Ready to discover the secret ingredient for lasting brand success? This episode, we're elbow-deep in the captivating world of brand love with our esteemed guest, Dr. Aaron Ahuvia. As one of the foremost experts on the subject, Dr. Ahuvia peels back the layers, revealing brand love as a potent emotion that you can master using psychology and neuroscience.
Forget about those tired marketing buzzwords, we're talking about strategies that can set your brand apart in a crowded field. We'll navigate the terrain of the digital world, exploring how it opens up a new frontier for cultivating brand love. We'll touch on the importance of humanizing your brand, making it an integral part of your customer's identity. We're also taking cues from successful brands like Patagonia and Airbnb, unravelling how they've mastered the art of storytelling, authenticity, and alignment with customer values to foster deep emotional connections.
Stay tuned and you'll walk away not just understanding the concept of brand love, but armed with practical tips on how to cultivate it. From discussing the potential of brand love to impact long-term success to examining the role of digital marketing in achieving it, this episode promises to be a treasure trove of insights. Plus, be sure to keep listening for an exciting opportunity that could see you nabbing a one-on-one coaching call. Join us in this journey deep into the heart of brand love, and let's transform the way you connect with your customers.
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Ready to discover the secret ingredient for lasting brand success? This episode, we're elbow-deep in the captivating world of brand love with our esteemed guest, Dr. Aaron Ahuvia. As one of the foremost experts on the subject, Dr. Ahuvia peels back the layers, revealing brand love as a potent emotion that you can master using psychology and neuroscience.
Forget about those tired marketing buzzwords, we're talking about strategies that can set your brand apart in a crowded field. We'll navigate the terrain of the digital world, exploring how it opens up a new frontier for cultivating brand love. We'll touch on the importance of humanizing your brand, making it an integral part of your customer's identity. We're also taking cues from successful brands like Patagonia and Airbnb, unravelling how they've mastered the art of storytelling, authenticity, and alignment with customer values to foster deep emotional connections.
Stay tuned and you'll walk away not just understanding the concept of brand love, but armed with practical tips on how to cultivate it. From discussing the potential of brand love to impact long-term success to examining the role of digital marketing in achieving it, this episode promises to be a treasure trove of insights. Plus, be sure to keep listening for an exciting opportunity that could see you nabbing a one-on-one coaching call. Join us in this journey deep into the heart of brand love, and let's transform the way you connect with your customers.
Guest Links
Learn More:
Brand love. Wouldn't you love to have unconditional love from your brand, from all of your customers? It might sound like it's unattainable, but we know that there are brands, like the apples of the world, that have attained this. How can our brand get more brand love? Well, that's going to be the topic of this unique and really, really inspiring episode of the Digital Marketing Coach podcast.
Speaker 2:Social media content, influencer marketing, blogging, podcasting, vlogging, tick-tocking, linkedin, twitter, facebook, instagram, YouTube, seo, sem, ppc, email marketing there's a lot to cover. Whether you're a marketing professional, entrepreneur or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing you've got Neil on your side, because Neil Schaefer is your digital marketing coach, helping you grow your business with digital first marketing, one episode at a time. This is your digital marketing coach and this is Neil Schaefer.
Speaker 1:Hey everybody, welcome to another live stream episode of the your digital marketing coach podcast. Today, we are going to be talking about branding, and not just branding, but a concept that my guest actually coined up called brand love. Yet you might think it's been around for a while. Well, back in 2006, my guest actually was the first one to come up with this term and well, I'll introduce him shortly. But I always enjoy having other, not only marketing authors on this podcast, but also marketing professors, which my guest is both. So Dr Aaron Ahuvia is both professor of marketing at University of Michigan. He is also author of the things we love, how our passions connect us and make us who we are.
Speaker 1:And as I prepare for this interview, I just came back last night from actually dropping off and picking up my daughter and her three best friends at the Taylor Swift concert, and they are just graduated high school. They paid a lot of money for these tickets and what they said after the concert ended was that was the best $500 I've ever spent. That is really incredible, considering that my daughter is now going to have to work tens of hours in order to make that back up. But that sort of intensity, loyalty, brand love and although that's a personal brand and a musician, I think you know I'm hoping that we're going to sort of uncover what that looks like and learn more, not just about branding and marketing but, I believe, about ourselves and why we are attracted to brands as well.
Speaker 1:So I'm not the expert on this. My guest is the expert on this. So, without further ado, I'm going to welcome Dr Aaron Ahuvia to the stage. Aaron, welcome to the show. Thank you, neil. It's a pleasure to be here. Oh, it's an honor having you, my friend. So I sort of gave the introduction and I always like to give my guests the opportunity, based on how I introduce them, to further introduce themselves, to make sure that I didn't miss out on any important details there.
Speaker 3:Sure. So yeah, I'm a professor at the University of Michigan, actually on the Dearborn campus. I taught at Ross on Ann Arbor campus a little while ago but moved over to Dearborn and my work deals with brand love and I'm a psychologist consumer psychologist so I'm very interested in how this occurs, how you can increase brand love, what it does for people and how it works for businesses, and I will say I've been working on this for over 30 years. I started this. It was a topic of my dissertation, which was published in 1992. And I've done 14 major studies since then, so I've very much kept up with things on this front. But about 10 years ago I learned some new information from some new research. This was research that I did not conduct myself, but was a series of neuroscience studies on how the brain functions, and it totally changed the way I looked at this.
