Brand Love: Is It Right for Your Customers?

Have you ever talked to someone about their new smartphone or pair of shoes and been surprised at how they can’t stop talking about it? They’ll extoll characteristics you didn’t even know were important for devices or shoes to have.

But then they keep going and tell you about other products from the brand or interactions they’ve had with the company. And suddenly, you’ve gotten far more information than you anticipated.

If you’re a marketer, you’re then left with a burning question: how do I make customers that passionate about my brand?

The answer is brand love. We asked Dr. Aaron Ahuvia, author of The Things We Love and the world’s leading expert on brand love and the science behind what helps a consumer develop strong feelings toward a brand. Here’s what he had to say.

The Foundation of Brand Love

Before you consider how to sprinkle a special potion over your customers to turn them into lovers, you have to ensure you have the foundational pieces in place.

1. A good product or service

2. The effort to eliminate pain points the consumer is facing

3. Making it simple to interact with your brand

Without these foundational pieces in place, it will be challenging to make your consumer fall in love with your brand.

The Science Behind Brand Love

Brand love requires that your customers’ brains do something weird. And understanding that unique process can help you harness the power of brand love.

When you look at something, your brain sorts it into various categories with people being in a unique category all their own. You can thank evolution for hardwiring the brain this way. The way the brain recognizes the difference between people and everything else is that people have faces. And when the brain processes visual information about these faces it does it in a special place that is different from where it processes other visual information.

When a human being looks at an object, it processes that object. If it is a face, it gets processed in a part of the brain reserved for faces. That’s because recognizing human faces is such an important task, it requires the most brain power of any type of processing. To avoid overwhelming the brain, the body reserves that one part of the brain solely for that purpose. This is just one example of the many ways that the brain thinks about people using different neural mechanisms than it uses when thinking about objects.

The brain reserves love for people. So to develop love for a thing, the brain has to think about that thing using the same sort of mental processes that it normally reserves for people.

That’s what makes brand love such a huge hurdle is because you must change the very way people think and the automatic processes that happen in the human brain. But there is precedent for it.

Think about how people love their dogs. Dogs are a lot like people. They have faces, they live in our houses with us, and they behave in ways that are often similar to a person. As a result, our brain treats dogs like people, and this allows us to love them.

The good news is, it’s completely possible for people to associate your brand with human-like characteristics, allowing them to ultimately love the brand. But the bad news is, it’s very challenging and expensive to do so. That’s why brand love is a strategy reserved for brands with the time and resources to devote to understanding the psychology behind it.

What Happens When You Build Brand Love?

Once consumers have started thinking of your brand in a similar way it thinks about people to allow room for them to love your brand, amazing things can happen.

Think about the difference between what you would do to help a friend find a new job versus what you would do for a stranger. The same is true about what you would do for a brand you love versus one that holds a utilitarian place in your life.

The bond between a consumer engaged in brand love is far stronger than the bond of the average consumer. And that’s why you might get more than you anticipated when you ask a friend about their new smartphone or pair of shoes. That is the love oozing out in their conversations.

3 Ways to Build Brand Love Based on Science

Building brand love requires upfront investment and a focus on changing how your customers view your brand. Here are the three ways Dr. Ahuvia says you can build brand love.

1. Anthropomorphism

Making your product anthropomorphic means giving it characteristics of a person, such as making it look like a person, talk like a person, move like a person, or act like a person. That way, the sorting mechanism in the brain identifies it as a person and places it in that area of the brain reserved for people.

This could mean using a face or something that looks like a face in your product design. Or it could incorporate humanlike speech, like Apple’s Siri does to help people connect with their digital devices.

This way of building brand love has a lot to do with design. Google makes its product anthropomorphic through the two O’s in the logo looking somewhat like eyes and providing an experience that allows users to input human language and the service returns answers in human language. While it isn’t entirely a conversation, it mimics one, which pulls people in. The same is true of bots.

2. Person-Thing-Person

A more common way of creating brand love is through the person-thing-person association. This can happen entirely on its own without a brand putting forth the effort to make it happen.

For example, a consumer who wears a wedding band might experience this phenomenon. The person wearing the ring associates the thing with their spouse — another person. That item makes you think of your spouse despite the brain knowing the ring itself is not the spouse.

The same is true of gifts. People often associated gifts with the person who gave them the gift. And as your love for the gift giver increases or decreases, your love for the item they gave you will likely increase or decrease to the same degree.

This is also why personal relationships play such an important role in business-to-business (B2B) marketing. People then associate the product or service with the sales rep or customer service representative they frequently speak to. So while they aren’t building a relationship specifically with the brand, they associate the brand with the person who they interact with frequently.

3. Self-identity

Getting someone to identify their personal identity with your brand is similar to person-thing-person. In this case, the consumer associates a product or service with being a part of a group of people or a certain characteristic. Consumers who want to be jet-setters invest in brands that support their passion for travel. Consumers who want to be savvy purchase the latest tech items that help them connect with others in their social environment who they view as savvy.

The brand becomes part of the consumer’s identity. This goes in the “me” category of your brain. Then if someone were to criticize that brand, the consumer would become defensive of it because it’s like they’ve insulted the consumer personally.

Mission-driven businesses can benefit from self-identity brand love. For example, Patagonia does well with environmentalists because of its mission. Chick-fil-A does well with conservatives.

While mission alignment won’t harm your brand much with those who see the world differently, it can create meaningful relationships with consumers who identify similarly.

Why Brand Love Isn’t for Everyone and a Solid Alternative

Brand love leads to profits. Apple proves that point authoritatively. The company has been researching brand love and intentionally targeting it from the start. And the result is impressive.

As of the second quarter of 2022, Apple held 48 percent of the market share for smartphones. But it commands 80 percent of all industry profits. The reason behind that difference in its market share versus profits is brand love. People are more willing to pay more for a brand they love than just any brand.

But brand love isn’t the only strategy out there that works.

If you don’t have the money to invest in brand love, UPE might be the better alternative for you. UPE stands for useful, pleasant and easy. That’s what you want to exhibit in all customer interactions. You aren’t looking for love. Your consumers’ brains will still look at the object and see it as just that. But the brain will choose that brand over others because it is simple to work with.

The concept of user experience (UX) is built on UPE because it aims to reduce friction between brands and customers. For many brands, this is a very viable strategy and recognizes that many consumers will switch brands at some point if the conditions are ripe for a change. But ultimately you bring in new customers regularly through UPE and do all you can to keep existing customers happy.

Ways to Learn More About Brand Love

Brand love is a complicated concept. If you want to learn more about it, listen to the Triple Bottom Line podcast with Dr. Aaron Ahuvia. Or book Dr. Ahuvia for an upcoming keynote address. Read more about brand love in his book The Things We Love, which Amazon ranked as one of the best 20 business books of 2022.

At Design Positive, we help companies build memorable brands that help them connect with customers on a deeper level while doing it in an access-to-all approach.