Brand Love: Loving or Hating Brands

It’s a common saying that Marketing is a delicate balance between science and art; Brand love is one concept that can showcase the validity of this statement. There are psychological factors behind how consumers behave and the strategies that marketers use to create brands and market their products. Advertisements are designed to evoke different emotions within the audience to build a loyal customer base through sentimental connections. When customers go beyond the loyalty stage and create a relationship with a brand, it can lead to brand advocacy, which produces a positive reputation, word of mouth referrals, and broader reach for the company. Through this brand advocacy, love can be developed and refers to a long term relationship between a brand and a consumer, filling an emotional gap for the person. Love is a compound emotion that involves feelings, thoughts, and beliefs; thus, close social circles can influence this emotional response. On the reverse side, trusted groups’ opinions can negatively impact the affinity we hold towards a company and create brand hate.

How to Influence Brand Love

When designing an advertisement, marketers can use imagery, color, language, and sound to impact the audience’s sentiments when seeing a communication piece. This can be done by showing the ad’s subjects expressing love and happiness, which adds human characteristics that can be linked back when recalling the brand and setting the foundation for brand love. For example, an advertisement for a pediatric medical office can depict a mother and child embracing and smiling during a doctor’s visit. This will clearly portray that both the parent and patient are loving towards each other and comfortable and happy with their care.

Next Steps

When hiring professionals to design advertisements for your business, examine the presented work for elements that will evoke positive emotions and elicit feelings of love. By strategically stimulating this sentiment, your audience can develop brand love increasing customer loyalty and revenue.

If you haven’t yet read my last blog on the multi-attribute attitude model.