What is Brand Love? How to Win Love for Your Brand
Every marketer believes in word-of-mouth magic. Have you ever thought about what makes consumers spread the word about you? It’s none other than brand love.
Some people can’t imagine chilling without Netflix or starting their day without chugging Nescafe coffee. That’s what brand love is. Some brands get intertwined in your life, so you can’t resist using them.
When love enters the room, reason goes out the window. It’s true in marketing because 95% of customers’ purchasing decisions are based on emotions.
How many times have you chosen the same brand product? All of us do it most of the time. But brand love goes further than simply creating brand loyalty and customer retention.
Let’s find out the secret behind most people choosing the top brands and some even advocating them.
How to Define Brand Love?
The marketing stuff you hear nowadays is full of emotional jargon like loyalty and love. There can be as many definitions of brand love as there are emotional states of customers.
Yet, we attempt to provide you with a holistic definition of this seemingly new relationship between customers and brands.
Definition:
Brand love is a subtle relationship between loyal and satisfied customers and the brand that comes from a strong belief and brings positive behavior changes in the customers. Customers that are head over heels for a brand associate certain positive emotions of their life with it and can’t think of anything except the particular product.
Lovable brands can even overpower the mind and appeal to emotions, so they become fixed in the subconscious. With that said, brand love isn’t manipulative or evil. Rather, it’s a marketing strategy to turn loyal customers into consistent users and advocates of a brand.
Essentials of Brand Love
- People must strongly believe that the brand product solves their problems.
- After repetitive use, customers don’t think while purchasing. Some of their purchase patterns are repetitive.
- Customers think they owe something to the brand, so they advocate the brand. That’s why brand love reciprocates.
Think of Coca-Cola. Can you imagine a party without it? If not, then it’s your loved brand. Similarly, iOS users get addicted to iPhones. They won’t even think of changing their phone brand.
Why is Brand Love Important Today?
There is a clamor around creating fans rather than customers. Particularly, we see a shift in the purchasing behaviors of millennials. They seek brands and products on different grounds. Though a robust marketing campaign is necessary to get enough engagement, the real sauce lies in creating value.
A study finds that millennials want brands to align with their values. They love brands that resonate with political or social ideas.
The new surge in behavior patterns necessitates adding brand love to your marketing strategy and making it your marketing end goal. The competition is not to bring in engagement. Rather, it builds a community of brand lovers and fans.
Nike sells sports footwear to 48% of Americans. The best thing about Nike is its ads. Have you ever wondered why it has reached such staggering success? The reason is simple. Nike has been creating people-centric ads. And by doing so, they have left no stone unturned to become a source of inspiration.
The staggering success of Nike is attributed to brand love and loyalty. You need to wear board spectacles to create a variable strategy for your business, as Nike did.
It’s like looking beyond sales and engagement. It brings us to add brand love to your marketing strategy. Also, you must see things from the customer’s perspective to make them happen.
How Does Brand Love Work?
Love and logic are daggers drawn with each other. You may raise your eyebrows after hearing this. You may say: How can someone love something as impersonal as a brand?
Big brands like Nike and Apple employ brand love strategies to appeal to their consumers. People think closing a sale is the end of the marketing funnel.
Today, marketing aims to create a loyal community of consumers who buy products regularly and advocate the brand. You also imagine your business to be a beloved one among your consumers.
Let’s find out some essential tactics that make people love your brand.
1. Create Customer-Centric Products
Knowing your customers mean coming out of your product-oriented shell. Many businesses fail to continue a lasting relationship with the buyers because the marketers turn deaf ears to what customers have to say.
Therefore, you should focus on what you sell to why your customers will buy from you. Collecting market data is one way to get into the details of wants and needs. Thanks to digital media, finding consumers’ data is not much hassle.
You will find a long data trail when you start engaging with prospective buyers and first-time customers on social media, forums, and website comments. These nuggets of gold would throw light on their reservations, complaints, and positive comments. You can brainstorm them to draw behavior and psychological patterns.
So, engagement is the key to becoming a consumer-oriented brand. Since customer satisfaction comes at the last of the marketing funnel, many famous brands start from the customers and re-engineer their brands. It’s like setting a sound foundation to build a skyscraper over it.
