When we talk about love, a person is usually at the receiving end of that love; but if your brand is really lucky, it can also become the object of people’s love. Not just “I like this brand” or “I always buy this brand”, but “I LOVE this brand.” We call this brand love.
Initially built on the triangle theory of love between people, brand love has been studied extensively by researchers over the last two decades.
In this article, we dive into what brand love is, why it matters, how you can build brand love, and how you can assess the love for your brand.
What Is Brand Love?
Just like love is complex among people, brand love is not a simple concept.
Brand love is the degree of passionate emotional attachment a satisfied consumer has for a brand.
— Carroll and Ahuvia (2006)
Two things stand out about brand love:
- The brand evokes strong emotions; people feel intensely affectionate toward the brand they love.
- It comes with a sense of separation distress. Consumers feel distressed at the prospect of no longer being able to buy or own the brand they love.
The Six Components of Brand Love
If we were to break down brand love further, it is made of six key components:
| Brand Love Components | Meanings |
|---|---|
| Passion-driven behaviors | Love is passion. People loving a brand have a passionate desire to use the brand, are willing to invest resources into buying and using the brand, and have a history with the brand. |
| Self-brand integration | A loved brand says something about who the consumer is, helps present oneself to others, and makes life meaningful. |
| Positive emotional connection | Consumers are emotionally connected to their loved brand. The brand feels like a natural fit, an old friend, and brings contentment, excitement, and other positive emotions. |
| Long-term relationship | If a consumer loves a brand, they expect to use the brand for a long time and feel a sense of long-term commitment. |
| Anticipated separation distress | Consumers feel anxiety, worry, fear, and general apprehension at the prospect of no longer being able to own and use their loved brand. |
| Attitude valence and certainty | A loved brand is thought of often and talked about often, and consumers are confident with how they feel about their loved brand. |
Table: Loyalty Science LabCreated with Datawrapper
The Financial Impact of Brand Love
Why should we care about brand love? Because it makes a big difference in what people buy and how brands perform.
Impact on Brand Loyalty
It’s no surprise that brand love makes people more loyal to a brand.
According to an analysis of 255 research studies, the average brand love-loyalty elasticity is about 0.4. In other words, a 100% increase in brand love produces a 40% increase in brand loyalty. What’s more, this impact has been rising over the last two decades.
A separate consumer survey produced comparable results. In the study, each 1-point increase in consumers’ brand love rating increased brand loyalty rating by 0.4 point (both on 5-point scales). The impact is even higher for word-of-mouth, at +0.56 point per 1-point increase in brand love.
Willingness to Pay and Share of Wallet Lift
Brand love can make consumers willing to pay a price premium for a brand and increase the brand’s share of wallet.
A study of over 1,000 consumers in Australia found that feeling love for a brand significantly increased the brand’s share of wallet. Across four product categories, gasoline, beer, laundry detergent, and instant coffee, the lift in share of wallet ranged from 17% to 24% above average levels.
Brand Financial Performance
A financial analysis of 152 US brands across 16 product categories showed that a 1-point increase in brand love (out of 5 points) increased a company’s return on assets (ROA) by 4–5%. This impact is even higher for hedonic brands, in product categories where brands are an important decision factor, and in more competitive markets.
Important to strategic considerations, this study found that investing in brand love is not to produce short-term returns, as higher brand love in year 1 does not lead to a higher ROA until year 3. So brands need to be patient with their brand love initiatives and be willing to commit themselves for the long run.
Building Brand Love
If brand love has such a positive impact on customer loyalty and brand performance, how can you create the best conditions for consumers to fall in love with your brand? Research points to a few different ways.
#1: Be the First Love
When consumers experience a whole new product category for the first time, such as the first car or the first bite of chocolate, a favorable brand experience can make a lasting memory and become the beloved brand for that category.
This excerpt from a consumer interview said it best about Puma being this consumer’s first love:
“It may sound a little kitschy, but my first football boots were Pumas. It went so far that I only wanted to play in these shoes…I think, I just took them off, when I took a bath…Well, they were the first football boots…[You] play with it, you feel that it fits, you somehow harmonize together, even if the shoes themselves don’t do anything special.”
— Excerpt from a consumer interview reported in Brun, Langner, and Fischer (2017)
To be that first love, a brand needs to get in early and capture the critical moments of a consumer’s first experiences.
#2. Be a Channel of Self-Expression
From the early days of Nike’s “Just Do It” slogan to the more recent example of the Dove Self-Esteem Project, beloved brands allow people to express who they are as an individual.
Brands become self-expressive when consumers find something in the brand that resonates with their own identity. For example, an athlete may find their inner competitiveness and striving for excellence in their sportswear; or a fashionista can construct the edginess of their image using certain designer labels.
One great way of making a brand more self-expressive is by linking the brand to less mundane, out-of-ordinary experiences such as vacations. When on vacation, people let their true inner selves come out, untethered from the weight of everyday responsibilities. Brands bought and consumed during this time are likely to be associated with strong emotions and fond memories.
