In (brand) LOVE we trust…

Little things bring humanity as a whole together as LOVE. This human quality has transcended time and place to get right to the hearts and minds of the people inhabiting this planet; and although it is something we constantly live with, very few thinking goes into researching love. Perhaps because love is what it is, pure essence of love. Just so we’re all in sync, let’s quickly define love:

{love} A strong positive emotion of regard and affection. (positive emotion being key for my next commentary)

Now that we know what love is, a positive emotion, we can start to relate it to branding and marketing – Few brands achieve the status of a loved brand in the global marketplace. Such few examples as Apple, Yahoo (during its golden years), Google, Starbucks, McDonalds, among other locally known ones have a privileged position in the consumers minds and hearts: They are loved!

A brand doesn’t get love through coincidental and unplanned ways, in fact the whole opposite is true. For a consumer base to start loving (and keep loving) a brand many very detailed, strategically planned moves must happen. One of the -easiest- ways to start to get a brand into the “loved” category is through a thorough analysis of what consumers want from a brand. Some things to take into consideration:

• What consumers want from a BRAND might be very different from what they want from the product the brand is offering, don’t be fooled into one brand and product benefit.
• The BRAND must be able to connect emotionally with the consumers. Learn what their emotion range is, where their pleasant emotions hide, and how their negative ones burst out. Then learn how to trigger the nicer ones.
• Remember consumers have many hidden paths within their emotional self. Many times they don’t know how to express what they really are looking for in a BRAND, or perhaps they do but are too conscious to make it known (status, power, money, ego, physical superiority, etc.)

Once you get a thorough, initial idea of what they want it’s time to get “Strategically Creative”! You need to get your way into their hearts…and this is done through marketing activities (communication, advertising, PR, internal communication, activities, street-marketing, promotions, customer service, website, etc…) that have been especially designed and planned to cater to the very specific needs detected through the research, that will end up triggering the positive emotions in your consumers.

Take an easy example: Apple. If you care to think of how the brand has acted in the last couple of years, one word comes to mind: Perfection. They have done -pretty much- everything right. They have given consumers what they were looking for (…and much more) through all of their consumer touch points. Their stores have people lining up hours before their grand-opening, mac fans ramble on their amazing products, they proudly wear t-shirts, and the best one of all: they stay loyal to the brand.

Perhaps you never thought of your brand as something to be loved by your consumers; but in reality that is your intention, even if you never expressed the thought. Maybe you just called it loyalty, or sales increase, or customer service rating, or many other different terms. In the end, the amount of love a brand gets might as well be the ticket insuring a ride to a more profitable future.

Happy Valentines Day!

Technorati : branding, love, valentines day