Let’s take the example of Amazon. Its CEO Jeff Bezos even reads customer feedback emails. That’s the primary reason behind Amazon’s top-notch customer service.
Being customer-specific doesn’t mean you shouldn’t keep an eye on new trends in the market. Rather, forecasting future needs is part and parcel of brand love.
Thus, you have to go the extra mile to satisfy the needs people don’t feel yet. Giving something extra comes with a lot of benefits for your business.
People see an extra feature in your product as a major plus point to buy from you instead of your competitors.
- Engage with your customers.
- Gather customer-related insights.
- Create a USP– any extra benefit for your customers.
- Analyze the customer’s feedback.
- Create your products based on customers’ wants and needs.
2. Build a Lasting Relationship
It’s no secret that communication is the key to a lasting relationship. Friction arises where there is only one-way communication or no communication at all. So, you must converse with your consumers.
Here conversation doesn’t mean addressing a large audience in an authoritative tone. Instead, you must narrow down your conversation game and adopt two-way communication.
A customer won’t listen to you if you both aren’t on the same page. You have to open up their pain points to grab their attention.
Through feedback, you get to know what interests them. Keep one thing in mind: all customers don’t have the same preferences. They aren’t on the same level of awareness.
So, you must develop a personal approach toward your customers. Conforming with each of your customers requires a sense of empathy and positive communication.
Reckless communication can often blow up into a rage. For instance, if you miss your audience demographics and create sales emails demeaning a certain section of society. You will end up losing some valuable prospects.
Let’s take another example. Suppose you have a clothing brand. Without considering every customer, you send “male clothing ideas” emails to your female audience.
It wouldn’t create sales for you because you hit the wrong message to the right audience. Usually, females aren’t interested in what males love to wear.
The key takeaway is communicating with your customer as if you are talking to your friends. Resolving their issues is the holy grail of a long-lasting relationship.
Do you know that humans are inbred with the impulse of “give and take”? Cialdini redefines it as the principle of reciprocity. Thus, if you solve people’s problems through communication, you may get tremendous rewards such as brand love and loyalty.
- Communicate with your audience on a personal level.
- Provide them with what they want to hear from you.
- Build trust for your brand.
- Adopt the principle of reciprocity.
3. Stay Relevant
Staying in the minds of your customers is halfway to developing a love for your brand. The information on the internet is massively overflowing. It deeply retards the speed with which the customer comes back to you.
Even a great product can’t retain all the first-time customers because they get distracted by loads of enticing information coming to them via emails and social media. At the same time, your message gets clouded and doesn’t create an actionable impact on your customers.
What to do to turn their heads towards you? One way to approach this problem is timely messaging. When you close the first sale and get positive feedback from your customer, you must stick with them.
You can employ data science to forecast what they would need from you in the future. Start emailing the relevant content to remind them of your brand’s importance. Provide valuable content to stay in touch with them.
Secondly, you can initiate giveaways and surprises for your valued customers. It’s selling without selling.
You can also build a community on social media to host a giveaway. Facebook and Instagram giveaways are good for bringing more social attention. There is a simple reason behind it. People love free stuff, and giveaways are the best growth hack option.
Consequently, these rewards and gifts create buzz on social media. That’s why rewards, discounts, and giveaways are the best tools to make you relevant among your buyers.
- Host giveaways.
- Keep on emailing your customers with relevant information.
- Give surprises and rewards to your loyal customers.
Summing Up
Falling in love with a brand is not as easy as it seems. At the same time, the new marketing environment demands you to tweak your brand’s proposition on the emotional ground. But first, you should understand the importance of brand love.
As people want brands to align themselves with their core values, you shouldn’t miss it. Otherwise, you may find yourself in hot waters.
There are a lot of tactics that may help you resonate with your audience. First, you overhaul your business and make it more customer-centric.
Second, you must stay relevant in the dynamic digital landscape. Lastly, you must develop a lasting relationship with your customers.
We have discussed each point in detail in this article. We hope that this article will help you in winning customers’ love for your brand.
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