For a while now, this series has been circling the concept of ritual from different angles. The more I looked at the types of engagement that actually last, the more ritual kept surfacing as the most valuable position any brand could hold. Ritual over reach, if you want it in three words.
So I started examining what ritual really is. I worked to separate it from the things that wear its shape without doing its work, the habits and the compulsions, and what kept surfacing was that ritual is where identity, belonging, and deeper connection live. It is a behavior a person repeats because it has become part of who they are.
Put that way, the appeal to a brand is obvious. A position rooted in someone’s identity is one no campaign can rent, and no competitor can dislodge. Of course, a brand would want to live there.
That is exactly the problem. The same property that makes ritual the most valuable position a brand can hold is the one that makes it impossible to manufacture.
What Ritual Actually Requires
Ritual is repeated behavior that carries meaning beyond its function. The morning coffee makes coffee, but it also marks the beginning of the day. The mat slap before martial arts training acknowledges a shared agreement between training partners. The Sunday family dinner reaffirms a bond that the food alone could not affirm. Repetition is the architecture. Meaning is the load it carries.
In another essay in this series, I have described what separates ritual from other things that resemble it: the habits and the compulsions that share the architecture of repetition without doing the same work. The three properties that separate ritual from these pretenders are sensory texture, intentional meaning, and identity formation. The body engages. The meaning is felt. The practice becomes part of how the person describes who they are.
For the brand, the properties that matter most are the second and the third. Because those are the two that cannot be granted from outside.
A brand can offer sensory texture. The weight of the cup. The smell of the bean. The pour cadence of the kettle. The temperature of the water. These are real design decisions, and the brand can make them, or at least shape them. They are necessary, but they are not enough.
A brand cannot grant or create intentional meaning. Meaning is what the human brings to the practice. The brand can supply the medium, but the meaning is the participant’s contribution. The coffee company can design the best mug in the world. It cannot decide what the cup means to the person who wakes up at five forty-five and pours into it the same way every morning. That meaning is a private agreement between the practitioner and the practice.
A brand cannot grant or create identity formation. Identity emerges from the participant over time. Every iteration of the practice, performed with attention, becomes a little more part of who the practitioner is. The brand can be present in that process. It cannot drive it. Identity is something a human discovers about themselves by doing the practice again, with intention, until the practice becomes part of who they are.
This is why brands cannot build rituals. Two of the three properties that constitute ritual live inside the participant. The brand can supply the texture and the form. The meaning and the identity have to come from the human who is making the practice their own.
Where the Big Argument Lands
This is also where the larger thesis of this whole project lands hardest. The argument I keep coming back to is that participation works better than persuasion in human engagement, especially for marketing and communications. Most of the time, when I say that, the implication is at the macro level: participation produces stronger and more durable engagement than interruption.
The brand-ritual question is where the principle becomes mechanical.
Persuasion can drive purchase. Persuasion can drive habit. Persuasion can drive compulsion under the right conditions. Persuasion cannot drive ritual, because ritual is constituted by what the participant brings, and what the participant brings has to come from the participant. You cannot be persuaded into meaning. You can only arrive at it through your own engagement with something worth engaging with.
The reason ritual is the most valuable position a brand can hold is also the reason a brand cannot manufacture it. The same property that makes it powerful makes it unbuyable. That paradox is the spine of everything that follows.
What Forcing Looks Like
The clearest way to see the limit is to watch a brand run straight at it. Michelob Ultra has spent the last two years on a campaign it calls Play For An Ultra, the friendly wager where someone says play you for an Ultra, and the loser buys the round. It runs constantly, with Super Bowl money and high-profile talent behind it, and every time one of the spots comes on, I cringe. It feels forced. It feels like a brand trying to install a social ritual by saying the line out loud often enough that the rest of us start saying it back.
For a while, I wondered whether I was the one who had it wrong. The numbers do not obviously agree with me. Michelob Ultra became the best-selling beer in America by volume in 2025 and now holds the largest share of the country’s draft lines. If the work is forced and the brand is winning, maybe forcing works.
Then I looked at what was actually driving the win. The Michelob Ultra brand sits on correct positioning, a light beer that belongs to an active life, which is a real association that people already hold. On top of that sits enormous media weight, marquee sports sponsorship, and a piece of category luck, the collapse of Bud Light after its boycott, and the pressure on Modelo from tariffs, within a beer market that shrank overall. That is a media machine using brute force on top of a sound position. It is the persuasion engine doing exactly what the last section said persuasion can do, which is to drive purchase. None of it is evidence that Play For An Ultra has become a ritual in anyone’s real life. The beer is selling. The practice the ad depicts is hard to imagine happening in the real world.
So the cringe was diagnostic after all. The positioning is fine. What grates is the attempt to script the practice itself, to write the participant’s line for them and hand it back as though they had chosen it. That is the difference between fostering and forcing, and forcing always leaves a mark. My kids would call it “try-hard.” A brand that has earned its way into a ritual never looks like it is trying that hard, because it did not have to manufacture the thing it is standing in. The strain is the tell.
