Starting and running a successful business is about more than just providing a product or service that people need. While addressing core needs is crucial, the best businesses in the world create deep, multifaceted customer relationships, inspiring deep loyalty, emotional connection, and even a sense of belonging.
This sense of purpose separates an ordinary business from a cult brand that carves out a special place in people’s hearts. These brands don’t just sell products; they inspire people to join their cause and become long-lasting advocates by changing the status quo. But what does it take to build a brand that goes beyond practical utility to become a powerful movement that people want to get behind?
Adam Jacobs, Co-Founder of Australia’s largest fashion retailer THE ICONIC and employment platform Hatch, offers intriguing insight into the art of cult brand-building. Despite starting THE ICONIC at a time when online shopping was in its infancy in Australia, Adam and his team built one of the country’s leading fashion retailers by challenging industry norms. This enabled THE ICONIC to set a new standard for customer experience, not just within fashion, but the entire Australian retail industry.
During the American Express Business Class Masterclass, Adam sat down with journalist Kate Racovolis to break down how THE ICONIC created a powerful brand by focusing on cultural needs. Here are five key takeaways from that discussion on how to build a brand that resonates so deeply that it becomes an essential part of people’s lives.
1. Think creatively about the opportunity
When Adam and his team first started THE ICONIC in 2011, they faced an immature market plagued with myths. There were only a few major e-commerce players, and their business models centred on bargain shopping.
“The proposition was to shop online because it was half-price,” Adam explains. “The package might come in two or three weeks, it might be the wrong order, there might not be a phone number you can call if you’ve got a problem, but hey, at least it’s half price.”
Adam and his team rejected this mentality, setting out to create a better customer experience than people could receive in-store. They assessed how consumers interacted with e-commerce businesses internationally and developed a strategy that aimed to make the buying process as quick and satisfying as possible, centred on ultra-fast delivery, free returns, and exceptional customer service. This required the team to break down a series of long-held industry assumptions.
“The whole industry said that fast delivery and free returns weren’t possible in Australia, because it’s a big, geographically dispersed country and it's too expensive to deliver overnight,” he says. “People said that free returns weren’t economical and didn’t support a profitable, long-term business model. They also said Australians didn’t want to shop online. These were all myths.”
The team assessed all these assumptions and broke them down one by one. They found that roughly 80% of Australians lived in 5 capital cities at the time, which helped break the fast-delivery myth. They also found that offering free returns generated more loyal customers who would be more likely to make a repeat purchase, becoming more profitable over time.
“We just kept busting those myths as we developed the proposition of the business model. That's where the brand was created,” Adam says.
2. Evoke a strong emotional connection
At the heart of every successful brand is a strong emotional connection with its customers. While rational factors like price and convenience are important, the real driver of customer loyalty is emotional engagement.
“What you're doing when you're building a brand is figuring out how you want to make someone feel. It all boils down to that,” Adam says. “It doesn't matter what you're selling, at the end of the day, there’s a person on the other end who decides to buy your product or your service. Whether we like it or not, we make decisions more on our feelings than our rational thinking.”
Adam shared an analogy of a ‘customer experience cake’ to demonstrate how brands can cultivate a sense of connection to customers:
- The base layer is centred on internal culture: ensure everyone in the company deeply understands how the brand wants to make customers feel and that they’ve experienced it themselves.
- The middle layer is about hygiene: identify the day-to-day touchpoints that customers interact with – including everything from the website and social media pages to delivery interactions, returns processes and checkout experiences – and ensure they’re all delivering that sense of emotional connection.
- Halo experiences are the ‘cherry on top’: this is where you signal to the market that you stand for something different and can pull it off. For Adam and THE ICONIC, this was providing three-hour delivery, but it looks different for every business.
3. Identify your core audience
Another key to building a brand is identifying and focusing on your core audience. Early in THE ICONIC’s journey, the company experimented with selling a wide range of products across multiple categories—from fashion and footwear to sports and lifestyle products. However, Adam and the team quickly realised that this broad approach was diluting their efforts.
“One of the biggest reasons why businesses fall over is because they try and be too many things to too many people. We fell afoul of this mistake.” Adam says. “It required us to buy stock from a whole different set of brands and we had to figure out the kinds of ranges we wanted to offer. There were also lots of different warehousing and delivery strategies… it just creates a range of compounding problems.”
Roughly two years into THE ICONIC’s journey, the team ran a pivotal piece of analysis to determine that fashion and footwear customers, aged between 21 to 35, were its most valuable segment. So, it started focusing on those customers and dropped everything else.
“That was probably the moment that we accelerated our growth the fastest as an organisation,” Adam says. “To create advocates, it’s so important to stay focused on the people you want to serve in a very narrow, almost ruthless way.”
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4. Create advocates by going the extra mile
To establish a brand that people love, it’s often the little things that make the biggest difference. THE ICONIC was committed to creating great experiences through every interaction and one of the ways it accomplished that was through its ultra-fast three-hour delivery service.
Partnering with an organisation that was previously delivering urgent medical supplies, the company created countless memorable moments for customers that turned them into advocates.
One story involved a customer who lived just three blocks away from the warehouse and received her order in just 21 minutes, despite getting a two to four-day delivery window.
“She was sufficiently surprised,” Adam says. “She Googled our address, picked up the parcel, came in and demanded to talk to who was in charge and someone grabbed me. She had waves of confusion and joy running across her face. She asked if her mum said something or if we were following her on Facebook… my response was, as soon as you ordered it, we sent it to you.”
Adam also recounted another instance where the customer service team found a social media post of a customer whose heels had broken on the day of her 21st birthday. The team delivered a replacement pair of heels straight to the dancefloor, turning a negative interaction into a positive, unforgettable one.
5. Keep moving forward
Businesses are constantly navigating shifting economic conditions that often make it difficult to keep focused on innovation and growth. To address this challenge, Adam referenced the concept of the “20-mile march,” from the business book Good to Great by Jim Collins. This concept is inspired by a hiker’s mentality to walk for 20 miles every day, no matter the weather, how much food they have, or other external conditions, imposing order amidst disorder.
“The analogy for a business is: what are you trying to create, not in the short term, but in the long term? Where do you want your company to be five, 10 years or even 100 years from now,” Adam says. “What is that North Star that you're trying to march towards? Every year you should be marching the same amount towards it.”
This concept reinforces the importance of staying agile and pivoting during turbulent economic conditions to keep moving forward, even if it requires you to reshape your business proposition to cater to a new set of customer needs or priorities.
Powerful brands capture the hearts of customers
Building a strong brand is not a simple or linear process. It requires a deep understanding of your customers, a willingness to challenge industry norms, and a relentless focus on delivering an exceptional and consistent experience. Adam’s journey with THE ICONIC provides a powerful blueprint for entrepreneurs who aspire to create brands that resonate on an emotional level with their customers and inspire a loyal following.
As Adam’s experience shows, the rewards of creating such a brand are not just financial—they’re about building something people truly love, which becomes a meaningful part of their lives.
To watch the full Business Class Masterclass on Cultivating Cult Brands, click here.