While brands have long leveraged ritual to engage consumers and stay top-of-mind, increasingly, companies are evolving their approaches in sophisticated ways. We’ll look at the way three brands are using the semiotics of ritual to reshape consumer experiences and strengthen strategic objectives.

Ritual to turn unfamiliar into everyday: M&S Yay Mushrooms! Shots

Marks & Spencer’s mushroom juice shots, launched in early 2025, tap into the now established “shroom boom” with a ritual-based format that helps bring what has traditionally been a specialised wellness proposition into an FMCG context. By framing the shots as part of a defined daily ritual, M&S is signposting ways for curious consumers to easily integrate the benefits of adaptogenic mushrooms into their lives.

The product comes with prescribed timings for consumption – AM and PM – designed to align with the intended benefits of each part of the day. This careful scheduling – combined in the duo shot pack with the mushroom-like shape created by the bottles slotting close together into a wider piece of card packaging above, ties the ritual directly to the active ingredient, making the experience feel intentional and purposeful. Further, the schedule’s similarities to taking time-sensitive medication code serious, curative efficacy.

Nevertheless, these codes of seriousness are balanced with elements of fun and pleasurableness within the ritual created. Unlike remembering to take your medicine exactly on time to achieve a continuous effect, the shots promise both a burst of energy in the morning and a calming experience in the evening. Alongside colourful designs, excitable, informal tone of voice (e.g. calling the different shots “Bring the Zing” and “Absolutely Dreamy”, and use of exclamation “Yay!”), this positions the feeling of specialness that the schedule engenders as relaxed, fun and enjoyable, balancing the associations with serious efficiency.


Mushroom-like shape of duo shot pack with colourful design and informal TOV

As well as the routine of consuming the product at a set time, the shot format itself also has ritualistic meaning. Already familiar in the chilled aisle to signal a quick, potent boost to health (e.g. ginger shots or gut health products like Actimel and Yakult), the small format suggests that only a little is required to have a powerful effect. This is most immediately perceptible for the pre-portioned small bottles, but equally applies to “dosing bottle” variants, where linguistic similarity to medicinal contexts again suggests efficient potency. The quick, revitalising consumption ritual – whether taken straight from a tiny bottle or poured out into a small glass – is easy to perform without waylaying consumers – overall, coding the mushroom shots as an efficient way to seamlessly integrate optimised adaptogenic potential into everyday routines.

Dosing bottles

Overall, then, in a landscape where wellness products can sometimes feel niche or intimidating, M&S has made adaptogenic mushrooms accessible, turning them into an everyday, yet special-feeling and therefore premium FMCG item. By tapping into the power of ritual, the brand makes the product not only easier to adopt but also more enjoyable, framing it as both an efficiently health-boosting and fun part of daily self-care.

Ritual to turn chores into leisure: Sunday Lawn Care

Sunday Lawn Care has reimagined lawn maintenance in the US by creating a user-friendly ritual around garden upkeep—an approach uncommon in this traditionally utilitarian category. By transforming what can often be a fairly ad-hoc or overtly efficiency-focussed process into a structured but pleasurable ritual, the brand has unlocked several strategic advantages as well as benefits to consumers.

Firstly, the name “Sunday” itself suggests a defined, recurring performance of lawn care, and is associated with time devoted to more leisure- and self-care-oriented household tasks in contemporary US culture (for example through influencer narratives around Sunday Reset Routines). This framing subtly repositions garden maintenance from effortful chore for which time must be found, to a rewarding, habitual ritual when done the Sunday way.

Similarly, references to a “Sunday Neighborhood” community strengthens the coding of ritual by implying a collective experience – i.e. lots of people performing the same lawncare actions simultaneously, suggesting being part of something bigger. The brand name reference to the day of traditional Christian worship and church-going heightens this association with collective experience and community in the US. Meanwhile, being able to see where product use is prevalent amongst your-real life community and describing use of the product as making “your neighborhood a better place for people, pets, and the planet” re-enforces this coding of positive collective action and highlights a brand following of customers who share belief in the product ritual.

