Re-Vision Labs has partnered with the innovative interdisciplinary program Three Degrees for the Digital Media and Learning Competition supported by the MacArthur Foundation.  If the joint proposal is successful in securing a grant, Re-Vision Labs will create a participatory online platform to connect Three Degree’s interdisciplinary Climate Justice Seminar with host community partners in the high-Andes and other climate vulnerable communities around the globe.  Please check out the entire proposal here—we are looking to find additional innovative and established partners within the competition to see whether our collaboration can be strengthened further.

Three Degrees, which is comprised of 25 graduate students from 15 different departments at the University of Washington, is researching how communities in the high-Andean regions of Ecuador will adapt to glacier retreat.  At the completion of the 5-month seminar the graduate students will create climate adaptation assessments focusing upon 5-issue areas:  health, food & water, security, equity, and justice.  Currently, the seminar is in its first phase as pilot project.

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by Ashley Best
Re-Vision Labs Fellow Emeritus

Need the current scoop on education in the United States? Check out these links!

STATE OF THE UNION: President Obama gave the State of the Union last night and unveiled his plan to use healthy competition to bolster performance in schools across the nation and to work toward reducing the high cost of tuition through various avenues.  His “Race to the Top” program rewards schools that make strides in raising academic standards and teacher quality, and improving failing schools .  This plan would help schools that have weakened their standard under the No Child Left Behind act, as floundering schools currently lose federal funding and districts cling to what monies they have available.  It is estimated that these programs will cost in the ballpark of $4 billion. “In the 21st century, the best anti-poverty program around is a world-class education,” Obama said. “No one should go broke because they chose to go to college.” Tax breaks and student loan payback incentives are designed to ease the burden places on students and families under the high cost of college tuition.  The following links explore these plans and their implications of the future of United States education.

"We only reward success." - President Obama

1. The Official Plan – From the White House website

2. Prepared Text – The basics of Obama’s vision to improve the United States’ education system

3. The Nitty Gritty - A detailed account of the individual facets of the new education plan

4. Show Me the Money – How do we pay for “Race to the Top”?

5. United States Student Association – The country’s oldest and largest national student-led organization praises education ideas

Check back for next week’s hot topic!  Education is empowering. Enjoy the week!

A New Kind of Worker

Last spring, I came across a series of articles in Time Magazine called ‘The Future of Work.” The series stated that the coming decade will bring an end to the ‘climbing the corporate ladder’ trend that we’re all so familiar with.

The upcoming generation of workers, according to a consulting firm quoted in the Times series, will no longer be defining success by paycheck, rank, or seniority. Instead, people will begin to define success “‘by what matters to [them] on a personal level,’ whether that’s the chance to lead a new-product launch or being able to take winters off for snowboarding”(Fischer, “When Gen X Runs the Show”).

The series goes on to point out that workers are no longer as willing to commit themselves, body and soul, to their jobs and only their jobs. Balance in life is becoming a new and important priority.

A New Kind of Company?

My question is this: If money is no longer the primary determinant of success for individuals, how will this new trend affect the way our corporations and businesses measure success?

If this new generation of workers are defining success by how well they maintain a work/life balance and how often they’re able to achieve their personal goals, does that then mean that our companies will cease to operate only for money? Could there ever exist a future where entire businesses measure their success not by sales or clients but by their ability to attain certain goals while maintaining balance?

Being a bit of a realist and subscriber to free market philosophies, I’m not entirely convinced this could, indeed, be a feasible future.

However, it is interesting to note that there are already some companies who are seeking to define their success on these new, more balanced terms. The long-standing outdoor clothing company, Patagonia, Inc. is one of them.

Founded by climber and surfer, Yvon Chouinard, Patagonia has always been a little bit of an anomaly among businesses for a couple of reasons:

1. The goals of the management team and employees are closely related to the goals of the clients. Those goals are, predictably, enjoy the out-of-doors in comfortable out-of-door-wear. That’s how the company got started in the first place: Yvon Chouinard started making his own equipment for personal use.
2. The company’s long term success depends on the preservation of wild spaces.

So here we have a company run by people with personal goals of enjoying wild spaces with both a personal and corporate interest in the preservation of those wild spaces.

The end result? A company who, like the future generation of workers, measures it’s success in a new way.

As Yvon Chouinard writes in his book Let My People Go Surfing, Patagonia evaluates its success not on sales numbers but on the “number of [environmental] threats averted: old-growth forests that were not clear-cut, mines that were never dug in pristine areas, toxic pesticides that were not sprayed,” or conversely, on the positive results of dismantled dams, restored wild areas, and creation of parks and wildernesses (Chouinard, 78).