Speaker 3:I had to do a 180 in my thinking and really revamp how I saw brand love and how I saw it working, and that change eventually resulted in the book the Things we Love. That lays out a new strategy, and I'm going to be a little bit bold here. I know that I listen to a lot of podcasts and read a lot of books about marketing and often you get this sort of old wine and new bottles phenomenon where another consultant comes in and says to have brand love, you need to just make better products, you need to be more inspired, and it's kind of the same. It's true, it's not wrong, but it's kind of the same old. I'm going to guarantee that, unless you've heard me talk about this before, read my book. There are going to be things here that are genuinely new and you didn't know, and the reason for that is most people don't know that, and the reason for that is that it's really new science.
Speaker 1:Awesome. So marketing based on psychology, neuro marketing you covered a few topics and I've had previous guests sort of go over before no one really applying the psychology to that concept of brand love. So why don't we begin? I'm assuming that brand love is something that came about before the internet, before social media, considering that you've been doing this for 30 years. But I'm assuming that the internet and social media, obviously with parasocial relationships and what have you, I'm sure that's only accelerated this. But I'm curious how let's begin with defining what brand love is and why it's important to businesses.
Speaker 3:Yeah, brand love is a marketing jargon term and it refers to love, this plain old love. There's different forms of love. Romantic love is a little different from the love you feel for your kids and that's a little different from the love people feel for products and brands. But brand love is basically love when the thing we love is something that someone wants to market. So it could be a brand, a product, a service, doesn't really matter. You're marketing something. You want customers to love it. That's great. I assume people use the term customer love and I did not invent that term, but I like that term a lot. I kind of wish I had, because it captures the variety of things really well.
Speaker 1:Awesome. So, based on that, I guess the first thing is that I suppose that every brand would love to have brand love, and I'm assuming then, therefore you mentioned it could be brand product business. Whether it's B2C or B2B, it really doesn't matter nonprofits, personal brands, politicians I guess we could go on and on. I'm curious from a B2B perspective. I tend to work with as many B2B brands as B2C. Does it play out any differently with B2B or do you see this concept, because it's based on human psychology, to play out the same regardless of industry?
Speaker 3:Oh, it plays out very differently in different industries. The core sort of scientific, psychological principles remain the same, but it plays out very differently. And you mentioned that any business would love to have brand love, and that is true. If I had a magic wand and could just wave it over a business and say now, customers, love your brands, no business would not want that. However, it's not easy to produce brand love and I'm going to say something very different from what you probably hear from other keynote speakers Not every brand should pursue brand love. It is a great strategy for some brands, it can work amazingly well, but it is not the right strategy for everybody and we can talk about why that is. And that's part of the change that occurred in my thinking when I was confronted with some new scientific evidence about how the brain thinks about people differently from the way the brain thinks about objects.
Speaker 1:That's really interesting. Let's dig a little bit deeper into that, and I want to. Before we began this interview, there were a few talking points we discussed, so you had said and maybe this is going to relate to what you just said there that product and service performance is essential to brand love, but not sufficient, and the best products won't generate lasting brand love without two other ingredients. So there's a hint here that there's multiple ingredients that are part of brand love and the product itself is only part of it, I'm assuming the most important, but maybe not the most important element. So I'd like to dig a little bit deeper into that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, let me back up for a minute and go back. In your introduction you talked about Taylor Swift. That's a great place to start. There is a wonderful keynote speaker, brittany Hodak, who has really useful stuff to talk about creating superfans, and she used to actually work with Taylor Swift as her manager Not her manager, but in promoting her work and her approach is how do we take the sort of super fandom and get people to be fans of a brand the same way they're fans of a singer, and that can work, and she's got good advice on how to do that. However, if you think about the term superfan, what are people normally superfans of? The superfans of singers, athletic teams like your huge superfan of your favorite sports team, movie stars what are all these three things have in common? They're all people. Yeah Right, athletes are actually people. The singer is a person. The movie star is a person.
Speaker 3:What I learned 10 years ago is that the human brain sorts out people from objects automatically, unconsciously, and it treats them very differently. The things that we call love or that are love are really reserved for people, so the brain is built in such a way that it tries not to fall in love with objects. It sorts out the objects and it says you can be instrumentally valuable to me, you can do nice things for me, but I'm not gonna love you the way I love a person. Well, look at Apple. It's really obvious that people do love brands and that it can be incredibly profitable when they do love brands. So how do you put these two things together? How can it be, on the one hand, that your brain is kind of developed in such a way that it tries to avoid loving objects, and yet there are times when it does love brands and that's very profitable? And the short answer is every time you really love a brand or an object or some possession or whatever it might be, anything that isn't a person, your brain is thinking about it as if it was a person. Your brain has made that sort of an honorary person in terms of the way it thinks about things, and so what you need to do is you need to get your brain, or the consumer's brain, to think about these brands or objects as if they were people, and that's what you really need, along with the quality. So if you have a really high quality, high performance product, people are gonna value it a lot. They will think it is really important, right, that's great. But you won't really get any brand loyalty because it will always just be a means to an end. You may have habit. They may buy it out of habit, or they may buy it because they think it's better than other products. But as soon as a new product comes along, it's a little bit better, they're immediately gonna switch because it's just an instrumental connection.
