Superstition

Superstition (noun): A belief maintained even in the absence of empirical proof; persisting not out of logic, but because it feels true. From the Latin, superstitio. To “stand over” or “stand above.”

In early Roman usage, superstitio described an excessive or irrational religious awe, contrasted with religio, or a healthy respect for the divine. Over time, superstitio came to mean beliefs that “stood over” reason.

I was recently asked what people in branding are pretending not to see. I said, “Superstition.” (See above.)

And what I mean by this is that brand, with its many definitions and applications, is—at heart—a system of belief that catalyzes people into action, for good and for ill. Encouraging that action is a set of brand expressions made visible through story (positioning), decision (strategy), and design (form/function). Which, when mystified by the collective consciousness, creates a very sticky superstition. 

Tesla, say what you will about Elon, was built on a belief in technological transcendence. Beyond cars. Beyond efficiency. It is a brand driven by the superstition that a better future could be engineered into existence through insistence and imagination, and that the people who truly believed in the future were a different class of human altogether. And this belief powered extraordinary action. People bought into the company before its operations fully cohered, waited years for products, defended its failures, and forgave a volatile public figure because the brand they were loyal to encompassed a worldview—or, superstition (again, see above)—they shared. Even now, with Elon bruised from his polarizing ride into the White House, the brand continues to override logic and endure contradiction, exemplified by the bumper stickers on the Teslas in my neighborhood that all seem to say the same thing: “I’m over Elon, but I still like my Tesla.” 

Brand functions as both signifier (tangible) and signified (conceptual), which is where, I think, the mysticism enters. The brands that command belief do so from some other place. 

For years, Patagonia has invited customers not only to buy less, but also to view their purchases as a form of environmental solidarity. When the company ran ads that said “Don’t Buy This Jacket,” people bought more. And when Yvon Chouinard transferred ownership of the company to a trust designed to fight climate change, it legitimized the brand with a lasting ethos, like the logical end of a long-held belief, and made whole its founding superstition that business could serve the planet, and that enough people might believe in that possibility to make it real. 

And like Patagonia, every brand is engineered from the instinct, intuition, and imagination of its founder. Which is something else that we sometimes pretend isn’t real. 

Take Glossier. For all the postmortems on its DTC strategy, what made the brand powerful in the first place was the belief in the spirit of Emily Weiss and her intuition that beauty was becoming less about aspiration and more about intimacy. Weiss created a community that made people feel seen. The packaging, the tone, the UX. It all flowed from Weiss’s instinct about how women wanted to feel when they touched their own skin. That belief carried Glossier further than its margins should have allowed. And even now, as it retools, the ghost of that original instinct still holds value because the brand was built on a conviction that no data point or consultative accounting can shake.  

Superstition survives on the sense that things are more than what they seem. And when a brand taps into this sense, when it embodies a set of values so deeply that people begin to behave as if those values are more real than the products they buy, then something like sanctity starts to take shape. 

I’ve tried to reverse-engineer conviction from positioning statements. We’ve tried to differentiate based on color and type, verbs and nouns. But the brands that shape culture, endure backlash, and continue to do so despite whatever trouble befalls, feel alive beyond mere difference. They conjure a kind of faith.