By those measures, Patagonia has been extremely successful. As of 2006, Patagonia’s 1% for the Planet program in which 1% of the company’s sales are donated to grassroots, environmental groups has caught on with over 400 other companies (Chouinard, XI). Since 1985, over $22 million has gone to environmental groups from Patagonia alone (Chouinard, 78).

A Hopeful Outlook

Every company has a mission statement. Patagonia’s is: “make the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, and use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis” (Chouinard, 78). The company focuses not just on a profit or even solely on producing a product. It also brings into consideration somewhat loftier goals like avoiding inflicting unnecessary harm and seeking to sustain the environment.

Perhaps the corporations of the future will have mission statements of a similar nature that look at success from a broader, more open perspective and that make more of an effort to incorporate all three of the elements of the Triple Bottom Line (people, planet, profit) than they do today. Profit will always be an integral part of business, but perhaps, someday, people will view profit as something that ca be achieved not through the ‘rape and pillage of the earth’ but rather by doing the right thing (Chouinard).

Perhaps someday, corporate success will be defined not just by numbers in a bank but also by what good that company has done for humanity at large. Perhaps someday, the new business philosophy will be: Why stop with profit alone when your business can change the world?

I’ll close out with another quote from Let My People Go Surfing that really highlights the potential role that business can play in making our world a better place:

“A certain void exists now with the decline of so many good institutions that used to guide our lives, such as social clubs, religions, athletic teams, neighborhoods, and nuclear families, all of which had a unifying effect. They gave us a sense of belonging to a group, working toward a common goal. People still need an ethical center, a sense of their role in society. A company can help fill that void if it shows its employees and its customers that it understands its own ethical responsibilities and then can help them respond to their own.

Patagonia will never be completely socially responsible. it will never make a totally sustainable non-damaging product. But it is committed to trying” (Chouinard, 259).

*Chouinard, Yvon. Let My People Go Surfing. New York: Penguin Books, 2005.

How Do You Achieve Critical Mass in Social Media?

There is no question about it, when you first start a blog, a Facebook page, or a Twitter account, it is HARD to build up your account.  In no way does the 1980s “if you build it, they will come” philosophy work in social media.  You have to prove your worth on the social media site, and you have to put the work in to get out there and let people know you exist plus prove to them that you’re worth spending time with.

There isn’t just one thing that brings you to a critical mass.  It has to do with the quality of your posts, your ability to understand and cater to your target audience, the focus, authenticity, and consistency of your outreach efforts… and truth be told, a bit of luck.

Hitting critical mass is quick, unpredictable, and totally exciting!  And once critical mass happens, the momentum soars.  People will come to you.  It is a glorious time!

What Number Makes Critical Mass?

At LinkedIn, users get a special prize for having more than 500 connections.  Is 500 the magic critical mass number?  Do you only need 500 fans, 500 blog visitors per day, or 500 Twitter followers, before it takes on a life of its own?

I would say it depends on the quality of your posts as to whether your critical mass will be 500, 1,000 or 2,000.  High quality posts, such as those on our client TisBest’s Facebook page, quickly allowed the company to reach 500 loyal fans.  Once that happened, the Facebook fans took off on their own – telling their friends who in turn tell their friends – and quickly the TisBest fan base surpassed 1,000, and continues growing strong.  And they don’t have to try anymore – they can focus on continued quality and timely engagement.

However, we have other clients who take longer to learn how to effectively engage their audience and turn fans into advocates.  For them, it takes somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 fans before their accounts really take off unattended.  It depends quite a bit on post quality and well-timed regularity, as well as developing the skills to truly engage.

Metcalfe’s Law, Zipf’s Law, and The Long Tail

These three principles are often spoken or written about in discussions of critical mass.  In the blogging spirit of brevity, rather than fully dissecting them I’ll just give a brief summary and hope that in doing so I don’t grossly oversimplify the ideas so much that they are unrecognizable.

They are all 3 related:

• In Metcalfe’s Law, the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users who are connected within that network.  Fair enough: your network is only as powerful as its number of users*.  (Bob Metcalfe is attributed to inventing the Ethernet, by the way.)

• Zipf’s Law is a law of scale, where the quantity of (whatever it is you’re studying) is inversely proportional to its rank within a group of (whatever it is you’re studying).  So essentially the popularity of a word, website, or fan page follows a predictable distribution that is proportional to the popularity of all the words, websites, or fan pages.