Speaker 3:We have this expression in dating. We'll say like does that person love the other person or are they just using that? Well, that's exactly the difference between thinking about a person and thinking about an object. We say when they're just using them. Sometimes we can use the term. We'll say, oh, he's just using her, he is objectifying her. Right, he's thinking about her as if she was an object. And that shows some understanding in our language already that you don't love objects, you use objects. You love people. So long as everyone, the customers, when they look at your brand or your product, it's just an object to them, then they're never gonna love it. They're always gonna be just using it. Now, is that terrible? Not necessarily.
Speaker 3:We look at two super profitable companies. Look at Apple on the one hand, and Walmart on the other, apple succeeds with a brand love strategy and proves that it's possible. And I would also say about Apple that most people don't know is that Apple is very conscious about brand love. Brand love is at the center of Apple strategy. Brand love Apple measures brand love and when they create an advertisement or a store or anything else, they sit around and talk about how do we maximize brand love. That's what they're doing in the company. So it's not a coincidence then that they have a lot of brand love, and one of the things if you wanna get brand love for your company, well, maybe you follow that example a little bit and actually try right. Think about brand love and think how do I go about creating this? Well, walmart is also an incredibly profitable company and Walmart does not have a brand love strategy. That's not what they're going for. What Walmart does is they don't use this language.
Speaker 3:I'm sure I suspect nobody at Walmart has ever thought about it this way, but what they sort of stumbled into is people are gonna see us and our products as objects. That's just the way it is. They are objects. They're gonna see them as objects. They're gonna think about them as objects. So the result of this is they're not gonna be that brand loyal, they're not gonna care that much, they're not gonna go on social media and brag to their friends about how they went shopping at Walmart and what a wonderful experience it was.
Speaker 3:But that's just the reality we have and we're gonna win in that world. We're gonna be live in object world and we're gonna win in object world. And so those are your two core strategic choices you need to make. Are you gonna just say, look, I'm gonna live in object world and I'm gonna win in object world, and here's how you do that, and I could talk about that a little bit. Or are you gonna say, no, we're gonna move over from object world to people world. We're gonna get people to start thinking about our brands as if it's a person, and then we're gonna be able to generate that launch.
Speaker 1:Is there a relationship, and thank you very much for that. That's really fascinating, fascinating topic, I mean. I was curious this, you know object world and the person world. When you move to the person world, is that where you're also able to get or be perceived as having more value, more premium or high end, or is that sort of an after effect of receiving that brand love, or is that not related at all? I'm curious as to what you think.
Speaker 3:People. If you receive brand love, that will give you a bump, an increase in value. People in a biased way. Just think about like the way people look at their kids versus the neighbor's kids. They are not unbiased in their assessment of how talented and beautiful and cute their kid is versus the neighbor's kid, and so if people love your brand, you will benefit from this kind of a bias. However, there are brands that are living in object world People are.
Speaker 3:The consumer sees it as an object, does not confuse it with a person at all, and yet provide such a high level of instrumental value that people are willing to pay a lot of money for those products because they're just that much better, or they're perceived as that much better, and people have the confidence that it's gonna be that much better. There may, in fact, be another product that might be as good, but it's a high risk situation. It's an important thing and they don't wanna risk that kind of money to buy something else If they're not confident it's really gonna be as good. So it is possible to get consumers to care a lot about a product and to value it and to pay a lot of money for a product purely on its instrumental value. It just doesn't last it.
Speaker 3:And the other thing is that nobody's gonna go on the internet and if someone comes in and attacks a product that you are thinking is instrumentally valuable, you're gonna take time out of your day You're a busy person To go on the internet and defend that product and get angry like how could you say that about whatever it might be? You wouldn't do that because it's a rock and you don't really care about it. It's just an object, right? You don't care about it. Every time a customer goes on the internet and defends a brand that isn't something they personally own, it's because they have an emotional connection to that. That goes beyond the instrumental value.
Speaker 1:So clearly, you know, based on what you just said, brand, whether you pursue this, this brand love, road or mission or whether you stay in the object world, you can still be successful. But I think you hinted that in the object world there is not that, obviously there's not that attachment. Therefore, you you lack that potential. I mean, for instance, social media, word-of-mouth reviews, those things that I think you just talked about. So I'm assuming that, although you don't need to go to brand love, you don't need to take that approach, that, but if you're successful at it, that from what you're you know saying, it seems to be more of a long term or a longer approach when there's more long-term benefits. Is that a correct assumption?
Speaker 3:Yes and no. There are Different kinds of long-term benefits that you can build up. If you've got, you know, an object, you're living an object, world Right. There are other kinds of long-term benefits you can build up. It is in many ways, nicer, like there's no denying it. I don't think there's any denying it that if you could create brand love Easily and cheaply, everyone would want to do that. It clearly has benefits. But it's not easy, it's not cheap to do.