#3. Support Life Transitions
Transitional events in life, such as going off to college, buying a new house, or having a new baby, have been identified as a significant formative experience for developing brand love. Such life transitions are frequently stressful. Brands that lend a helping hand and stay with consumers during these difficult transitions often become beloved brands in the long run.
Brands can support consumers’ life transitioning events through both financial and social resources:
- Financial resources take the form of free gifts, discounts, or rewards, such as the ones issued through a loyalty program. The key idea is to help consumers meet the financial demands of the transition.
- Social resources offer consumers a sense of social connection with others, such as a physical place to hang out with others, a virtual online community, or sometimes even just conversational materials to facilitate social interactions.
#4. Build Heritage Around the Brand
Childhood memories are one of the most powerful sources of brand love. Often, people love a brand because their parents or grandparents use it, and the brand carries a feeling of home, family, and nostalgia.
“When I was about 4 years old, I remember going to the beach in my Dad’s Toyota truck. The day stood out because it was my birthday, and my Dad took off work to bring me to the beach. I can smell and taste the saltwater breeze mixed with the exhaust of this off-road machine, and to this day, I have a fascination with Toyota trucks.”
— Excerpt from a consumer interview reported in Langner et al. (2016)
Longevity of a brand is obviously good for building heritage, but storytelling is just as important. History is passed down through stories. The stories from a brand’s past help build the feeling of nostalgia and connect the brand’s past with the consumers’ own past.
Besides storytelling, brands should also strive to become a part of consumers’ family rituals. You can start with customers who are already loyal to your brand. Offer them reasons for buying, using, or talking about your brand with their family, particularly young members of their family. Make the brand part of a family-bonding experience.
#5. Cultivate a Sense of Community Around the Brand
Outside of the family unit, a brand can also build love by building a sense of community around the brand. Previous research using Vegemite, a popular food spread in Australia, showed that a sense of community and brand identification accounted for nearly 70% of brand love for Vegemite.
The sense of community around a brand is closely tied to the self-expressive power of the brand. When people with similar values and identities use the same brand to express themselves, a community starts to form around that brand. Classic examples of these are Harley Davidson, Red Bull, and Apple. Other online examples can be found in this Medium article.
Creating a sense of community for a brand means social engagement. The key ingredients include:
- unique brand personalities
- shared values and stories
- an online presence driven by consumer-to-consumer interactions, and
- organized consumption experiences such as brand-themed festivals and gatherings.
Gauging Your Customers’ Brand Love
The journey to building brand love should start with measuring the level of love consumers feel about your brand now. Researchers have developed brand love scales that you can easily integrate into one of your customer surveys.
The Six-Item Version
In a more robust but still practical version, you can measure your customers’ brand love using six rating-scale items, shown in the table below. The items in the scale capture the six key components of brand love we mentioned earlier.
A great strength of this 6-item scale is that it can point you to what components of brand love your brand is doing well on and what components it needs to improve.
The One-Item Version
If space is limited in your survey, you can also use a single-item scale developed by Professor Rossiter. To use the scale, you provide consumers with five options ranging from hate to love (see below) and ask them to choose the one that best describes their opinion of your brand. To make sure that everyone is on the same page, it is important to include the complete description of each option in your questionnaire.
- Hate: I would say that I hate this brand.
- Dislike: I feel that I dislike this brand.
- Neutral: I feel neutral about this brand — no strong feelings either way.
- Liking: I would not say I love this brand, but I would say that I like it.
- Love: I would say I feel deep affection, like love, for this brand and I would be really upset if I couldn’t have it.
The upside of this scale is that it is extremely easy to use and the single item allows you to ask the question a number of times, so that you can measure the love for your brand and competing brands. The downside is that you won’t be able to diagnose where your brand falls short of as the six-item scale can show you.
Key Takeaways
Brand love is an important concept that every brand aiming to build an emotional connection with their customers should pay attention to. It can increase customer loyalty, drive word-of-mouth, grow share of wallet, and increase company returns.
To leverage the concept of brand love, we recommend the following steps:
- Step 1: Start with understanding your customers’ level of love for your brand, using the measures described earlier.
- Step 2: Using the above data, figure out your strong and weak brand love components and how your brand stacks against rival brands.
- Step 3: Focus on improving brand love drivers that are the most closely related to your weak areas to create holistic and passionate love among consumers.
Throughout the process, keep in mind that brand love does not happen easily. Probably only a core group of your customers will ever get there. Love needs to be developed and not forced. For some consumers, it might be love at first sight; for others, it may be a slow path toward love. Understand consumers’ different trajectories toward brand love, and develop the emotional experience and positive critical incidents that make consumers fall in love.
This article was originally published by Medium on 14 February 2024. View original.
Photo by Bart LaRue on Unsplash.
