With brands craving nowadays to go viral, a group of fellow Brandcenter students and I decided to make the ultimate viral sensation; a cult. And it turned out to be scarily easy.

Our goal was to get as many followers as we could to believe in something completely ridiculous and then guide them towards an action they would normally not do. Our ridiculous idea was that coffee was a conspiracy by the government to control the working class. And the action we guided people towards was to put up stickers protesting coffee in their hometowns.

We started putting posters up to advertise our new movement, dubbed AntiCaff, and encouraging people to continue the conversation on Reddit. Turns out, plenty of people were more than willing to believe something we totally just made up.

There was some initial backlash by some more rational people but their arguments only incited our new followers even more. Pretty soon, we had requests from people we’d never met asking for AntiCaff stickers to put up.

Eventually, these protest stickers were posted in nine different states, Washington D.C., the United Kingdom, and New Zealand.

With 18,225 unique views and 201 active members to date, AntiCaff is a movement that grew beyond what we thought possible. But don’t worry, we are still in control over our cult. For now…