One morning I descended the stairs into my kitchen to do the first thing I do every morning. Pour a cup of coffee. As I walked toward the coffee maker I got a waft of an interesting smell. I said to my wife, “It smells a little funky in here.” 

“It’s my Grüns,” she replied, rather cheerfully.

The way she said it got my attention. She was happy to tell me that the funky smell was “My Grüns”. And she spoke of them as something she owned, on a personal level. Not “It’s these gummies” or “It’s THE Grüns.” It was “MY Grüns.” This is what can happen when a brand creates a cult-like love with its consumers. 

Here are a few ways the superfood gummies brand did just that.

Exquisitely branded, all the way through

Grüns is an exceptionally well-built brand. And that might be the biggest factor of its cult-like love from consumers. 

Let’s start with the name. Grüns is German for “green” and linguistically traces back to gruene, which relates to fresh plants and foliage. Not only is it on-point for a naturally-derived superfood, but it’s short, interesting and easy to remember. (According to Google, Founder Chad Janis added the umlaut because it resembles a smiley face. Bonus points.)

The stated mission of Grüns is “To make daily nutrition simple and enjoyable.” Judging by the brand presence in both design (the cute bear mascot), in language on their website and packaging, and their social media, they are making it enjoyable. And the individual once-a-day packs and subscription model are exceedingly simple.

The brand design is simple and beautiful. It feels friendly and inviting–something you would be happy to interact with every day (which we’ll get further into later). The green and yellow color palette is completely natural to the brand and the product.

Grüns’ content, on their website and social media, is casual and personal, creating a conversation with their customers. Everything is tied together beautifully with their tagline/slogan of “The Bear Necessities.” It’s brief, branded and speaks to the product.

You would be hard pressed to find any beloved brand with a following that isn’t meticulously built, from design to copy.

It’s foreign/exotic (is it?)

If you asked 10 people to guess where Grüns was founded, I would bet at least 8 of them would say Germany or Sweden or maybe Norway. Nope, founded right here in the US. But it doesn’t matter. Consumers love to adopt something of their own that feels foreign or exotic. It’s the same reason people will tell you endless tales about their trip to Europe or sit you down for dozens of swipes through their phone photos. They want to take ownership of something different and curious. It helps validate their own uniqueness to the outside world. They want to feel like an insider. 

Again, look no further than the brand–bright, bold and much more closely aligned with stylish Euro-style design than what you would typically find in an American pharmacy or grocery store. It’s an immediate signal that this is something unconventional that can be added to a person’s repertoire of cool and unusual things about them. 

Not every brand can or should position itself as foreign or exotic, but every brand can present itself as a place to be discovered. A place where its consumers can feel like insiders.

Grüns creates ritual

The Grüns brand and product is built on a ritual, plain and simple. As it says on their website, “Rip. Tip. Enjoy.”. The ritual is enabled by the product’s design (individual daily packs), and supported by their mission statement, “To make daily nutrition simple and enjoyable.” 

Cult-like love very often includes ritual–religion (going to church), sports (watching/attending games), fitness (daily workouts). While not every brand has a product that is naturally ritual-based, every brand is in an industry that has its own kind of ritual. Sometimes being adjacent to ritual, regularly acknowledging or participating in ritual, even piggybacking on ritual is enough to do the job.

Grüns is expensive

Those powerful little gummies are not cheap. And that’s important not because they have built a cult-like love of wealthy people, but because Grüns requires a commitment. Commitments, particularly expensive commitments, are not disposable. And when you commit to something, there is an innate urge to see it through. Commitments are deeply personal. They define some part of our personas. And, people want other people to know that they committed to something. It might not always be true love, but in the world of branding and marketing, it’s very close.

This is not to say that every brand should be expensive. But it is not an uncommon tactic to build cult-like love by being as expensive as consumers can bear. Think Apple, Hermés, or Dyson.

(Grüns recently lowered their price, after recently being acquired by Unilever. Something to watch, whether loyal consumers begin to feel like it’s not as special anymore.)

These factors–branding, origin, ritual, and price–are all big contributing factors to the cult-like love Grüns created for itself. There are certainly more. They also do a pretty good job on social media and they work hard on fostering a community, for example. And they are pretty good at picking collaborators, like they did recently with Minions. But I would argue that any brand can take some cues here to help build their own cult-like love. You might sell brake pads. It can be done.

Care to chat about it for your brand? Contact us and we can put our heads together.