Some rituals are inherited. Others are created almost accidentally.

The morning coffee from the same café. Friday-night takeaway. Walking through the same entrance before a football match. The pre-flight airport routine. A birthday dinner at the same restaurant. Even scanning a loyalty card before the weekly grocery shop.

None necessarily begins as a ritual. But through repetition, meaning and association, ordinary behaviours can become embedded in how we organise our lives.

This creates an interesting opportunity for organisations and places. The strongest brands do not simply persuade people to buy something; the strongest places do not simply attract visitors. They can become part of behaviours people repeat, anticipate and attach meaning to.

But rituals cannot simply be manufactured. There is a tension between designing the conditions for ritual and trying to engineer the ritual itself.

Patterns: Rituals grow through repetition, place and meaning

The first pattern is deceptively simple: rituals need repetition.

A café becomes “my café” because we return. A sporting venue becomes meaningful because we have stood in the same place dozens of times. A family restaurant matters because birthdays keep happening there. Brands can become part of these rituals because their product, service or environment provides a reliable cue around which behaviour develops.

This matters because repeated behaviours create commercial value. McKinsey’s 2026 Australian Consumer Loyalty Survey found six in ten Australians said membership in at least one loyalty program had changed how they shop. Grocery loyalty programs influenced the behaviour of around 60% of members, while airline programs influenced roughly 70%.

Yet repetition alone does not make ritual. Meaning matters too.

The weekly grocery shop is routine. Buying the ingredients for the meal your family cooks together every Sunday can be ritual. Going to a stadium is an activity; wearing the same scarf, meeting at the same pub and singing the same song before every game creates something more.

Place is particularly powerful in creating these associations. Research into Australian public spaces has found that routine activities can act as “relational glue”, creating incidental interactions and a sense of belonging that is difficult to reproduce online. Infrastructure Australia similarly recognises parks, recreation facilities, arts and cultural spaces as social infrastructure that contributes to identity, inclusion and cohesion.

The pattern: The most powerful designed rituals rarely start by asking people to perform a ritual. They provide consistent cues, spaces and experiences that people choose to repeat until they acquire meaning of their own.

Tensions: Can you design authenticity?

This creates an obvious tension for brands: the moment a ritual feels engineered, it can lose some of its power.

Ritual depends partly on ownership. People need to feel that this is what we do, rather than this is what a company wants us to do.

Brands have long attempted to insert themselves into particular moments: beer with the football, champagne with celebration, coffee to start the day, chocolate at Easter, particular foods at Christmas. Some become deeply embedded. Others remain advertising propositions.

Today’s consumers may also be less willing to accept the relationship automatically. PwC’s 2025 survey of 1,600 Australians found consumers were prepared to switch brands rapidly following poor experiences, reinforcing that trust and experience need to be continually earned. Ipsos similarly found 73% of Australians prioritise customer experience when making brand choices.

There is another tension around inclusion.

A ritual can create belonging precisely because it distinguishes those who know the codes from those who do not. A local pub, football club, festival or cultural institution can create intense belonging for regulars while simultaneously feeling inaccessible to newcomers.

This is increasingly important when social connection itself is under pressure. In 2025, only 53% of Australians had weekly face-to-face contact with family or friends outside their household, compared with 68% in 2019. Formal volunteering was also lower, falling from 30% in 2019 to 23% in 2025.

Designers of places and experiences therefore face a delicate challenge: create enough consistency to foster belonging without creating so many unwritten rules that others feel excluded.

The tension: Organisations can design the stage for ritual, but meaning ultimately belongs to the people performing it.

Shifts: From transactions to experiences — and from loyalty to participation

One of the biggest changes is that organisations are becoming much more deliberate about designing moments rather than transactions.

Retail stores host events. Wineries offer tastings and long lunches. Sporting organisations create hours of activity around a match. Hotels develop arrival rituals. Tourism destinations encourage recurring seasonal experiences. Even loyalty programs increasingly reward behaviours and participation rather than purchases alone.

This reflects a broader appetite for experiences. ABS spending data show that major concerts and cultural festivals can generate noticeable increases in hospitality, catering and hotel spending in Australian cities.

At the same time, loyalty itself is changing. McKinsey found that Australian consumers increasingly expect immediate, relevant and personalised rewards, rather than simply accumulating points for some distant benefit. More than half now look for deals on every purchase, while experiential categories such as dining and travel remain areas where consumers are willing to splurge.

Technology is accelerating this shift.

Apps can prompt the morning coffee order. Wearables celebrate exercise streaks. Loyalty programs recognise birthdays and anniversaries. Digital tickets, notifications and personalised recommendations can create cues that encourage repeated behaviour.

Yet the physical world may become more, rather than less, important as digital life expands. Australian research into social connection suggests mundane public and commercial places provide incidental forms of human connection that are difficult to reproduce digitally.

Brands can provide consistent cues, products and experiences that become embedded within those moments.

The shift, then, is subtle but important: From getting people to return, to giving them something worth returning to.

Designing for ritual

The opportunity is not to invent a ritual and convince people to perform it.

It is to understand where rituals naturally form.

What happens immediately before an experience? What do people always do when they arrive? What object do they take with them? Who do they share the experience with? What happens every Friday, every summer, every birthday or every match day? What behaviours have customers already created that the organisation has never formally recognised?

These small repeated moments can be more culturally powerful than a major campaign.

For brands, that might mean creating a distinctive serving behaviour, recurring event or moment of recognition. For places, it could mean creating spaces people can appropriate and return to. For government, it can mean protecting and activating the social infrastructure where communal life occurs. For experience designers, it means recognising that consistency itself can become valuable.

The strongest rituals are rarely those that organisations announce.

They are the ones people eventually stop thinking about altogether and simply say: “That’s what we always do.”

Square Holes is a cultural insight studio.

We design mixed method explorations of people and culture beyond the category,  uncovering the patterns, tensions and shifts shaping behaviour to inform strategy, inspire innovation and enable confident decisions. Our studio model brings together the right mix of thinkers, researchers and specialists for each exploration. If you’re navigating change, entering a new market, or seeking deeper understanding of people and culture, let’s start a conversation >