Love Is All Around

For brands, being loved by their customers is something that has often been pursued and coveted. Nevertheless, the very idea of ‘brand love’ has constantly gone in and out of fashion, with much debate (and derision) about whether it can even exist.

The idea that people fall in love with the purely functional items they purchase is easy to dismiss, but we all undeniably have emotional relationships with brands. The old advertising adage that ‘brands only exist in the minds of consumers’ is true – and emotions will primarily drive anything that exists in our brains.

A quick glance at any of the ‘Most Loved Brands’ league tables, it’s clear that certain types of brands seem more capable of garnering true adoration. Products and services that are on the cutting edge of tech and entertainment – or are delicious to eat or drink – tend to dominate. They’re also the ones that have very deep pockets to invest in emotional storytelling, to connect more meaningfully by tapping into the passions of their audience, or by borrowing the emotional cachet of celebrities.

Love might come more naturally to some, but it shouldn’t be left to the few. Despite how utilitarian a product or a brand might be, we all need to embrace love in its many nuanced forms. Whatever we humans like to tell ourselves, we feel before we think, and that’s what dictates our behaviours. Whether we would freely confess to truly ‘love’ our favourite brand of cereal or loo roll is kind of missing the point. Love is deep and so much more complex than that. It comes in all shapes and sizes. So much happens under the surface, and bonds are formed in very different ways for different people over the course of our lives.

Marketeers will benefit by analysing their brand and forging relationships with customers through the lens of love. Incorporating the concept of love, in all its nuanced complexity, to inform more emotionally relevant relationships with customers holds the key to building deeper, more valuable relationships. But, as we all know, true love is never smooth sailing, and there is no formula. But here are three key bits of advice for all brands chasing it.

Love happens beneath the surface

Brand love league tables are a useful yardstick to identify the biggest and most successful brands out there, but they can only ever really scratch the surface. Love isn’t a binary thing – and it’s only useful if you understand the ‘why’. If the industry wants to revisit brand love, it needs to be with a more scientific lens.

Falling and being in love happens under the surface. It takes most of us some time to work it out, whilst our subconscious motivates our behaviour – this is especially true when it comes to marketing. If asked, I’ll probably say I don’t love a brand (and I’m a certified marketing nerd), but brands seek to engage our deeper emotional human needs for a reason. It’s only through behavioural and neuroscience that I’d ever really know.

Love is hard-fought for

Brands must recognise that love, like trust, is earned through experience. To quote Massive Attack, “love is a verb, love is a doing word.” No matter how effective your emotional storytelling is, brands can’t quickly drum up love in an instant. It comes from a combination of cognition and feelings triggered by experience, with subtle elements that add up over time. To put it in romantic terms, it’s not about a one-off display of roses and a heart-shaped box; it’s the well-timed cups of teas and hugs of support throughout the year that really matter in a relationship.

And like in real life, there’s often complicated power dynamics at play. Marketers should always remember that brands need people more than people need brands. And consumers aren’t too keen on monogamy, even with the brands they’re very fond of. We’re as happy to try new ones as we are to leave others behind.

Love is experienced differently by everyone

There are plenty of tropes and commonalities, but we’re all so different in our approach to love. We all accept that your personality type, attachment style or love language will affect romantic relationships – things are just as individualised in terms of what we would want or expect from brands. Some people want affection and affirmation, some people want acts of service, and people really need their space. At its core, a brand is only a set of synapses firing in a specific way in one person’s brain. It’s only by understanding these complex emotional attachments and connections on a human level that you can make somebody care about, value, and maybe even love, a brand.

This might be a letter of love, but I promise you it’s not all sop. We’re brought up to see emotion and logic as separate, even oppositional, forces. Not only is this totally wrong, but brands are selling themselves short if they buy into the myth. It doesn’t matter what the product or service is, if you can find a way to create more emotional relevance, it will be sure to lead to commercial value.  Even if the odds are slim, love is always worth the gamble.