How can you attract consumers to love your brand?
Our starting point is to be clear about what we mean by "love for a brand." The love of the brand is more like the love of ice cream than the love of the husband. Love for a brand is a strong sense of anticipation for something good or nice or benefits we believe with great certainty that we will get from the brand. It is the expectation of good experiences, gentle sensations, or positive feelings. Consumers like M&M chocolate candy, buying from IKEA, driving a BMW, using a Nokia phone, or Googling information, exactly because of the focused and intense anticipation they enthusiastically describe as "love." But we, as professionals, need to understand beyond the verbal descriptions of consumers, so that we can stimulate such feelings. Stimulating anticipation for benefit is a more friendly task than "stimulating love."
How do consumers fall in love with the brand?
Structurally, it happens in the same process in which people fall in love with people. Let me describe how this happens. We all have beliefs about what will meet our needs, and what will be good for us and make us happy. In many cases, we are not aware of it or not only partly aware of it. They are often not phrased in words but are found in passing images and scenarios that we experience with imagination. It constitutes our preconceived act of desire.
When a brand succeeds in being perceived as a concrete realization of our abstract beliefs as to what will be good for us (pre-disposition) - the expectation that a brand will be good for us is the result. Thus, the brand is seen as an opportunity to achieve the benefit we have in our imagination. This is also what happens when we are tempted or in love with a partner, and this is also where the similarity between love for the brand and love ends as the basis of the relationship between people. We expect the brand to be useful to us and therefore we want it. The commitment we have to people and the mutual agreement that exists in relationships can never be shaped toward a brand.
How do we create "Click"?
The brand development process begins with insight. To reach such a vision, we must discover and interpret the unconscious set of rules that constitute the consumer's prior disposition. There are advanced research tools that help identify this set of rules. It requires advanced psychological expertise and interview skills and is therefore not commonly used by research companies (the tool I use is called research). Insight is only the beginning of the process. We use this to guide the creative process through which we create a new concept to provide the consumer with an advantage to pre-dispose of. This concept is the basis of the brand.
How does it affect the intensity of love?
The more useful the brand is as important and rare, the stronger the emotions will be. Then there's the question of how much the brand can be trusted to deliver such a feature in a good and consistent way. Good management can guarantee the second factor. A great strategy is needed for the first factor.
How can you create an important and rare benefit? What you're looking for is an intuitively important feature for the consumer, but it's not yet connected to your product category (I call it: extra-core differentiation). An example is a commitment at the heart of The Body Shop chain's strategy to protect the environment and help those in need around the world. In this way, successful brands enjoy immunity from tradition by competitors, because what they do seems irrelevant to this category. The second rule is to provide this feature in a new, unique and different way from how it is provided in other product categories.
The benefit can be intangible
Any non-essential benefit is by definition an "added value" of the benefit arising from the product itself because the benefit is natural. Your non-fundamental differentiation can depend on a benefit that is not tangible or empirical but between people, social or psychological. When De-Beers launched the brand "Right-Hand Ring" in 2003, they created a new tool for social benefit. A woman can wear a "right-hand ring" on her right hand, of course, to indicate that she is single, unlike the ring on her left hand, which refers to engagement, marriage, or just a gift from her husband (please note: in Eastern Europe, for example, the symbolism of the hand is reversed!). De-Beers has created a code known to everyone through an extended advertising campaign, and as a result, women can use it to send a message to their surroundings.
How will the consumer discover the brand?
It is easier for consumers to fall in love with the brand when they feel it "comes from within them," rather than "selling it" to them. The key to this is what I call "electric marketing" rather than "satisfying marketing." The usual marketing is "satisfying marketing", whose main goal is to satisfy and satisfy the consumer. In return, "Electrifying Marketing" promises surprise and excitement, plays hard, plays on the consumer and sets conditions and obstacles on the road to achieving sweet satisfaction.
How will your brand turn into a great offer?
A good way to revive the brand strategy is to use "Drama Theory" tools. Furthermore, the success of the brand, which has an intangible value beyond the function of the product itself, depends on the consumer's willingness to accept something unrealistic as real, i.e. to be in euphoria (I call this "brand euphoria"). The drama has been famous for centuries for putting audiences in a trance where they allow themselves to be swept away by unrealistic conspiracies. I usually start developing the creative approach to brand expression, presence, and disclosure, analyzing "brand drama." Every strong brand provides the consumer with an advantage he craves, which is neither easy nor easy to achieve. Brand drama is a two-power encounter that occurs when a consumer tries to achieve the promised benefit of our brand, even before our brand is known to him. This analysis includes questions such as: what happens to the consumer when they try to achieve benefit in other ways? What are his attempts and efforts? What is the result? What are the internal and external difficulties he faces? How do they show themselves? How does it fail? And then? How does our brand help him achieve the benefit he seeks? This clarification raises all the necessary material to "dramatize" the brand in a way that generates within the consumer a delightful feeling of "finding it!"