Not terribly profound, but it does put things in perspective:  if you are a microfinance site, you can only be as popular as microfinance sites are – a microfinance blog’s fan size and growth is proportional to other microfinance blogs, and will not be proportional to a social media blog, or example.  Unless an unpredictable and large variable comes to play, social media blogs are just going to be more popular than microfinance blogs, so there is no reason to strive that high!

• The Long Tail is essentially a niche marketing strategy, coined by Clay Shirky and popularized by Chris Anderson in a 2004 Wired article and later a book by the same name.  A free market generally follows a distribution that favors the most popular 20% of retail items.
  

So think of movies:  the top 20% of movies are all that Blockbuster or Wallmart would ever care about and stock, because that’s all that works with their market model.  They can’t have a bunch of slow-selling items on their shelves for months at a time.  But then along comes Netflix, who is making a killing on the other 80% of the titles!  It costs next to nothing for Netflix to stock a whole lot of different titles due to their new kind of model.  The same is true for blogs, Facebook pages, or Twitter accounts.  So what if you aren’t in Technorati’s top 100 – you can still make a big impact.  Thanks to Netflix, there are a whole lot of documentaries that are actually getting seen – and changing people’s minds – because someone believed in the long tail.

Personally, I don’t think any one of these principles stands on its own as a guide for how we should think about critical mass in social media.  But together they do begin to paint a picture of the types of things that play a part in success.  And the greatest factor of all is still the creation and maintenance of an infrastructure of true engagement.

All three principles fall flat if they aren’t effectively set up and maintained.

*Note:  there is some argument that users do not equal Metcalfe’s original description of “compatibly communicating devices”, but we’re interpreting loosely here anyway.

Speaking of the Long Tail….

Sometimes it Just Takes One Person

At One Green Generation, I have an advocate who has brought me far.  That advocate just happens to be one of the top respected people on reddit.com.  That means every time he or she posts a link from my site, it has the potential to go up the reddit ratings very quickly.  On January 4, 2009, when many people were just starting to enact their “go green”new year’s resolutions, qgyh2 posted a link of mine, and my blog stats rose from 500 a day to nearly 3,000 in one day.

While most of those 2,500 new people did not stay and become regular readers or subscribers, a few did.  And, because there were so many people coming to the site, one or two of those reddit users also had a StumbleUpon account, and happened to have a lot of clout there.  The next day, reddit and StumbleUpon users together brought almost 5,000 people to the site.  Then more people Stumbled the post over the coming weeks and months, and still today I have at least 150 readers each day coming to read that one post.  And over those two days, my site surpassed its critical mass.

Which brings me to….

Sometimes it Just Takes One Post

Now don’t get me wrong, you can’t have a site full of crappy posts with one good one.  Yes, people will come and read that good one, but they won’t stick around.  Overall quality needs to be paramount.  It is important to occasionally spend quite a bit longer to write a well-researched, well-laid out article that people will pass on to their friends.  These longer, deeper articles are ALWAYS the ones that end up Stumbled, reddited, and bringing in hits long after I’ve posted the article.

But note that these posts will generate high traffic only if they come at the right time, and when you’ve already hit critical mass.

Typical articles that work well in this category are How To or Top Ten articles.  They’re also articles that get to the heart of whatever field your blog plays within.  And finally, something I have never done, they are the posts that list a lot of other bloggers and essentially bolster their egos.  Magazine and newspaper blogs do this:  The Top 100 Bloggers of the Year, for example.

And one final note:  it’s rarely predictable when critical mass will happen, and when a post will go “viral.”  You can’t get disappointed if you spend 24 hours creating the best article you’ve ever written, and it doesn’t get any play at all.

Viral Happens More On Some Days Than Others

Watch your site stats.  Watch your comments.  When is there the most activity on your site?  What time of day do your readers most like to read your posts?  Answer these questions, and then make sure your most important articles are posted during the peak times.

If your site is virtually dead on a Sunday, don’t post the article on Sunday.  If it peaks on Wednesday afternoon (many sites do), post on Wednesday morning so it’s there and waiting.

Don’t Discount SEO

The intricacies of SEO are for another post, but I encourage you to not take SEO lightly.  Some of my most loyal readers came to my blog via a recipe they found on Google, or a solution for how to get rid of ants sustainably on Yahoo.  How do I know this?  They have told me so.

