Gen Z Influencers: the Step Chickens TikTok Cult 🐓❤️

What defines a cult? Is it the polarizing influence of its leader? The mind-altering practices? The zealous of its followers? Or is it just more than an addition of single characteristics?

But most importantly, what do chicken suits, TikTok videos and blue selfies have to do with cults and why such a weird mixture of stuff is suddenly so relevant??

The answer lays in one gem of a TikTok trend: the Step Chickens cult. Born from the unpredictable mind of ex-Yahoo and Google, now full-time-mother-hen Melissa Ong, aka @chunkysdead, the Step Chickens phenomenon has seen its fame skyrocketing during the last few weeks.

Here’s a quick summary of the timeline that brought to the current dominion of the Step Chickens (you may also listen to it from the words of its very creator), which also make a pretty insightful example of how a 2020 Gen Z cult takes shape.

May 18th, 2018: Ong sends the notorious blue selfie to a friend as a joke. The friend puts it on a mug to troll her. The selfie is momentarily forgotten. Then Ong buys a chicken suit to win an office contest and, after not winning, she starts using it to make mock-ups of porn videos on TikTok. She WANTS to be associated with the suit and, after several attempts, one of her videos goes viral.



That’s when a new lingo is created (another typical trait of a cult-like organization): she labels her videos with a phrase from a user’s comment: “Step chicken, what are you doing?”, and shortly afterwards she and her followers start addressing each other as Step Chickens. She asks her audience if they should start a new religion, and the response is unanimous: yes.

But what’s a religion without an icon? The blue selfie resurfaces, and the Step Chickens followers/cultists start uploading it as their profile picture.

So, now they are all recognizable and different from the masses, they have a leader they “worship” and they can start…doing cult stuff. Which, in Gen Z’s world, means spreading chaotic ironic energy all over the place: making random pranks under users/organizations’ TikTok posts and starting battles with other TikTok cults such as the @adrianxortiz’s Weenies, @myleswithuhy’s Babbages, the Flamingos, the Murder Hornets, Duck Sanctuary, Beardians, and #YeeHawSquad. 

Now, you may be wondering: why are they telling us this kinda bonkers story? Well, we think that there are some interesting lessons to be learned here. First, the shift in the power dynamics of influencers nowadays.

As Ong herself states, she realizes she has “the power of getting a great number of people to do something”. She didn’t get the power from some type of outside fame, though: she has built her fame inside the platform through her own edgy content and by dialoguing with her audience as they had always been “together in this”. And people are responding as all influencers would love their followers to: with complete devotion.

Because, yes, Step Chickens experience a sense of belonging towards their cult, they feel like they are part of something, as hilarious and random as that something can be. Especially in such scary and uncertain times like those we are living in, where the reality outside seems even weirder than a video of a chicken hitting on its stepbrother. To quote Taylor Lorenz’s NYT article: ‘Ms. Ong’s fans said that joining Step Chickens has helped them feel less isolated in the midst of widespread stay-at-home orders. “I think a lot of people want to be a part of something,” said Sam Schmir, 20. “With the pandemic, social media is very political and controversial,” Jiayang Li, 22, said. “It’s nice to have a break from everything going on. It’s a break from it all and a fun way to interact with other people and have fun while everyone is quarantining.’



And how do such devotion and affiliation materialize? Through explosive virality. News outlets and media such as The Washington Post and Adweek kneeled to the cult and its blue icon, maximising the Step Chickens’ resonance. Ong started producing its own merchandise with psychedelic prints and logos and reached almost 2 million followers, getting her account verified. TikTok’s takeover was completed, and with that battle won, General ChunkysDead took her loyal army towards more ambitious conquests.


 

As every good leader knows, when at war, you should choose your allies wisely. That’s what Melissa Ong did when she partnered with Sam Mueller to create a new exclusive space for Step Chickens to meet and connect. Ong and Mueller met at Yahoo, then he went off to found a new social network: Blink. With his experience in community building and Ong’s past in running meme pages and being overall infused with meme power (as many Gen Z cult leaders seem to be), they decided to cater from Step Chickens’ burgeoning fame to boost Blink into stardom. And the leverage on cultism paid off once again.

Blink was quickly rebranded as Stepchickens and was downloaded more than 100k times within a week, which made it fly straight among the top 10 social apps on the Apple Store. Yet, what strikes the most is the app’s reviews by members of the cult: people calling Stepchickens “lifechanging”, perpetuating the cult narrative with enthusiasm and irony.

And that’s probably another pivotal point of the story: Gen Zers are able to ironize on their cults, or better, to downright build a cult around irony, memes and pranks. Their levity, if you want to call it like that, elevates their idols and creates a sense of community where the ideal of the perfect influencer is replaced by figures that are flawed like everyone else and that don’t make you feel wrong when you are being your weird, Step-Chicken self. The self-acceptance of quirkiness is rising, and it seems unstoppable.

So, what do you think will be the future of the Step Chickens cult? Will they be able to conquer other platforms such as YouTube and Instagram? And do you think there are ways out there to harness the power of Gen Z’s cults that haven’t been thought of yet? Let’s put our chicken suits on and talk about it!

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This is part of YAD — Understanding Young Audiences Digest: a free monthly digest on young audiences for VOD and TV professionals. We’ve analysed millions of data points and we don’t mind sharing some of them — if this could help channels and commissioners to reach Gen Z, by understanding their needs, behavioural traits and intrinsic cultural values.

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