How to Build a Powerful Cult

KEYPOINTS

• 01

  In an endless flood of content, attention goes to a human with conviction and a story that keeps unfolding.

  Lulu Cheng Meservey — former communications chief at Activision Blizzard and Substack, now founder of the advisory firm Rostra — says launches used to come every few months; now they come several times a day. Infinite content makes individual humans stand out. Conviction is oddly hard to resist — cult and terrorist recruiters win with awful pitches on sheer certainty. A narrative arc, like Scheherazade's thousand and one nights, gives people a reason to stay tuned.

• 02

  Tell the story in the overlap of what you care about and what your audience already cares about.

  Picture two circles: what you want to say and what they're thinking about. Your circle alone won't land; theirs alone does nothing for you. Start in the overlap — the 'gateway drug' — and walk them into the rest. A defence-tech startup shouldn't lead with marketing drivel. It should start with how to prepare for a possible invasion of Taiwan, and then show where its software fits.

• 03

  The hook matters most, then the story, then the medium — most people reverse it.

  People obsess over which podcast to pitch before working out what will make a fish bite. The best distribution is being so interesting that people can't stop retelling you. Online you get under five seconds; on social video, about 99% of viewers are gone by 30 seconds. For email it's the subject line, for a post the first sentence. Reliable hooks: humor, curiosity, strong emotion, or a fresh angle on something people already follow.

• 04

  The number one mistake is misidentifying your audience.

  Speaking to all 8 billion people dilutes a message into nothing. 'Be interesting' only means something once you know to whom. Know your audience's 'intellectual and cultural erogenous zones' and accept being less interesting to people you don't need.

• 05

  Corporate and government communication is hollow because the metric became the goal.

  Comms teams are measured on activity — two op-eds, three podcasts, four town halls — rather than on helping people understand something important. Like mice that keep running a trained route long after every original mouse is replaced, everyone copies everyone. She sees government jargon as a tax on citizens' time. Change comes when a leader such as Shopify's Tobi Lütke does something original and others follow.

• 06

  Startups are like cults, and the leader has to do the talking.

  You'd never build a cult by hiding the quirky leader behind a polished spokesperson. Selling something unproven needs first-person conviction: 'Look me in the eyes. This will be my life's work.' Press releases have no skin in the game — no glory if they land, no humiliation if they don't — and she calls them a decade obsolete.

• 07

  Trust can be engineered: repeated exposure, shared values, and conviction repeated over time.

  First stop being a stranger; parasocial familiarity counts. Then establish shared values — she wouldn't take a restaurant tip from someone with opposite tastes. Gavin Newsom opens debates by agreeing on something trivial. Repetition from a trusted source moves beliefs: Elon's Mars talk sounded crazy at first, but by the 10,000th time people who trust him believe it.

• 08

  Make yourself a hard target; deterrence is set by how you respond.

  In The Three-Body Problem, aliens hold off while a 'Wallfacer' with perfect deterrence holds the trigger, then call his weak successor's bluff. Palmer Luckey reliably hits back, so attacks rarely land. Shopify fights every patent troll despite the cost, and now gets none. Robert Axelrod's work suggests 'tit for two tats' in repeated games: forgive the first slight, never the second.

• 09

  Before responding to an attack, ask two questions; if both are yes, respond fast.

  Is it reaching people who matter? Is the accusation material? An attack from your opponent's camp can be a gift worth turning into an ad. If both answers are yes, act immediately. Like a broken nose, reset it now or re-break it years later.

• 10

  If you're fighting a story with a statistic, you're losing.

  Pro-NAFTA GDP percentages meant nothing beside 'Shane, father of 12, just lost his job.' Charities show one girl or one named panda. Every great political story follows the Shire-to-Mordor structure. Beneath your statistics lie better stories — the Rippling–Deel spy flushing a phone overpowers every revenue claim.