There is a quieter irony in it. Michelob already stands next to a real practice, the beer at the end of the run or the round, the reward at the close of the effort. That is something forming in the world, and it could be fostered. Play For An Ultra is the louder, more synthetic thing built on top of it. Even inside a single brand, you can watch the choice play out, between noticing what is already there and trying to construct what is not.
What Brands Can Actually Do
Once you can see the structural limit, the useful work begins. Brands cannot build rituals. But they can do four other things, in sequence, that produce something close to the same outcome over time.
Observe and Diagnose
The first move is getting honest about what the brand is currently doing in the lives of its customers. Most brands have no idea. They have engagement metrics, frequency data, and retention curves. They do not have a clear answer to the question of whether what they have built is a ritual, a habit, or a compulsion.
The diagnostic I recommend for this is the One-Year Audit I have described in detail in a previous essay. Stand back from what the brand is doing in a customer’s day, week, or year. Imagine asking the customer, a year from now, how they would describe what the brand is doing in their life. “It improved my life” indicates ritual. “It cost me more than it gave” indicates compulsion. “It was neither here nor there” indicates habit.
Recognize Where Rituals Are Forming
The next move is observational, not generative. Brands that earn ritual position usually do not invent the ritual. They notice it.
Stanley did not invent the morning hydration practice. The cup had been on the market for over a century. What changed was the company’s recognition that a specific product had quietly entered the morning routines of millions of people, and that they could leverage that information once they saw it.
Wordle did not need to be marketed. Josh Wardle built a small game for his partner, and the daily one-puzzle structure baked the ritual in. The New York Times acquired it after the participants had already made it a daily practice. The skill was in seeing what was already happening and not breaking it.
Apple has been building its keynotes into the technology calendar for four decades. Most of that history is the company paying attention to what was forming around its own announcements and shaping the form to honor what the participants were already doing.
The pattern is consistent. Brands earn ritual position by recognizing where the practice is forming, not by engineering it from a blank page. This is closer to gardening than to construction. The brand notices what is growing and gives it the conditions to keep growing.
Support Without Overtaking
Once a ritual is forming around a brand or its category, the brand’s job is to remove friction from the practice without inserting itself into the mechanism. This is harder than it sounds, because most marketing instincts run in the opposite direction.
The brand that tries to colonize the meaning, to put itself at the center of what the participant is doing, breaks the ritual. The brand that knows how to stand back, to serve the function without occupying the heart of the practice, earns its way deeper over time.
The instinct most brand teams will resist here is the one that says do less. Do not overlay. Do not message at the moment of practice. Do not turn the cup, the socks, or the pen into an advertising surface for the brand at the exact moment the participant is using it. The brand that respects the practice gets to stay in it. The brand that tries to use the practice as a billboard gets pushed out of it.
Steward Over Time
Rituals compound across years, not quarters. The brand that earns ritual position has to operate on a timescale that most marketing teams do not plan for.
This means consistency in form. The mug needs to be the same mug, year over year, with the same weight, the same lip, and the same color. The pen has to be the same pen. The keynote has to keep its shape. The annual event has to happen on the same day in the same week. Variation kills ritual position. The practitioner is depending on the form to be what it was last time.
It also means consistency in posture. Brands change marketing leadership every couple of years. Strategies pivot. Messages get refreshed. The brand that earns ritual position has to behave as if those changes do not happen at the level of the practice. The mug does not care who the CMO is. The Wordle player does not care who owns the New York Times this year. The brand has to develop a way of working that protects the ritual layer from the noise of the broader business.
The marketing teams that manage this well share a few characteristics. They are usually small enough that decision-making stays consistent over time. They sit inside companies where founder-led continuity has kept the practice steady through changes in leadership. They work with brands whose ritual position has become so well established that the brand itself acts as a conservative force in its own organization. None of these is an easy condition to manufacture. All of them are what the position requires.
What Gets Earned
The brand that does this work, year after year, earns something the rest of the industry cannot manufacture.
It earns time. Not bought time, not borrowed attention, not impressions. Recurring time. The time the participant is going to spend anyway, in the morning, the week, or the year, on the practice that has become part of their identity. The brand sits inside that time as the medium of the practice. Every iteration deepens the relationship between practice and brand. Every iteration is also defensive against competitors who would want to occupy the same position but cannot, because they were not present when the practice was forming.
This is the deepest version of what the rest of this Exchange has been pointing toward. Participation produces stronger engagement than persuasion. Ritual is participation at its most concentrated. And the brand that has earned its way into someone’s ritual has earned a position no campaign can buy, and no competitor can dislodge.
The meaning was never the brand’s to write.
As a brand, you cannot build a ritual. But if you embrace the four practices described above in sequence, with patience, you can become part of one. That is the play. That is what the brand teams asking for the recipe were really asking for. That is the position I kept arriving at when I went looking, the one no campaign can buy and no competitor can take. The meaning was never the brand’s to write. The work is quieter than that. Be present while the practice is forming. Be patient enough to still be there when it becomes part of someone’s identity. That is the whole play, and it is the one most brands will never slow down enough to run.