Follow Your Own Path

I want to conclude this article by recognizing the incredible human-ness of the internet and every social media site.  The internet is people, through and through.  People are not always predictable.  And people are not always good predictors.  So write good articles and posts that follow best practices, write them frequently, tell your friends and acquaintances about them, and have the infrastructure in place that allows for good strong engagement.  If you do all of those things well, and have a little patience, you’ll probably do just fine!

Have You Experienced Critical Mass?

Please share your tips with all of us, or ask questions if you have them!

In 2001, Washington experienced a 6.8 magnitude earthquake. Although some infrastructure and buildings required extensive repairs, not a single life was lost. When compared to the tens of thousands of lives lost in the 7.0 magnitude quake in Haiti, it is clear that poverty was a key factor.

Already one of the poorest countries in the world, our neighbors in Haiti need our help.  They have lost their government, their roads, their homes, and – I would imagine – their hope.  And we can do something for them.

Seattle Greendrinks, SeaMo, Re-Vision Labs, and Global Washington have joined together to co-host “Washington for Haiti” in recognition of the urgent need for support.

Some may ask why it is necessary to hold an event, rather than just encouraging direct donations. We agree that direct donations are critically important, but we feel compelled to provide an opportunity for the Seattle community to gather and learn from experts and witnesses, since the more we know about the tragedy, the more likely we are to commit to supporting the long term changes needed to ensure that a disaster of this magnitude never happens again.

Please Join Us

When: Thursday, 28 January 2010, 6pm-9pm

Where: Pike Brewery, 1415 First Ave Seattle WA

What: A Benefit to support the work of one of Haiti’s most well-established economic development organizations, as they play a key role in emergency relief and long term reconstruction efforts.

Who: Hear from speakers representing Fonkoze and other organizations working on the ground in Haiti, as well as live music from Sunday Evening Whiskey Club.

Cost: $20 suggested donation at the door, with all proceeds going directly to Fonkoze.

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Last week, on a dreary, rainy Seattle night, 500-600 people walked through a door in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle.

Inside, they mingled. The room was filled with conversation about sustainability, about ambitious goals, and about fundamental world change.

Terry Provance and Re-Vision Labs gave everyone something new to think about: how our money can change the world. And not with donations, with real investments in people.

Join The Movement

The economics of the past clearly haven’t worked, as we have seen over the past several years, but particularly in the last year. The economic norms don’t have humanity in mind, they are not for the good of the people, they are for the good of the few. The rich few.

Money is one of the things that makes the world go round, there’s no denying it – when the economy goes south, we all feel it.  However, I firmly believe individual actions make a difference. I believe each of our actions together can change the world.

So let’s redefine finance, change how money works or doesn’t in our world. Let’s put our money where our passion is and truly, completely, invest in our future.

How Does This Movement Work?

Instead of investing your money in a money market fund, or keeping it in a savings account, you put it into a microfinance fund like Oikocredit. That fund is used to provide loans and business services to people in the developing world who cannot obtain a bank loan for their business plan (because they are poor and have no collateral or previous credit history). These loans have a 95-99% success rate – much higher than typical small business loans. And in 35 years, Oikocredit has repaid every single lender with their money plus interest.

It is a strategy for bringing people out of poverty by helping them become self-sufficient. And it is a strategy for changing the world by changing what we do with our investments: why give our savings to a big bank who cares nothing about you, your money, or the greater good of the world? You can do more with your money.

How Is That A Movement?

Because we can only change the world if we all do it together.  So that requires each of us to take a few moments and literally join the movement – not just invest, but spread our excitement and encourage our friends and families to invest in people.

Who Does It Help?

Here is a bit I wrote on the Oikocredit website about a woman named Flora:

Flora lives in a region of Kenya where 90% of people in the area live below the poverty line on less than $2 a day. When Flora’s husband was killed and their cattle stolen in 2001, she cried, feeling helpless and hopeless. But with four young children to support, she desperately needed to rebuild her life. With a series of loans – and a lot of hard work – she was able to re-establish her herd and eventually open a small grocery store. Little by little Flora started thinking big again and taking control of her life.

Flora has never forgotten her own struggle and is devoted to helping others in her community. She offers fair credit in her shop to customers who need it. In addition to a home for her family, she has also built rooms to rent out. This housing means others can live affordably and benefit like she has from the town’s growth. Today, she not only feeds and clothes her family; she pays school fees for her two brothers and plans to send her own children to college. Her future dreams include opening another business. Not only does Flora have improved her own life, but she has also become the inspiration for other single women in her community. Photography: Samburu Teachers Sacco

But quite honestly, it doesn’t just help Flora.  It helps you, and me, and our friends, our families, our neighborhoods, and our world. I firmly believe that part of living in a sustainable world is helping our neighbors, helping spread the wealth and happiness to other communities, and being there when others need us most.  Sometimes the best thing we can do for the planet – and for ourselves – is to help others.