Speaker 3:I can talk a little bit about how to do it. It can absolutely be done, but there's gonna be companies that say it's too expensive, it's too risky. We've tried that. We don't want to put our resources into that and they'll develop a different strategy. So let me just give an example really quickly, one of the things that you want to do if you are Not using a brand love strategy.
Speaker 3:If you're using, well, there's three basic things you want to do Useful, pleasant, easy. I call it a useful, pleasant, easy strategy because you want the product to be useful, you want the interactions with it and the company to be pleasant. You want the whole thing to be as easy as possible Because people don't really care much about your product and if it's a pain in the ass, they're not gonna deal with it. And if it's not easy, they're not gonna deal with it. So you're gonna go out there and you're gonna create huge distribution, really like Proctor and Gamble and lever brothers, and you're gonna have your products Everywhere. Coca-cola does this right, so whenever someone wants that product, it's within arms reach, so that it's super easy.
Speaker 3:Well, that kind of distribution is a long-term asset. It takes a long term to develop those distribution channels and so if you've invested money and you have those channels, that's a long-term asset that you can leverage. In certain ways it's a different one from the brand love. But if you are brand love your Apple you don't have to be everywhere. You don't have to buy an Apple phone. In every 7-eleven People will go to the Apple store. They'll go out of their way to go there because they love that and it means something to them. So you have a different source of benefit and a different advantage that you can bring to fit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, as you're speaking, I think there's so many directions we could. We could springboard this, but you sort of hinted at one of those things when you talked about useful. Yeah, useful, pleasant, easy, that's right. Okay, so you had mentioned before we started recording, to create brand love, the user experience must be at least slightly enjoyable, and that this creates the chemistry in the customer relationship so you can have all the distribution you want and make it easy. But it sounds like that enjoyable or Pleasants becomes a really critical differentiator and maybe this is where it challenges a lot of brands. I'd like you to discuss a little bit more about that.
Speaker 3:Sure. So if you're Walmart, you'd like things to be Pleasant. You don't want things to be unpleasant. My personal experience in Walmart is often that they don't they don't make that far.
Speaker 3:It's kind of I find it pretty unpleasant, but I don't shop there that much. I know a lot of people do. You know they don't find it that objectionable and that's sort of what Walmart is going for, you know, to not be awful. That's you know. That's that's their goal and because if it's a painful experience, you know nobody's gonna want to do that. So you want to get rid of the pain points. But it doesn't have to exactly be fun, whereas brands that want customers to really love them They've got a higher hurdle there. They've got to be create some sort of an emotional experience. That's fun, that's interesting in some way. So the reason for that, if you think about date, we've all Probably, if you remember back, if you are dating or remember when you were dating, you probably have this experience of going out with somebody and saying, well, that person Looked good on paper, but there wasn't any chemistry there.
Speaker 3:But what does it? Look good on paper part, that's the instrumental value, right? You check off like they seem functionally valuable, they've they got a good job or you know whatever it might be that you know your criteria. They look good according to those criteria, but there wasn't any chemistry. What chemistry simply is is how much you enjoyed yourself on the date.
Speaker 3:If you are on a date and you're bored and it's hard to make conversation and you're feeling anxious and you think the other person is judging you, then you don't have chemistry. If you're on a date and in time is flying and it's easy to talk and you're laughing a lot and you're having fun, then there is chemistry. So chemistry comes from that kind of enjoyable experience and if you want people to love your product, that's a really good thing. Now I know this is about. This podcast in particular is about digital marketing in different ways and it's sometimes harder in that kind of a context to create the type of enjoyment Then it is if you're a restaurant or some other. You know Face-to-face kind of product. So I would say in a digital context you may not always be able to Pump it up there quite as high as you can in some other Context, but there are other things you can do to kind of make up for that, even if you can't quite get the enjoyment factor up as high as you'd like.
Speaker 1:And I'm thinking some companies will send you fun swag to your physical address or, you know, compliment it. I want to bring up a comment here from actually, a friend of mine was also a marketing and branding expert this notion of taking a stand for something. Keep. Show some examples here Nike, patagonia, apple, lego, dub. I actually just recorded at my podcast episode that I just published this morning about this notion of well, icky guy from a personal perspective. But this notion of brands having, like, a mission or a purpose and how I think the stat that razor fish came out with last year was 82% of consumers want to do businesses with, with you know, brands that have that mission or purpose, and I think the younger the Generation we go, the more we see that. How does that and, todd, thank you for that comment to add to the conversation how do you see that working into this whole equation?
Speaker 3:It's super important, it's absolutely very central. And there again is a difference between these two approaches. If you're living in an object world, it's okay to be bland Because you're trying to reach a lot of people who care about you a little bit. But if you want to go for brand love, you have to connect with people on a deeper level and and very often not always, but very often that means connecting to their values in Some way, making them feel like this is a brand that really represents me. Now, there's a lot of different psychological aspects to love, but at its core, all forms of love romantic love with the person, love of your family, love of your friends, love of brands, love of hobbies, love of anything else every single form of love works by Getting the person who's falling in love to see the other person or thing as part of their own Identity. So it doesn't mean they become part of your consciousness that would be really weird it but it does mean that they become In your brain.
