds to experience, and it’s place in human culture means it can also strengthen bonds of collective identity and community to such an extent it can lead to intergroup bias; a bias against other groups, or in the case of brands, biases against other products.

It's easy to see why many brands are keen to facilitate ritual building around their products. They can be key in creating long lasting brand engagement and add a layer of brand loyalty that can be difficult to break. Particularly in a post-covid consumer environment and a period of economic instability where loyalty has been tougher to keep.

Building on existing habits

Creating a ritual from scratch for a brand is almost impossible. Every example of successful brand rituals have taken a pre-existing habit and overlaid deeper emotional layers to it.

We can see examples of this with the Crème Egg “how do you eat yours” campaign, or the Oreo Trust the Twist campaign. Both take existing habits, combined with social proof and a sense of community and thus elevating a habit into a more emotional act. The clothing brand Carhartt on the other hand made a small addition that took existing habits into a more formal and ceremonial direction. Knowing their hard-wearing clothing was often resold by owners, they added a label where previous owners could write in their name. Adding a narrative to the clothing, allowing an owner to become a part of the story. Imbuing it with ceremony and a sense of ritual as it’s passed from one person to another.

The key element is for brands to understand the emotions associated with a brand or the gaps where there is space to create emotion or ceremony. This is a significant research challenge, and not something that can be uncovered in a simple survey. These elements of consumer behaviour can rarely be articulated consciously by consumers. You need to find indirect ways to access these emotional drivers. This is where behavioural science can help in going deeper and gaining access to narratives and emotions we may not even be aware of.

Legitimised behaviour

Historically rituals have been used to strengthen bonds of collective identity and a way of legitimising certain patterns of behaviour. We’ve seen community used in the examples above, we can also see it in the beauty industry and in particular the rituals of skincare.

Product development and marketing levers in this industry in recent years have moved to an increased use of “natural” ingredients. What brands have also done is lean on the provenance of these ingredients to speak to a deep and rich history and communities of users. Ingredients such as argan oil have been harvested and used by the Berber of Morrocco for thousands of years. Brands like Fable & Mane and Subtle Energies blend ingredients and techniques from Ayurvedic practices. This heritage connects us with something deeper, a link that connects us as an imagined community and gives meaning to a routine to help it cross the line into ritual.

This community connection is not always enough to tip a routine into ritual. A key aspect to consider is “mindfulness”. Habits are rote actions where you normally pay little attention. For habits like brushing your teeth at night, or grabbing a coffee in the morning on the way to work, you don’t really give much cognitive space to it, you just do it. What a brand needs to do is elevate the habit to ritual with this sense of “mindfulness”, in essence finding ways to make the consumer pay more attention and give more cognitive space by overlaying a deeper emotional current.

The beauty industry has taken these concepts of community and mindfulness and overlayed the notion of “self-care”. Self-care is an interesting topic with a radical history. In the mid-20^th century the term was only applied by healthcare professionals to help patients manage their ailments. In the 1970s, popularised by the Black Panther Party, it became an important feature of the civil rights movement in America. These days it has broader connotations, and has evolved into the concept of mindfully taking time for yourself and is now a giant industry in itself.

The skincare industry has combined community along with notions of mindfulness and selfcare to carve out a space where a ceremony of individualistic practices, which at the same time, are rooted in a broader community, are not only legitimised but celebrated. It’s ok for us to take time outside of our day, outside of our worldly concerns, to ignore our social networks and spend time only on us. It is in fact, a healthy thing to do.

Habit-Stacking

Habit stacking is another potential entry for brands into rituals. This is something that happens naturally in some of our routines; the shower in the morning, followed by brushing teeth, followed by using deodorant. These actions are connected in our brains and completing one leads on the other automatically. P&G used what they termed as “micro-step” habit stacking as a way of connecting and developing a more experience based ritual connected to some of their brands a few years ago. They encouraged new daily practices such as singing your baby a song while they changed their diaper (Pampers), or identifying your top priority for the day while applying deodorant. Thus elevating a mundane habit into something more mindful and meaningful.

Turning habit to ritual

The benefits for a brand successfully leveraging ritual as part of a product story can be massive in encouraging brand loyalty and engagement. Particularly at times when difficult economic circumstances have such a huge impact on brand loyalty. Ritual can cut through that, if a product or brand has an elevated emotional role in our lives we make sacrifices to keep it. Brands can of course allow social trends to create rituals out of their products but just imagine how powerful they can be if you can understand the opportunity for creating rituals and building your brand around them, making them an essential part of every day life. To do that these interventions need to be authentic and properly aligned with existing habits and emotions, and identifying these correctly is key.