Why am I so excited about creating a movement with our partners at Oikocredit?

The founders of Re-Vision Labs set out to change the world as a business, and we don’t choose our clients lightly.  Oikocredit has been around for 35 years, with an amazing mission and truly selfless people working together. They also take huge strides to make sure their work is socially, environmentally, and economically sustainable.  They want to improve the world just as much as we do, and they believe, as I do, that we can change the world by changing what we do with our money.  Learn more at the new interactive website we’ve created with Oikocredit.

There are other great microfinance organizations as well.  If you want to look around at other microfinance organizations to pick which one works best for you, just make sure you investigate them as we did with Oikocredit.  Make sure they are offering loans at reasonable rates to people in the developing world, and that they offer services beyond loans – support services like courses in creating a business plan, accounting, marketing, etc – these things are what make the biggest difference.

Thank You For Joining Us

Last week we gathered 144 names of people interested in becoming a part of the movement in microfinance.  We gathered $1,000 in donations to the Seattle Greendrinks Oikocredit investment fund.  We gathered a lot of excitement and interest in a new way of investing.

And this is just the beginning.  This is just Phase 1, the pilot project. We will be expanding this movement around the country, and eventually around the world. So if you know anyone who may be interested in helping us champion this cause, PLEASE let us know! Leave a comment, send us an email, give us a ring. Thank you for helping us truly make a difference in the world.

We thank our community so much for joining us, and for having open ears and warm hearts. Together we can change the world.

Wow. I thought I was being original when I first came up with this topic for a blog post. Turns out there’s a lot of debate floating around on the world wide web about whether or not Vancouver’s famed yoga-inspired athletic apparel company, Lululemon, is a corporate cult. Check out these two interesting articles on Lululemon’s cultish traits: “Lululemon’s Cult of Selling” by Fast Company and Lust for Lulu by New York Magazine.

Lululemon fans as pictured in New York Magazine's article "Lust for Lulu"

Defining our Terminology

Let’s start with a look at definitions.

Cult (as per Google)

• followers of an exclusive system of religious beliefs and practices
• fad: an interest followed with exaggerated zeal
• followers of an unorthodox, extremist, or false religion or sect who often live outside of conventional society under the direction of a charismatic leader
• a religion or sect that is generally considered to be unorthodox, extremist, or false

Community (also per Google)

• a group of people living in a particular local area
• common ownership
• a group of nations having common interests
• agreement as to goals
• residential district: a district where people live; occupied primarily by private residences
• (ecology) a group of interdependent organisms inhabiting the same region and interacting with each other

Based on these two definitions, it would appear the main difference between ‘community’ and ‘cult’ is the intensity of fervour possessed by the members and whether or not these members consider themselves as existing fully outside of society as we know it.

‘Community’ is made up of people with similar interests; ‘Cults’ are made up of people with similar beliefs, or zealously-held convictions rather.

Lululemon Cult?

As I said before, whether or not Lululemon Athletica is cult-like is a controversial issue.

Lululemon certainly seems to employ features of a cult. The company was founded in 1998 by Chip Wilson, newly ‘awakened’ yoga practitioner and avid subscriber to self-help books like The Secret and institutionalized inspiration such as that provisioned by the Landmark Forum.

Employees at Lululemon are required to subscribe to Wilson’s recipe-for-success-literature-and-educational-institutions. I’ve heard rumors to this end which almost makes working for Lululemon seem like something of a creepy employment option. Employees are required to listen to self-actualization tapes, told to post posters outlining their personal, health, and professional goals for all to see (and assist where needed), asked to indulge in literature like The Secret and The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and after one year of employment, sent off to participate in a three-day Landmark forum.

According to the aforementioned New York Magazine article on Lululemon’s cult-like operations, the Landmark Forum has been accused of being a cult for quite some time…since the 70s actually. It’s a program “specifically designed to bring about positive and permanent shifts in the quality of your life – in just three days.” Hmmm, could that be three days of brainwashing? Most attendees become what you could call full converts who believe quite passionately and fervently in the gospel of the forum. In other words, they become members of the Landmark cult. Chip Wilson could be one such member, and his corporation’s push to bring employees into the family of the Landmark forum could be interpreted as corporate cult cultivating.