The ritualisation of lawn care has also enabled Sunday to present its offerings as a subscription model (coding carefully-planned convenience while enabling repeat custom) and to tailor them to individual consumer needs – for example through a yard analysis quiz, soil testing and personalised fertilizer formulations. Then, the seasonal delivery system and pre-prepared application schedule – presented as an accessible checklist with clear milestones, and alongside encouraging language such as “you can do this” – reinforce the ritual nature of the process while showing consumers that the complex planning has been handled for them, altogether coding straightforward, easy but tailored convenience.

Still from video showing unboxing moment

Finally, the unboxing experience creates an expectation around scheduled delivery, with all of the products needed at that time arriving together and in visually-coherent packaging to be unpacked by the user. Use of design choices more commonly associated with leading-edge food, beverage, or personal care brands – for example, solid tertiary colours, abundant negative space, rounded lowercase fonts and stylized illustrations – position Sunday as a contemporary, desirable and streamlined experience. This provides standout in a category where packaging with text in structured boxes, details to guide the viewer’s attention, literal illustration, e.g. hyperreal imagery of lawns and all-caps fonts to highlight the most important information typically code reliable function over form.

Overall, by centring lawn care around a structured process, Sunday reframes a traditionally functional task as a moment of personal and collective satisfaction and as a modern, feel-good routine – and all in a way that strengthens strategic aims while providing customers with a more enjoyable ritual.

Ritual to turn nostalgia into engagement: Vinted Re-Invinted QuizSecond-hand buying and selling platform Vinted’s “Re-Invinted” feature takes users on a nostalgic yet modern ritual journey through a personality quiz designed to help them learn about how others are using the platform and showcase potentially lesser-known features such as tech resale. Drawing inspiration from the personality quizzes that filled the pages of teen magazines users might have enjoyed in the past, the feature taps into a familiar ritual that blends fashion, nostalgia, and optimised tech.The quiz serves as a much more engaging way to introduce users to the platform’s offerings than, for instance, a corporate-seeming walkthrough. Instead, it invites users to participate in a familiar, entertaining ritual of reflecting and finding out about yourself through answering questions, with the promise of revealing insights at the end. During the process, there are questions such as “You can only pick one:” followed by a list of items which could be found on the platform and including both the well-known clothing offering but also highlighting that tech can be purchased. This showcases Vinted’s range of uses and services while keeping it light and fun. With questions that are sometimes loosely tied to the service, such as “Are you more creative or practical?” the quiz allows users to think about their relationship to the platform in terms of their wider preferences and personalities, instead of simply positioning it as a transactional tool.Re-Invinted also draws on more modern rituals to familiarise users with the app’s features and ways of using it. The quiz culminates in offering an amusingly composite description of users’ buying and selling interests and priorities based on their answers (we got “Fabric Fanning, Spring Cleaning, Keywordsmithing Historian”). This echoes the quirkily intriguing hyper-specificity of services such as Spotify’s playful “Daylists”, coding detailed, observant understanding of user preferences, positioning Vinted as a slick, contemporary digital UI and re-enforcing its functionality, where users are guided step by step through transactions by the app.

Ultimately, Vinted’s approach demonstrates that brand rituals don’t always need to be directly tied to the product itself; rather, they can be crafted around rituals that resonate with your audience – for example here offering a playful, nostalgic and engaging way to connect with the platform while also highlighting its offerings.

3 Key Takeaways for Brands

  1. Use ritual to transform perceptions – Ritual can fundamentally shift how consumers perceive your product. M&S transforms niche wellness mushrooms into accessible daily routines, Sunday elevates mundane lawn maintenance into meaningful garden-care, and Vinted transforms functional platform navigation and learning into something personalised, nostalgic and entertaining. Where a change in perception would benefit your brand, use semiotics to design ritual elements accordingly.

  2. Balance structure with pleasure – The most effective brand rituals combine structured elements (scheduled consumption times, defined application steps, facts & figures) with enjoyable aspects (playful language, aesthetic design, personalisation). This balance helps consumers integrate new behaviours while maintaining the engaging qualities that make rituals satisfying and, where applicable, repeatable.

  3. Blend familiar ritual patterns with innovation – Build on ritual patterns consumers already understand – like daily wellness routines, weekend resets, magazine personality quizzes – to introduce new habits, features and products. Using familiar cues as shortcuts will help consumers quickly and easily understand how to incorporate your offering into their lives, making adoption feel natural rather than forced.

Sophia Lucena Phillips, Project Director

The Power of Ritual: How brands transform consumer experiences