How to Find Brand Love this Valentine’s Day
This Valentine’s day I took the time to find true love — that is, brand love of course.
You see somewhere in between CPM, the word ‘content’, and digital marketing (as if digital doesn’t compose 90% of marketing nowadays), marketers started using the phrase “brand love”.
Yes, it’s super lame. But, it does make for valid marketing terminology with today’s consumers.
What we see with Millennial and Gen Z consumers is a greater propensity for brand loyalty. This brand loyalty is the first step to fostering brand love. Essentially, think of brand loyalty as a friend, while brand love is a romantic partner.
A romantic partner that you’ll spend a great deal of time with, that you can share life experiences with, and that you’ll do almost anything for. Only, in this case, it’s more like telling your friends about a brand through social media, refusing to acknowledge competitors, and buying new products or service offerings.
Not nearly as exciting, but to marketers, this is vital to growing a business — developing a brand that customers fall in love with.
Here is exactly how your brand can find love this Valentine’s day ;)
1. Take it slow
Despite what the vanity metric marketers will tell you, brand awareness holds very little weight in today’s digital environment. This is also the case for brand love.
Consumers can’t fall in love with you before they truly meet you (purchase), thus the first step needs to be turning awareness into action.
Top of the funnel consumers should be nurtured into buying before anything else. You wouldn’t ask a potential partner to come home with you right when you meet them, instead, you’d buy them a drink, take them on a date, etc…
It’s important that brands don’t try to “hit a home run” but rather opt for taking one base at a time until consumers are ready to move to the next base.
2. Discover Loyalty
After you’ve successfully turned awareness into action the goal is to now establish a real relationship.
The first step of this it finding loyalty. As 21 Savage once said, “I want loyalty over love!”. Before you try to find love with your customer, find loyalty.
Doing so is uber-dependent on your actual business, but can be summed up in one sentence:
Going above and beyond in all aspects to create an incredible consumer experience.
This will develop loyal customers that are ready to take the next step in your relationship.
3. Avoid the Friend Zone
Here is where things get tricky. Right about now your customer is happy, you’re good friends, but you’re unsure of whether things will heat up or not.
As a brand now is when you truly show your feathers and take your loyalty to the next level. Create a culture, environment, experience that your customers have a reason to fall in love with.
This goes beyond customer service, product quality, and marketing — this is where the true colors of your brand show.
There is no secret to getting past the friend zone beyond showing the real you. More often than not brands are fearful of this, thus they never show themselves.
But the brands who are confident enough to do so will reap the benefits of love — brand love.