The Lululemon Community

In light of the above, while I suppose what Lululemon does is a bit cult-like, the company also fully cultivates community. I suppose this is logical considering cult is really an intensification of community.

"Friends are more important than money?" Perhaps it should say, "More friends equals more money."

One of Lulu’s foundational philosophies is that “a company can only be truly great when it has a close relationship to the community it serves” (see Lululemon website). In order to get closer to its spandex-wearing, flexible “yogini” community, Lululemon has sacked the traditional retail ‘salesperson’ and replaced them with Lululemon-termed ‘Educators’ who exist to communicate the company’s core values and product information to customers….errr….’Guests’ I mean.

Both Guests and Educators both have access to free yoga classes, usually on store premises. They’re also encouraged to share their goals with the ‘community’ and work towards personal growth through what resources Lululemon graciously provides including its online forums and social media. In this manner, Lululemon is not only representing itself as a clothing company to consumers but rather as a means for personal development.

Lulu has also sacked the traditional methods of advertising in favour of 100% word-of-mouth marketing. Instead of TV commercials and ads, the company as recruited ‘Ambassadors,’ or athletically fit and inspiring individuals (usually yoga instructors though also triathletes and runners) who spread the good Lululemon word to newcomers.

With a simple change of terminology, some free sessions of downward dog and toe-touching, and innovative marketing ,Lululemon has managed to change itself from a retailer into a community hub. And not just that, but it’s managed to “grow from a single storefront on the surfside of Vancouver, British Columbia, to a public company with more than 100 outlets and $340 million in annual revenue” (Fastcompany.com). Lululemon makes $1,200 more per square foot than J.Crew and Abercrombie & Fitch using “virtually zero advertising” (Fast Company).

Cult Brands

Cult? Community? Who cares? Whatever Lululemon is doing, it seems to be working for the company in terms of sales.

Douglas Atkin, author of The Culting of Brands, would argue that Lululemon is successfully forming its brand into a cult. Atkin would add that, if you’re wanting to sell a product, ‘cult’ is not a bad thing.

According to Atkin, our society has progressed to such a state of consumerism that branding is no longer used, as it was traditionally, to validate the quality and authenticity of a product. Instead, brands are used to differential products. As Atkin says, “Nowadays, producers of brands realize that the consumer needs to say: ‘No, this is my product, I identify with it. The Apple computer is my computer because it stands for creativity and nonconformism, just like I do’” (“Interview with Douglas Atkin.” PBS) . Basically, there’s too much stuff out there, and a lot of that stuff really isn’t that much different from other stuff except that it might be branded differently. When a brand can get a consumer to identify with it, to see it as a representation of who they are, that’s when the brand starts selling the stuff.

The best way to get a consumer to identify and claim a brand as their own is via word of mouth. People trust their acquaintances far more than they trust advertisements or commercials. According to Atkin, advertising as it was done traditionally is on its way out entirely as more and more companies embrace word-of-mouth marketing strategies. Creating a Cult Brand is the best way to fully take advantage of word-of-mouth-marketing.

I should point out that cults aren’t necessarily bad. They have a negative connotation to them, but that’s probably more likely due to the fact that you tend to hear about satanic cults or suicidal cults more than you hear about the harmless cults. Atkin says, “We need cults, and the people who join them are very, very normal [...] And the reasons they join cults — and cult brands, as I learned from my research — are universal reasons to do with the human condition. They join because they want to belong to something, and they want to make meaning. They want to have a reason for being. Those are two very, very simple reasons that all of us in the human race need to express” (Interview with Douglas Atkin.” PBS).

The empty clothes racks and increased profits indicate that Lululemon is meeting with success in its efforts to create meaning and sense of belonging for its ‘Guests.’ Yes, the company does step over the line between community and cult in the way it tries to imbue its employees with Landmark Forum and self-help-book scripture, but the way it engages its community is highly effective in upping sales and bringing in the cash. Zero advertising, ambassadors armed with the word-of-mouth, and an interest (even if it is just a perceived interest) in connecting its clients to a healthier lifestyle through free yoga classes and other such resources are all brilliant innovations for a business model of a new century.

To quote Atkin again, consumer loyalty “…comes from a sense of community, a sense of belonging, and a sense of buying into something – a worldview in which [the consumer] believes. ”More than community, more than cult, Lululemon is cultivating consumer loyalty, and it’s that loyalty that is proving to be the key to the company’s success.