Speaker 3:Your brain has a category of things that are you. The number one thing in this category is your body. The reason you think of your body as yourself is because your brain has this category of things that are me and your body is the Number one first thing to ever go into that category, and it's again. There's good reasons for that. But your body is just a physical object and there are other physical objects that you think of as part of who you are as well, and there's a real easy test for this.
Speaker 3:So if you imagine for a second you're walking down the street and there's someone on the other side of the street you see two people and one of the people insults the other person. You might think, oh, what a rude person. But you wouldn't personally be offended because they didn't insult you. So now that rude person walks across the street, walks up to you and looks at your shoes and says you know what your shoes are ugly. All of a sudden, you might very well be offended.
Speaker 3:Well, why are you offended when they insult your shoes, but you're not offended when they insult the other person? It's because your mind categorizes your shoes as part of you. It sees them as part of you, and so when your shoes are insulted, you feel offended. So when you love another person or an object or your country or anything like that, your brain is making it part of your identity, and that's one of the reasons that we act in such loving and altruistic ways towards people that we love, because we wanna see them happy, because they're connected to us in this way. They're part of our identity. So for brands, in order for people to love the brand, they're eventually gonna need to see it as part of their identity, and one of the best ways to make that happen is to have the brand represent values or causes that the person feels deeply about.
Speaker 1:Got to, I guess, getting back to that date analogy, almost like when you find out that someone that you're dating has the same favorite band or the same favorite food or the same religious or political affiliation, that feeling of deep chemistry, correct.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that creates a sense. It's easier to make them a part of who you are, because they seem to fit with who you are. Then it's a good fit with you, and that's the same for brands as well. And that's also, I think, particularly true if you look demographically for younger consumers. Older consumers were raised in a time where products were just products. They were just I don't love that thing, I'm just using it, it's just a product, it doesn't matter. Younger consumers are raised in an environment where they've learned to think about things a little bit differently and they tend to be more interested in products that really express their values and identity. So, to the extent that you're looking and trying to act, younger consumers, that's gonna be more important.
Speaker 1:Makes a lot of sense and I'm just going back to that the useful, pleasant, easy. I just I'm going to Japan on business next week and I usually rent a wifi router when I'm there because it's a lot cheaper than what the telephone company is charged and I'm used to doing it with a certain way. But now there's a company where they actually have it's like opening up a post office box when you get to the airport QR code and it just slips right out this wifi router, right, and then you return it right back there again. It has a charger built in. It just made it very, very easy and useful.
Speaker 1:But I don't think they're going for brand love because they don't need. I suppose the experience is pleasant in some ways, but I guess there's some products or services where there's only so far you can go. But on the other hand, following some of those elements that you teach as well, there are still benefits. Even if you can't get 100% brand love or follow the entire approach, following parts of it can be beneficial to your business. Is that a correct assumption to make?
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely, and if it's cheap and easy, you should. There's no real harm in it, right? So it's always these things are always a good thing to do, but there is a real difference in what your priorities are going to be, and it sounds like that company. Their priority is really around the useful, pleasant, easy kind of approach, and it makes a lot of sense for that company, for them, to be doing that. There's other kinds of situations.
Speaker 3:So there's a woman I'm working with who is in Paris and she is starting a company that makes gold jewelry and the gold, instead of being mined, is reclaimed from electronic appliances that have been thrown away. So a lot of electronic appliances have very, very small amounts of gold in them, and her company recycles the whole thing. Instead of going to a landfill, they recycle it and one of the things that they pull off are these little bits of gold. They get them together and they make gold jewelry out of it. Now, this company that you're talking about in Japan. There's a big instrumental difference. Like they can, it sounds like more useful, more pragmatically useful, than some other approach.
Speaker 1:And easy, really easy. I don't have to like ship it back, I don't have to. You know, hope it gets to my hotel. They've taken out that whole shipping process. You know both receiving and returning, so cheaper for them as well and easier for me, yeah so it's great this woman with her new company, with the gold jewelry it's gold jewelry.
Speaker 3:It's not, at the end of the day, functionally better than some other gold jewelry. You know, gold is still gold Right, but emotionally it's way better Right. For a lot of people that's a really meaningful thing. So in that situation because there's no way that she can show like my gold is, you know, more useful than their gold, right. So for her, a brand love strategy based on getting people to say this really shows my values and connects to me in a deep way about things I think are important. That's a perfect strategy for her company.
Speaker 1:Makes a lot of sense. So I wanna dig into a comment that you made before I recorded, which is that most companies miss this essential ingredient of brand love, which is that the consumer's unconscious mind must treat the brand or product like a person, rather like a thing. I think you've already talked about why this is so important in order to make that chemistry, that emotional connection. But I'm curious and I'm sure a lot of the listeners is how you know what are the steps to go about actually making that happen. And it almost sounds like you know part of it is the actual product itself, and the delivery of the product or service itself becomes instrumental. I'm wondering, obviously, what those elements might be, but also, above and beyond that, in the marketing of that product or service, what are some of the things that everyone listening can do?
Speaker 3:So there's three basic ways that you can make get people to think about an object in the same way they think about a person. The first is the most obvious but also the least often done, and that is to make the object itself look or sound like a person. So if you put, I'll give you cars the front of a car, car designers call that the face of the car. The headlights are the eyes, the grill is the mouth they call it the face. They're very intentional about creating different facial expressions on the cars to have it look like a person. You can augment that by getting the customer to name their car.
Speaker 3:Customers who give their car a human name, that tricks their brain into thinking it's a person and so they treat it more like a person because they think about it more like a person. So that's called anthropomorphism, and there's a lot of companies to do that Apple or the other cell phones that have Siri or Alexa on them that you talk to. That creates this anthropomorphic effect as well, and a lot of entrepreneurs out there are finding ways to make products a little bit more anthropomorphic, even if it's as simple as like putting a smile on it, stamping a human face on it doing something that gets the customer to start seeing it a little bit in that way. So that's one very concrete way of doing it.
Speaker 1:And I'm assuming it could be as tactical as Neil at in an email signature or an email header, instead of saying it comes from a company, it comes from a person at that company.
Speaker 3:That's the second one. Okay, the first one, that's your head of the game. Good job, neil, head of the game. So the first one is the product itself is like a person and it doesn't really take very much to get the brain going in that direction. It doesn't have to like, it doesn't have to be like, oh, their conscious mind would be fooled. Their conscious mind is never fooled. People know that that is not. That car is not a person, but the unconscious mind is very susceptible to that. So if the car, you know, looks like a person or talks to them, or they have a conversation with it, then they come to think of it as a person. So that's the. That's one way to do it.
Speaker 3:The second way that you were talking about is actually much more common and, for the listeners here, if you're thinking about various forms of digital marketing, much more accessible to a lot of companies, and that is to associate the product with some human being. So if you're a smaller company out there, most of the time people are going to associate the product with whoever they talk with at that company or the owner of that company. I was talking with someone who's who was telling me that they done a study and they'd found that in the cell phone market, apple was by far the most loved brand and in the vacuum market, dyson was by far the most loved brand, and they were wondering why that might be. So what did Apple and Dyson have in common? Apple has Steve Jobs, dyson has Dyson. Both of them have people that we very much associate with those brands. What about the others? The other vacuum, the Eureka vacuums? There's no person comes to mind for Eureka vacuums, it's just a vacuum.
Speaker 3:So, having some sort of a connection and that could be the owner of the company, the founder of the company, the salesperson that they talk to in business, to business marketing, salespeople are really important because it is the salespeople that create that human connection. And there's not a lot of loyalty in business to business marketing. But to the extent that there is loyalty, it's not loyalty to the company, it's loyalty to that salesperson who you've talked to a number of times and you don't want to disappoint you know in one way or another. So a lot of companies, what they're learning to do. I mean they also have problems. Right, the salesman moves from one company to another company often. Both times they'll walk with customers, the customers will go with the salesperson because their loyalty was to the salesperson.
Speaker 1:Right right.
Speaker 3:Because you're not loyal to abstract companies. That's an object. You're loyal to a person, that's what you have a relationship with. So what a lot of companies are doing is they're saying, well, let's have sales teams so there's no one person to lead If they create relationships with more than one person. Or let's have the salesperson start creating the relationship, but if it's an important client, let's make sure that our executives form relationships with their executives so that if the salesperson leaves, the customer doesn't go with them.
Speaker 3:There are other human connections that will maintain the relationship. So the second way of doing this, if we're counting here number one, the product itself disguises itself as a person. Right, it looks like a person, it sounds like a person, it acts like a person, it's a little robot. Whatever, it's the person. Number two you connect the product in the customer's mind with a person, and that could be the owner of the company, the salesperson, the celebrity spokesperson. It could be an animated spokesperson, like a little gecko would work very well for that, and there's a lot of benefits actually to having sort of a computer generated animated spokesperson, because they'll never have a scandal, right, they'll always say exactly what you want them to say. You have a lot of control over that situation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's the popularity of virtual influencers for some brands. I'm curious, before you get to number three, just as an extension of what we've been talking about, when you talk about B2B and salespeople. I'm curious, then is and these are two slightly different things employee advocacy, employer branding. Are these, then, positive things that will, I guess, positively impact brand love when done right, or what's your view on that as part of a brand love strategy? Explain a little more detail what you're talking about.
Speaker 1:So the employee advocacy is you mentioned that people form relationships with people, so if they're always interfacing with the salesperson, they form a relationship, and that's so powerful that salespeople can often bring that customer along with them if they change right. So I guess the notion is showing more faces of the company, primarily in social media. It could be on the website. You see a lot of brands like Starbucks have a work at Starbucks type of Instagram profile where they're always showing happy workers who talk about their experiences there, and it's trying to get more employees to talk more about their authentic experiences working at that company in social media, especially on LinkedIn, but not limited LinkedIn Just trying to make your employees more better represent the brand and, in doing so, bringing more of a human face to the brand and connecting with more people with that human face representing the brand, and I'm just curious if that might be. Maybe it's something that you haven't talked with clients or done research on. I'm curious what your perspective on that might be.
Speaker 3:It fits beautifully. It fits beautifully. It's a great idea, and it's exactly this kind of thing about humanizing the company so that people are forming relationships with the person. If you're going to have a lot of different people doing it, it helps if you can create some sort of sense that there's something that they have in common beyond just that they're employees of this company. Maybe they talk with a similar tone of voice or maybe they use a similar kind of vocabulary. Maybe they just are wearing you know they're all wearing the same fun t-shirt, but trying to connect them together in some way so that the customer gets a sense of something that they're creating a relationship with. That isn't changing every three seconds. Nonetheless, that's a great idea. It's exactly the kind of thing I've also talked about approaches. For example, there's a company called Bombom, which I know it's just one of several companies that do this.
Speaker 1:Video emails right. It's very popular in the real-time industry.
Speaker 3:And it's super effective. When I get one of those things so for listeners, if you're not familiar with it it comes as a little bit of a gif going, a little video that you see but you don't really hear anything and you click the button, all of a sudden poof. Now you're watching a video of the person talking to you and they just talk to you for 30 seconds instead of sending you an email. It creates so much more of a personal connection and it's just another way of taking things and making them less anonymous and making them more humane. And we've kind of known for a long time that that's a good thing to do.
Speaker 3:But what we now see, with this sort of neuroscience research on how people really only form relationships with people, it all starts to fit together. It's like, okay, now I know why it's such a good thing to do and how indispensable it is. So that's the second. And then, if you want the third one, we've briefly mentioned it already, and that is you get the person to see the brand as part of their own identity and that's gonna have to happen at some point for love to happen. That's always required. That's not optional if they're really gonna love this thing. But when customers see a brand or a product as part of who they are, then their brain treats it as a human being and makes it eligible for love and you get those stronger kinds of loyalty and other effects that companies are looking for.
Speaker 1:So of those three things, I'm assuming that last one is the most challenging for brands. Maybe I'm wrong, but in your experience is that usually the differentiator?
Speaker 3:They're all challenging in their own ways and they all reinforce each other, especially the last two Having it connected with another human being and having the customer seat as part of their own identity actually work a little bit synergistically with each other, because we build our identity very much out of our relationships with other people. There was a fast end experiment done a number of years ago where they asked this was done at a college and they asked the students to bring in photographs and they just said photographs that show who you are.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:More students brought in photographs of other people than brought in photographs of themselves. So who you are? More people thought like this other person is part of who I am. Then then occurred to them, think like, oh, here's a selfie, this is me. I'm gonna bring in a photograph of myself. So other people that we have strong relationships with or we like or love are very much a part of our own identity. So when you create this connection to other people, you're also helping people integrate it into their identity a little bit. But yeah, the identity thing is a high hurdle and there are a lot of different ways of going about getting people to do that. But it's not easy and it's definitely a topic for several shows all by itself because it's a very complicated proposition.
Speaker 1:I was gonna say I felt like any one of these things we talked about could be its own hour long. Dig a little bit deeper. I'm just curious, as we sort of get to the end here, companies that are really good at brand love is there a? Is it the CEO top down? Is there a certain role that is in charge of it? How is this coming about at companies? Or, if there's a company listening maybe someone that's in marketing, I don't know, I'm just throwing that out there who would they start that conversation with to start seeing how they can start to create this in their own company? What is the normal sort of corporate organization revolving around this, which I'm assuming is also a challenge because it involves so many people and departments, I assume?
Speaker 3:Step one that very few companies do because they don't realize that it's even an issue or anything that they ought to be thinking about at all. Step one is to say, okay, are we gonna live primarily in object world and compete there and try and win there, or are we gonna try something that's in some ways a little bit harder but with a little bit more of a payoff and try and get customers to see us as a person? So you've gotta make that initial strategic decision, and one of the things I do with companies is I'll do keynotes and day long workshops and two day long workshops and we'll start to go through the pros and cons and how it works and what strategy world do you want to find yourself in? However, if you're a company that feels you've already made that decision there's lots of ways why that might have already happened and brand love that sort of approach, and you can call it super fans, you can call it brand advocates, you can call it strong promoters I don't care what word you use for it, but you're going for strong relationships with the customer Then the first things you need to do is you need to think about okay, we've gotta keep improving product performance and quality.
Speaker 3:We can't let go of that. People love excellent products. If you think about human beings when you're dating, nobody comes home from a date and says to their best friend, oh, I just fell in love with the most mediocre person I met on this date. Right, we love things that we perceive at least as being excellent, so you can't back off that. But then you've gotta get some sort of emotional connection going through a positive experience for the customer and then you've gotta pick one or more of these three approaches to get them to really see it as a person. And so that's the kind of thing that I often talk through with companies In terms of the internally within the company it takes.
Speaker 3:Whoever is working on strategy needs to work on this. So hopefully that includes the marketing department, but it usually isn't limited to the marketing department because it's such a basic function. So it's often the marketing department and plus anyone who's doing strategy and often the CEO, because it's such a core, long-term strategic decision that you need to have something going. If you've just got some mid-level person who thinks this is a good idea, they're not gonna be able to get the level of organizational commitment over time needed to see this payoff it sounds like it also has.
Speaker 1:In order for it to be successful and I think of like Apple it really has to be part of the corporate culture, the DNA of every employee, and that obviously takes a strategic approach and involving everybody in the organization. So that makes a lot of sense, aaron. Thank you so much Once again. For those that are interested, aaron Ohuvia, pick up his book on Amazon the Things we Love, how Our Passions Connect Us and Make Us who we Are, and I think you'll have even more takeaways than we were able to discuss in this very, very short time. Aaron, is there anything that we might have missed in this conversation about brand love that you'd like to tell everybody about, or do you think this is a pretty good summary?
Speaker 3:I'll leave you with one last thought on this, which is brand. Love is great if you can get it for companies in terms of profitability, but it's also a bit of a commitment. When you are saying to the customer I want you to see our company and our products in human terms. I want your brain to think about them the way you think about a person, that creates a higher level of moral obligation than if you're just living in object world. You really want, when you're connecting with another human being, you're saying I want to be your friend. You're taking on an obligation to really be honest with them and look out for their interest. I would hope that all companies would be honest with customers and look out for the customer's interest, but I know that's not always going to be the case. But I really hope that if you are making this offer like customer, I want you to think about me as more than just an object. Then you need to reciprocate and think about your customer as more than just a paycheck.
Speaker 1:Long-term friendships, long-term commitments, makes a heck of a lot of sense. Just, it sounds like a natural byproduct of everything we talked about. Actually, aaron, thank you so much. This has been a really enlightening conversation. I know our listeners are going to get a lot out of this. If listeners want to learn more about you learn more about you mentioned you've prepared various works in the past that haven't gotten published as books or if they just want to connect with you, where should we send people?
Speaker 3:Dr Brand Love. A number of years ago some friends of mine because I do all this research on love started calling me Dr Love because I am a PhD. I like that. But then other friends said he's not Dr Love. Come on, he's at most Dr Brand Love. That's stuck. My website is drbrandlove all one word dot com. Come find me there. There's a contact link. If you're interested in my academic work, I am super happy to share any academic papers that someone's willing to read. But I'll tell you the book is really a lot more fun. But you can also find me there for speaking. I do a lot of keynotes.
Speaker 1:Awesome. So drbrandlovecom, and then the book the Things we Love, how Our Passions Connect Us, make Us who we Are, on Amazon and wherever fine books are sold. Erin, thank you once again. I really enjoyed the conversation and I look forward to seeing more great examples of brand love. Maybe a year from now we can talk and look at the past 12 months and see these new companies that French recycled gold jewelry or my Japanese Wi-Fi a root or rental place but I think after probably I'm assuming, after reading your book as well, but after this conversation, I'm going to be looking at brands and the way they communicate and the way they show their product in a very, very different way, and I suppose that's part of the beginning of the process is to have this different perspective, to have a brand love perspective on companies. So thank you so much for that and, yeah, just wish you the best of luck and let's stay connected.
Speaker 3:Neil, absolutely, it was a pleasure and I'm happy to talk anytime.
Speaker 1:I hope you enjoyed that interview with Dr Huvia. Branding is not something that I talk a lot about on this podcast, but obviously it is an integral part of digital marketing and, as I teach my course at UCLA Extension on personal branding, obviously there is a lot of interplay with corporate branding and thus my interest as well. So I hope you enjoyed that. Hey, we are getting down to the end of the year and well, usually at this time is when I ask all of you if you have a minute to pop into your favorite podcast player choice and drop a review for this podcast, which really does help it reach more people. So this is episode number 347. We are still at 59 reviews, so what I thought I'd do is offer something of more value, to incentivize you to spend 15 seconds to leave a review for this podcast. So here's a scoop Right now. This episode is being released on Thursday, december 14, 2023.
Speaker 1:If you write a review and you take a screenshot after that review publishes very important and you email me at neil at neilshaffercom, that's N-E-A-L at N-E-A-L-S-C-H-A-F-F-E-Rcom, I am going to provide you a 30 minute one-on-one coaching call with your digital marketing coach. These coaching calls will probably be done more in January. I do hope to have the rewrite of my book done by the end of this year, so in January we are going to move to the copy edit phase, which should free up some more of my time. But I want to thank you for being a listener. More importantly, I really want to help you, and this just shows you how much your review would really help expose this podcast.
Speaker 1:And in the algorithms, what have you? So once again, it could be any platform where you listen to this podcast. I know some of you don't listen on Apple, you listen on a Spotify, or you listen on an overcast or podcast addict or whatever platform that might be. Once again, write a review, take a screenshot, send it over to me at neil at neilshaffercom, and I look forward to serving you in a private 30 minute one-on-one coaching call, which is usually only for my digital first mastermind paid members, which I offer them this once a quarter, once every 90 days. So I hope you'll take advantage of it and at the least I'd really like to get to know you better and how I can serve you. And who knows, maybe through that interview you might have a case study to share that might be featured in my next book, because it's not too late, so, anyway, hope you'll take advantage of that offer. This is your digital marketing coach, neil Schaefer, signing off.
Speaker 2:If you or your business needs a little helping hand. See you next time on your digital marketing coach.