The Severance writer and cast on corporate cults, sci-fi, and more
22 comments
·February 1, 2025comrade_dang
The worst example of corporate cult I ever experienced was in Goldman Sachs. You were expected to know every partner's and every higher up's biography. It was absolutely insane.
iamkonstantin
It’s also kind of ironic - is Apple the first corporation to succeed in applying the “corporate cult” strategy to consumers at such a scale?
graemep
At global scale, to such effect, probably.
There are many businesses with cult following: sports "teams", car brands, etc.
I know many people who buy the same marque of car for decades. There are huge numbers of people who are supporters of companies like Manchester United,which is a listed company again: https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/manu - and for many it is part of their identity.
yurishimo
Is that really a problem if the companies are providing a service that consumers are happy with? Cars I think is actually a great example. Toyota (and Honda, though to a lesser extent) have a reputation for a reason. If they screw up too much, that goodwill is eroded. Volkswagen is perhaps the poster child for corporate fuckup-ery.
Humans are at the end of the day all creatures of habit. This applies equally to purchasing habits. When applied to expensive consumer goods, brand loyalty makes sense. Why would I want to spend a year’s salary on an unproven product?
Now, personally, I think the identity piece is pretty cringe, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t make sense. Humans are also not great at living with inconsistencies in their worldview and decision making because many take it as a personal attack on their character instead of recognizing it only as a bad decision that they have learned from.
defrost
Scale changes as population grows and usage deepens.
At "Apple scale"? You can make that case, sure.
But the first? IBM was a cult to it's customers back in the day "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", etc.
Other earlier brands had their dedicated followers.
dbspin
That was B2B - it was a golf course brag for executives. Customers camping outside Apple stores was something different. That's personal identity defined by not merely consumption, but parasocial relationship to a brand.
defrost
> Scale changes as population grows and usage deepens.
^ IBM was the brand in a time when no computing products existed for the Man on the Clapham omnibus.
Earlier examples of consumers having a parasocial relationship with a branded identity exist, just not particularly in the computing tech field.
Dresses, artworks, perfumes, performers have famously had cult like followings in times past - Lisztomania had fans camping out for a glimpse and prime seats.
ghaff
HP was pretty iconic as well but aside from calculators and printers, much more about B2B as well.
GaelFG
Funny, I always thought that phrase was ironic and actually a joke against IBM bad quality/pricing ratio but abundant and aggressive marketing targeted at non technical managers. ( I actually have no idea of IBM quality/pricing ratio, I don't work on fields in wich they are present)
ghaff
IBM was more known as a sales-oriented company rather than marketing. Although, of course, they spent (and spend) a lot on marketing/advertising as well. IBM 2024 revenues were >$62B.
defrost
I dare say it became ironic .. but I lived through the zenith of IBM in business sales and they had a cult following with many and a solid stranglehold on federal, state, and local Governments (and various corporate sectors) in a great many countries.
That lessened with the rise of PC's in the office and the spread of non-IBM PC clones. It's a dim memory today and has been for three decades and more.
scyzoryk_xyz
The East India Trading Company definitely had that brand loyalty
defrost
More instilled than earned.
Not a cult you could easily break from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blowing_from_a_gun
yffh86g
There is a big diff between Education and Entertainment. It just leads to confusion and misunderstandings when both are mixed up.
If you are interested in how orgs work visit any top b-school site and read their research output.
thrance
There's a case to be made for cigarette companies as well. People were known to never change who they bought their poison from, despite all of them providing the exact same product.
nonameiguess
From watching Severance, the closest parallel to me for a company I ever actually worked for is Disney. Disneyland performer was one of my first jobs, and the orientation is a lot like Lumon's. Video history of the company's reach and achievements. Tremendence reverence for the founder. Disneyland has a statue of Walt holding hands with Mickey at the junction between Main Street and Fantasyland and Main Street itself is a reproduction of Walt's hometown as it was when he was a kid.
And there is absolutely a cult of devoted followers. Even I personally had literal groupies from this job. There were women annual pass holders who'd be there every day to watch me and try to become friends with me. The memorabilia auctions were among the most insane things I've ever seen. Comers from everywhere in the world paying tens if not hundreds of thousands for the slightest piece of something authentic the same way someone will drop a cool mil for a baseball signed by Babe Ruth. There were people who collected annually released pins who'd been doing it for 70 years.
For the fans, it starts in childhood, too. The relationship is so deep that Disney fanatics love the company more than they love their own friends and family sometimes. Even for me, my very first favorite film was The Sword in the Stone, the Disney cartoon from the 60s about King Arthur. I don't even remember it, but my mom tells me I was rewatching it like teenage girls of the 90s rewatched Titanic when I was 4 years old. Disney imprinted itself into me before I even formed permanent memories.
They had global reach, too. Disney perfected this kind of thing way before Apple did.
There is another element to Lumon that I don't think Apple has, too. That's the company town. They own almost everything. Virtually everyone works there or is related to someone who does. Disney kind of had this with the City of Anaheim for a long time, but the city has probably outgrown it at this point. But at one point, they owned most of the land, employed most of the people. Disney owned both of Anaheim's pro sports franchises at one point. One of them was even named after a Disney movie! They had deals with the city to restrict airspace visible from within the park and never to build anything that could be seen to preserve the illusion that you're in an entirely self-contained world separate from the real world. Cal State Fullerton was called "Cal State Disney" at one point because so many of the students were employed there.
bsenftner
Having worked on Disney Animation productions, you ought to meet these life long fanatics that actually manage to become Disney animators - their ultimate fantasy is realized, and then after a year or three the glow has dimmed, their figurines decorating their office acquire dust, and they become nonanimated, heads down, and just work, without the glow anymore. Disney corporate is rough.
fallous
Not really. In the corporate realm there was the well-known phrase "no one ever got fired by buying IBM." Such was the aura of IBM at the time.
TheOtherHobbes
And it was deliberately created - based on the concept of the "IBM way", staffed by (mostly) men who dressed a certain way and had certain attitudes, which distilled the essence of conformist corporate America.
There was even a company song book.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/08/tripp...
laidoffamazon
Another fantastic show (on Netflix) that explores the concept of corporate cults is Pantheon
These kinds of shows remind me a lot of The Prisoner (Patrick McGoohan - I am not a number!) which was very much ahead of its time.