Our Global CEO, Daniel Binns, spoke at the 30th Poptech conference in Washington DC whose theme this year was Civil: Civil society is not static. It moves through people. He spoke about the power of rituals to help brands create meaning in the modern world.
Long before we had governments, constitutions or cities, we had rituals. Some of the earliest monumental structures we know of, like Göbekli Tepa in Turkey, (which was built roughly 11,000 years ago which is before we had invented farming!), were built for people to gather in ceremony. That’s before they’d even settled down to live together.
Its because rituals are how strangers become a “we.” Funerals, weddings, a minute’s silence, voting day, even queuing. The sociologist Émil Durkheim called it collective effervescence, the energy we feel when we do something together, in sync.
And civility itself is a ritual. A handshake, taking turns, saying please. They’re small, unspoken ceremonies that tell a stranger “I respect you.” Civil society runs on them.
But something has changed. MSQ surveyed 4,000 consumers, and they told us most of their rituals now happen at home, and twice as often alone. The shared ritual has gone private.
And brands can leverage rituals power of emotional transformation by:
- Observing what the ritual gives people emotionally
- Facilitating how they can make the moment better
- Participating once they have earned the permission to be there
Civil society runs on people who show up with respect. The brands that last are the same: good guests. They’re useful, they don’t demand attention, and they’re missed when they’re gone.
Watch his talk on stage at Poptech here:
Dive deeper on the topic of Rituals, exploring how they shape meaning, identity, and connection in Daniel’s conversation with Moran Cerf, a Neuroscientist and Professor at Columbia Business School on the PopTech Backstage podcast:
