Aaron Ahuvia PhD is the world’s leading scientific expert on brand love.
Listen on Spotify, Apple or YouTube.
In this episode we discuss:
- How the brain works and what we know about love
- What it’s like working with Philip Kotler
- How we define love and why it matters to marketers
- How to build brand love
- What to do when brand love isn’t something you should aspire to
- Anthropomorphism and why brands talk to us
- Why stories matter
- Why the IKEA effect works (but not for me!)
- What Lisa Marie Presley can teach us about B2B marketing (really)
- What to do if people fall out of love with your brand
Aaron Ahuvia
Dr. Aaron Ahuvia is a Professor of Marketing at the University of Michigan-Dearborn and holds an appointment in the College of Engineering’s program on Human Centered Design as well as at the UM-Ann Arbor’s Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design. He completed his Ph.D. in Marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management, where he worked with Professor Philip Kotler (‘the father of modern marketing’).
After graduation, he started as an Assistant Professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor before moving to the university’s Dearborn campus. An independent Stanford University study ranks him in the top 2% of all the world’s scientists across all disciplines.
He published the first major scientific study on brand love, popularized the term brand love, authored all three of the most widely cited and read papers on brand love, published 14 major studies on brand love, and has written an award-winning popular book on the psychology of brand love. He was the first recipient of the Stetik Group Brand Relationship Award, 2019, which is a lifetime achievement award for research impact on marketing practice. He is also a leading expert on the psychology of happiness and how our happiness is impacted by our income and by our consumer choices.
Find Aaron at his website https://drbrandlove.com/
Recommendations
- Aaron’s book, The Things We Love
- Creating Superfans by Brittany Hodak
- Lidia Infante on the Strategy Sessions talking about using data on dating apps
Strategy Sessions Host – Andi Jarvis
If you have any questions or want to talk about anything that was discussed in the show, the best place to get me is on LinkedIn or Instagram.
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Episode Transcription
This transcript has been done automagically using Happy Scribe and hasn’t been checked by a real person, so there may be some hilarious mistakes where the AI can’t work out our accents – I’m sure they’re trained on just the American accent.
[01:00:00.19] – Andi
Aaron, what one thing do you wish you’d have known 10 years ago?
[01:00:05.14] – Aaron
I wish I had understood that the human brain uses fundamentally different processes when it thinks about people from when it thinks about objects. And that’s pretty central to my book. But I didn’t get that. And that’s because most people… I mean, this is new science. People are just understanding this due to neuroscientific research now. And it really makes a huge difference in how we think about generating emotional connections between consumers and brands.
[01:00:38.09] – Andi
And we are going to unpack that a lot in the rest of this episode. What I want to focus on a little bit from what you’ve said there is just the neuroscience element. It constantly amazes me how little we actually know about how the brain works. And we know a lot about how the brain works, don’t we? Certainly compared to maybe 30 years ago or 60 years ago. But the reality is, we don’t know a huge amount about what goes on between our ears, do we?
[01:01:04.06] – Aaron
No, we really don’t. The specifics, you’re exactly right. We know a lot more than we used to, and there are some general kinds of things we can get a handle on. But a lot of the work from neuroscience, it’s really important not to assume it’s more specific than it is. You get these very general kinds of findings like, Oh, well, this general part of the brain seems to be more active in one situation than in another situation. But there’s so much more going on than that. It is enough to give us some important clues that are really relevant to marketing, but we have a very long way to go.
[01:01:51.14] – Andi
Eyup, and welcome to the Strategy Sessions. My name is Andi Jarvis, and I love that you’ve joined me today. And when I say I love it, What do you mean? I absolutely love it because I love that you’re here to hear from the Love Doctor. I feel like I want to say that in a really deep voice like the Love Doctor, like a Barry White way, the Love I’ve got it. But it’s not that. Aaron Ahuvia, who was just on that little intro there, you heard a clip of him talking about what he wish to have known 10 years ago, is the world’s leading authority, really, on brand love. He explains in a moment how he became that, almost accidentally, and various other things about his career, including working with the great Philip Kotler. So that’s a little bit of a side note. But what he really talks about is why we love things and how brands can use that. Does your brand actually want to foster a strategy where people love them? Because love comes with other things. It’s not just, oh, great, people love our brand. This is fantastic. But they expect things when they say that they love you.
[01:02:57.18] – Andi
So is it for everybody? And it’s not for everyone. And Aaron talks about the differences between that and why some brands need that and why they don’t. I think this episode is utterly fascinating. Now, of course, I’m going to say that I recorded the interview with him, but there’s a lot to learn for anyone. It doesn’t matter what brand you work for, you can understand why people love brands, what it is that they are looking for in their relationship with a brand, and even, do they actually mean they love it? Is it love? Do they just mean they like it? Do they just mean they find it useful? It’s a really fascinating episode. Let’s get back to Aaron. So my guest today, who you’ve already heard from, is Aaron Ahuvia, who is the author of The Things We Love. If you’re watching on YouTube, or YouTube for the listeners in America, it’s the book I’m holding in my hand and badly waving in front of the camera. So Aaron, tell us a little bit about the book first, your area of study, how it came about, and what brought you to write this book.
[01:03:54.03] – Aaron
It’s a little bit of a long story, but it’s a funny story, I think, which is that many years I was a PhD student in marketing at Kellogg, the Northwestern Kellogg School of Business. And this being a marketing podcast, I bet a lot of your listeners will have heard of a Professor Philip Kotler. He’s a pretty well-known guy in marketing. He teaches there. I was in his seminar as a PhD student, and he was going on about how marketing is everything. Like, politics is really marketing. Religion is really marketing. Even dating is really marketing because you’re marketing yourself to this other person that you’re dating with. I was single at the time and thought that dating was way more interesting than real marketing. I asked him if I could do my term paper on dating as marketing. He agreed. To make a long story short, I started collaborating with the Professor Mara Edelman. This turned into a huge thing. We wrote a whole bunch of really interesting research papers looking at dating. This is when the internet was just getting going and online dating was just becoming a thing. Our work became very caught up in the press.
[01:05:12.05] – Aaron
I ended up on the Oprah Winfrey show talking about online dating and dating services and whatnot. It was really fun. In order to do this work, I needed to understand the psychology of love and romantic attraction. What happens when people date online versus in person? How does love work in these situations? I spent a couple of years studying the psychology of love. Then when I needed later to do a dissertation, I thought, Wow, I spent so much time reading about the psychology of love. I don’t want to do dating services for my dissertation. I’ll never get a job that way. But I also don’t want to get rid of all this work I’ve put into this topic. It’s a great topic. It’s It occurred to me that people talk about loving products and loving brands, but nobody had really looked into that. Lots and lots of people looked at why people want certain products, and people looked at love in a dating or a family context, but nobody had really put the two together and said, Hey, does the way our brain processes and thinks about other people when we fall in love, does this have anything to do with the way we actually interact with objects and brands?
[01:06:36.14] – Aaron
I started doing work on this. It later came to be called Brand Love. It turned out this was the first research that anyone had ever done on brand love. That really kicked off the whole field on brand love, and I’ve been working on it ever since. Now, I wanted to take what was 25 years of research that was quite influential academically. Academics are very up on this, but there’s a lot of stuff you read about brand love in the popular press, but it’s really not based in the science. It’s usually based on people’s gut instincts, which is nice, but has limits. The book is about taking what we know from the scientific research and making it accessible and hopefully interesting. To just a general audience, both marketers, but also the book is really written not only to be for marketers, but to be for anyone who’s curious. Why do people love sports? Why does this person seem to love their teapot collection or love their Cuisinart or their bicycle or whatever it is. So really designed to help people just understand that aspect of human behaviour.
[01:07:55.26] – Andi
So a couple of quick fires because I want to get into the book, but a couple of quick fire questions I can’t let go. You studied at one of the most famous business schools in the world under arguably the most famous marketing professor in the world. If not, he’s definitely top five. What was that like? Did you get a sense at the time? Did you walk in and every day be like, Oh, my Lord, I’m sat in Philip Kotler’s greatness here? Or was he just the professor and you had to turn a paper in every now and again?
[01:08:27.14] – Aaron
It’s a little of both. They have a mural with all the marketing professors, some student, some PhD student who also was an artist created this mural for them, and it has caricatures of all the different professors doing various things. It’s a setting. Philip Kotler is in the clouds as God, pouring down on everybody else from this mural.
[01:08:56.04] – Andi
When you’re going to make an excuse while you haven’t done a reading, you’ve got to I remember that God himself is looking over you as you’re about to tell him my lie.
[01:09:03.20] – Aaron
Yes, that’s right. So that does give you some little inkling about the way he’s perceived in terms of status. Certainly among professional marketers, he’s the best known person that was there. So that was nice. He is such a gentleman, and he is such a nice guy. He gets stereotyped sometimes Because he’s so famous, people assume he’s a ra-ra promoter about everything marketing, but he’s not. He’s actually very socially concerned and aware and critical about a lot of things in marketing, as well as promoting other things in marketing. He treated all the PhD students in a really kind way. He wasn’t aloof. He came off as very humble. That was really nice.
[01:10:03.23] – Andi
Excellent. Well, look, good to know because I think many people listening, most people listening, I’ve definitely heard of Philip Kotler. So interesting just to get an inside take on him. And the other thing I just need to tell you, I had a I had a guest on at the end of the last season, a lady called Lidia Infante, who pitched… I know Lidia, and she pitched me an idea to come on the podcast. You get a lot of pitches when you run a podcast. And this one was like, it’s about the dating apps. And I was like, it’s not really for I’m not really interested, to be honest with you. And she was like, no, no, I used marketing tactics to find a husband. Tell me some more about this. So Lidia is in SEO, a B2B SEO for a big tech firm. And had approached the whole use of dating apps as marketing qualified leads, sales qualified leads, passing things through the pipeline in a conversion funnel. I’d also set up, I’ll send you a link to the episode. She I set up a two by two of high intent questions, low intent questions, opening questions to send to people, different photos to put up with each one and match in.
[01:11:10.22] – Andi
And I was just sat there like, if you watch the video, you’ll see me with my head in my hands going, Lidia, I think you’re absolutely crazy. She’s just explaining the reasons why and how it goes. Spoiler alert, she actually met her husband on one of the dating apps. But how that has evolved from the early days of, was it plenty of in the early days and those early sites and even friends were united to a certain extent through now to this industrial scale use of dating apps? Maybe it’s an interest that you should have stayed in a little bit more.
[01:11:41.23] – Aaron
If I had known, I had opportunities to jump ship from being a marketing professor to working at some of these companies. If I had known what would happen with these companies long term, it would have been much more tempting to leave my academic job.
[01:12:00.13] – Andi
That’s what you wish you’d have known 10 years ago, isn’t it? You wish you’d have known that Tinder was going to explode.
[01:12:07.09] – Aaron
Yeah, it was longer than 10 years ago. But if I had known 30 years ago, hell, yeah, I I’m not going to use that.
[01:12:16.26] – Andi
That’s what we should have done. Brilliant. Well, listen, I suppose it’s only fair that we can call you the love doctor. There is surely no other term that we can use for you. But you’ve had a career studying the science of love, really, from dating initially then through to why people love things. But you’re an academic as well. So let’s start with what all great academics do. Can you give us a definition of love to work with it? Because people say, I love this. I love my team. I love my cat. I love this cup of coffee. Are there all of those things love? What’s the definition that you work with to get started?
[01:12:56.26] – Aaron
I’ll give you two definitions. The first is what love feels like psychologically. So love is finding someone or something to be so connected to yourself and so important to your life that you want to make it part of who you are, part of your very identity. So that’s a nice succinct definition. But I’ll give you a longer story that I think opened my eyes, it’s really changed how I think about love and is, I think, useful to listeners. It turns out that humans aren’t the only animal with love. There’s a lot of different species of animals that love. It’s a little odd because we don’t like to use… We don’t think humans are special. So we use the word bonding when we talk about animals, and we use the word love when we talk about people. But every species is different, but it’s really Pretty much the same thing. Just like we all get hungry, all these animals get hungry, all these animals get sleepy, and all these animals have a similar a bonding. Not every animal does, though. So it’s a split. There’s lots of animals that also don’t have this at all. And there’s this amazing, across millions of animal species, there’s an amazing 100 % correlation.
[01:14:21.20] – Aaron
There are some animals, like birds and like mammals, that raise their kids. And there’s lots of animals, like fish or insects, where They have a whole bunch of kids, but the parents don’t actually raise the offspring in any way. Every species where the parents are actively involved in caring for and raising the children has love or bonding, and every species where the parents aren’t doing that does not have any love or bonding. So what this tells you right off the bat is that love evolved in people and other as a motivational mechanism that gets parents to feed and take care of their children, gets parents to take care of and support each other as they take care of the children, Then later in human beings, which is not absolutely unique to us, but very special to people, gets us to form friendships. Friendships are based on love. We don’t always use the word love for that, but sometimes it’s Psychologically, it’s fundamentally a love that goes into friendships. For people, love creates these friendships where you take care of and support the people you are friends with. Love is all about this process of caring about other people, taking care of, supporting, and connecting with other people.
[01:15:53.26] – Aaron
From an evolutionary perspective, if you think about it, that’s an incredible It’s really important behaviour, but it’s also a little bit weird. If animals could talk and you went to some animal 500 million years ago and you said, Right now, when you see your offspring, maybe you eat them because you’re hungry, but you’re not going to do that anymore. Instead, you’re going to get food that you could eat and you’re going to give it to this other animal. That animal would look at you like you were nuts. Why the hell would I want to do that? I just found this food. Why am I giving it to some other animal? So you need a very powerful motivational mechanism to get people and animals to want to give that food and support to some of the things. And that’s really what love is.
[01:16:45.05] – Andi
Because anthropologically, the longer children’s their children and the longer before they go through adolescence and the longer they spend in adolescence, the better performing the species is, isn’t it? Because humans have a very weirdly long childhood and adolescence don’t they? Compared to most animals moving away from that. But that all, I suppose, stems from the evolution of love and all these things are interconnected, aren’t they?
[01:17:10.03] – Aaron
No, that’s one of the reasons love is so important to people as a species. If Love is about getting parents to take care of their kids. It’s one of the main functions that love performs evolutionarily. You’ve got human beings which have to take care of their kids for so freaking long. It’s not one season. It’s Years and years and years and years. Well, then you need the father and mother to stay together because two parents can take care of the kids better than one. So you need love between the parents that holds them together. Not always, obviously, but it has that function. And you need the parents to have this intense love for the kids, and you need the kids to love their parents so they listen to their parents and don’t do crazy, stupid things. And love becomes super powerful motivating force in our species. And from a marketing perspective, you don’t need people to love your brands as much as they love their kids. Hopefully, that’s never going to happen. But love is so powerful that if you can get even 1% of that, just a teeny bit of that, it’s going to be much more powerful than the other kinds of motivations people normally work.
[01:18:23.03] – Andi
So are there tears to this system in that you love your children or at the top of this in a way, but you still love your iPhone, just not quite as much, and you love your sports team, maybe more or less than your iPhone, depending on who you are. Are there layers to this, that change, or is it just a threshold? And once it’s love, it’s love. Is it categorised differently?
[01:18:49.19] – Aaron
Yeah. So I put it, first of all, it’s all on a continuum. And you could think of that with people, too. You love your immediate family more than you love your cousins But you love your cousins more than you love your second cousins. You’ll probably love them. And there’s other people that you don’t love at all. So there is this continuum with love, and the same with objects or brands that people love. It’s useful to put those into three categories. There’s the things you definitely love, and those are things that are strongly integrated into your sense of identity. There’s a huge number, things out there in the world, the vast majority of things that you just don’t love at all. Then there’s this intermediate category that I call love. These are a lot of objects or brands or people that your relationship has some aspects of love, but not other aspects of love. And it’s in this limbo, period. And for a lot of people, brands fall into that love category a lot more easily than they fall into the real love category. But even getting them into the love category can be very powerful.
[01:20:06.06] – Andi
Is this something that marketers should try and achieve? Because love is such a personal concept, isn’t it? And what makes somebody… The reason you love your wife is not so different to how I love my wife, but I don’t love your wife. Well, I’ve never met her, but you know what I mean? Your wife knows lots of people who don’t love her the way you do and so So love’s such a personal thing. Should brands be trying to achieve this or do they try and achieve other things and love is a byproduct of just being great over time and functional and useful? Or can you set out to say, We want to be loved by customers.
[01:20:47.11] – Aaron
Those are actually two different questions. I’m going to do something that is the difference between a good university professor and a consultant. Consultants want to tell you that everyone should read their book and everyone should use their process. And as a scientist, a university professor, I get to say, Oh, everyone should read my book, but not everyone should use my process. The book’s interesting, regardless. The book’s fantastic.
[01:21:13.17] – Andi
It’s absolutely Brilliant, by the way. You don’t need to sell it. I’m going to sell it. This book is fantastic. The Things We Love is brilliant.
[01:21:19.11] – Aaron
But in terms of, should every business be trying to generate brand love? No. There’s a brand love strategy, and there’s a different strategy that I call the useful, pleasant, easy strategy. The very first thing that any business should do is it should figure out which of these strategies makes sense for them. Not everybody should be trying to generate brand love because it turns out generating brand love To answer your second question, does brand love just happen as a byproduct of doing other things? Yes, but only very rarely. It does. That’s why almost every brand out there has one or two people that love it because it just randomly comes along. But you’re never going to get large numbers of people to love your brand unless you really set out to achieve that goal, or you just get very lucky and you happen to fall into the right things. You’re doing the right things, you don’t know why you’re doing them, but you happen to be doing the right things. And so because you need to do special things to get people to love your brand, it doesn’t just happen by providing a good product to consumers.
[01:22:27.28] – Aaron
It’s expensive and It can be difficult, and it’s not always worth it. So there is a strategy which says, Hey, we’re going to let the consumer’s brain just see us as an object, to see us as a brand. They’re never going to be all that brand loyal. They’re never going to feel much emotional attachment to us. They’re always going to see us as a commodity. But we’re going to be so useful. Interacting with us is going to be so pleasant, and it’s going to be the whole buying process and usage process is going to be so easy that we’re going to be a better commodity than all the other commodities. I think about a company like Walmart in the United States. Now, I know Walmart would like people to love Walmart, and I know there are people who love Walmart, the people with Walmart tattoos, but that’s not really central to their strategy. Walmart’s really about useful, pleasant, and easy, and hopefully, they get to pleasant. It’s not really a super enjoyable experience, but hopefully it’s not an unpleasant experience.
[01:23:36.24] – Andi
Pleasant is also in comparison to everybody else, isn’t it? As long as you’re pleasant compared to the competition. Yes.
[01:23:42.24] – Aaron
They can make a lot of money Why are you doing that. There are brands that can be very successful this way. There are other brands that really do want to create an emotional connection with customers, and it makes a lot more sense for some brands than others. And if your brand wants to create an emotional connection, the most The most important thing you need to know is that simply maxing out on useful, pleasant, and easy is never going to do it. Because the brain, this is what I started with, the brain thinks about people and objects in different ways. Useful, pleasant, and easy is how it evaluates objects. And what you get when the brain evaluates objects that way is value. So people will value your product and your brand. But value is different from love. And value does not imply the same emotional interest and emotional connection. And if you want to see the difference between value and love, think about something that you value a lot. Say your life savings, all the money you have in your money. I’m sure you all value that. Someone came to you and said, I’ll trade your life savings for an amount that is 20 % greater than your life savings.
[01:25:01.19] – Aaron
You’d be like, of course, that’s fabulous. 20 % return in one day? Who wouldn’t want that? So yeah, do that one for sure. Now think of a typical parent who loves their kid. And the parents are like, oh, I love my kid. She’s so smart and she’s so cute. And you went to that parent and said, I’ll trade you another kid that’s 20% smarter and 20% cuter than your kid for your child. How are they going to respond? They’re going to phone the police. They’re not going to make that trade. That’s the difference between love and value. If you want people to love your brand, to feel a sense of emotional connection to your brand, you have to get their brain to start thinking about the brand using the same mental processes it uses to think about people. And that takes some thought and strategy and effort on your part.
[01:25:54.12] – Andi
So there’s a brand here in the UK who I talk about a lot, not a lot. I use their examples from the occasionally because they’re quite good at doing this thing called Innocent Smoothies. And they have a really quirky fun tone of voice that went from a plucky startup to being bought by Coca-Cola. So they’re now part of the Coca-Cola business But they keep an independence to them. So they’re not just part of the global mess of coque brands. And they keep punching on that plucky startup-ness. But they started a trend over here, at least a number of years ago, of the brand talking to you directly. It became known as Wacky Gin, Wacky Packaging of the bottle itself having a personality. Hey, put me in the bin when you’ve done that type of thing, which actually has become so ubiquitous now that every single, almost everything you buy has the box talking to you like, please don’t put me in the wrong bin to the point where it’s become almost pointless. But is that the thing that is maybe on that start of that continuum? Let’s try and humanise this product by making it talk to you directly rather than having the brand voice.
[01:27:03.10] – Andi
Would that have been one of the steps that was part of that approach to try and make people love your brand?
[01:27:09.04] – Aaron
Right. So if you want people to love your brand, you got to get their brain to start using the same processes that it uses for people. You could think of this like if your brain is a factory, that factory has two different assembly lines. It’s got one assembly line for objects and one assembly line for people. And love, not just love, but any emotional connection, whatever you want to call it. You can say being a super fan, you want to say being a promoter or net promoter, any one of these things that has an emotional valence to it, emotional connection to it. That emotional connection is only installed on the assembly line where you send the people down that assembly line in your brain. You got to get your brand into there, and you can, and there’s There’s three ways of doing that. You’ve just hit on the first of the three ways. So that is anthropomorphism, meaning you get the brand or the product to imitate a person, to speak to people, to look like a person visually or just to talk to people like Siri and Alexa do, or in this case, you’ve got the brand doing that.
[01:28:22.20] – Aaron
The human brain decides twice in two different places in two different ways if something is a person. So you decide consciously if something is a person, and that’s a slow, effortful process. And you decide unconsciously if something is a person, and that’s a fast, non-effectful, very quick process. And that unconscious decision, because it needs to be super fast, because you’re going to do that for everything you see. Every tree, every bush, you’re going to do that for everything you see out there. It needs to be super fast. And because it needs to be super fast, it can’t go into a lot of detail. And so it uses these simple heuristics. Does this thing talk to me? If so, yeah, it’s a person. Does it have a face? Yeah, it’s a person. And then it just goes with that. That controls how your brain thinks about the object. So one of the reasons you see anthropomorphism becoming so popular now, so many brands make their products look like a person or talk like a person or act like a person or what have you, is because it really works in changing the way the brain thinks about that object and therefore starting to get some emotional connection.
[01:29:39.11] – Andi
So as people move through this process, you can use anthropomorphism to build that initial connection. What are the other steps that brands can take? Hopefully, and if you’re listening to this, please don’t be making notes of this and go, We’re going to do all this first thing tomorrow. As Aaron said, read the book because not everybody should do it. But what are step two and step three that can help transform your brand onto that human conveyor belt of the factory?
[01:30:04.09] – Aaron
Right. I wouldn’t exactly think about them as steps because anthropomorphism is not right for every brand, even if you want to do this. It’s not the most common way that this happens. In some instances, it can work super well, but you don’t have to make that step one as your first step. Think of that as one to do it, and you can combine these. You might do all three. You might just do one or the other. The first is this anthropomorphism. The second that is very common is to get the brand to be closely associated with a person. So you get the consumers to see the brand as so connected to a human being that their brain puts them together in a package. I I sometimes think about this as getting into as an entourage. I have some friends many years ago who, while she was still around, had the opportunity to go clubbing in Los Angeles with Lisa Marie Presley. So this was their big brush with Fame. They went out with Lisa Marie Presley to a bunch of nightclubs, and she was very short. And so there’s this huge crowd around the nightclubs, and the bouncer’s couldn’t see her because she was so short.
[01:31:32.10] – Aaron
So they had to pick up Lisa Marie Presley and put her on their shoulders and jump it down with her. So the bouncer would see her. But then, I just think it’s a hysterical image. But then when the bouncer would see her, not only would the bouncer let her into the nightclub, but like everybody else in the entourage, they all got to come in with her. Your brain is a little bit like that. So if your brand is connected to a person, the person is like the celebrity, the brand is like the entourage. When the person, because they think about the person as a person, the brand gets to come in with the person and be included. Now, who is that person or people that you’re connecting the brand to? Well, it could be the owner It could be the company. It could be Steve Jobs. It could be some celebrity owner of the company, or it could be a salesperson. If you are a business-to-business marketer, you know that there is very, very little brand loyalty in business to business market. People are always looking for the best deal out there. But to the extent that people have any brand loyalty, it’s because there’s a human being that they’ve connected with at the selling firm.
[01:32:46.14] – Aaron
It could be a salesperson, it could be a person or a service team, some a manager, but there’s someone at the buying firm that has an actual human relationship with somebody at the selling firm. And when they are thinking about resources sourcing this product, they think, Oh, but I’m going to have to tell Sarah that we’re not working with them anymore. And I don’t really want to tell Sarah that because Sarah and I, I really like Sarah. I like working with Sarah. So the loyalty to the company is really this loyalty to this person. So that’s another way that you can get this. It can also be, and this is a very… It’s the same thing, but it’s a little different. And that is the person that they connect the brand to can be another consumer in their life. So the Patek Philippe, the super expensive watch company, in their advertising, they get the buyer to see the watch as something they’re going to pass on to their children. And so the brand Patek Philippe, it’s not connecting them to someone at the company, Patek Philippe. It’s connecting them. The connection is to to the children of the buyer.
[01:34:02.09] – Aaron
But it still works the same way. The brand gets connected to a human being, and so when they think about their child, they think about the brand, and they get swept up that way. So there’s a lot of ways that you can do that, but that is a very common approach, which to summarise then is get the consumer in their mind to see your brand as strongly connected to some human being or some group of human beings that they will care and think about.
[01:34:35.20] – Andi
Just on the Patek example, I’m sure I heard a story, and please don’t go around repeating this to people because it may well be that I’ve misremembered this. But I think that great line that Patek used in their ads, You never truly own a Patek, you just look after it for the next generation, came about after the company had rejected two or three lines from the ad company, and it was almost written in five minutes outside the meeting while they tried to put their heads around something else and just went back in and went, What about this? And they were like, You’ve got it. We love it. I’ve actually been trying to get the company behind that to come on the podcast to talk about that story, unsuccessful so far. I don’t know if it’s real, but that’s the story I heard. Sorry, go on. And the third one?
[01:35:19.02] – Aaron
The third one is the most common. And to the extent that there are a lot of brands with brand love out there, it’s frequently because they use this strategy because this has been a fairly well-known strategy, and people just haven’t understood the connection between this and brand love. But you get people to see the brand as part of their own identity. So the brand represents their values or it becomes iconic for their social group. Ford F150 pickups in the United States.
[01:35:56.05] – Andi
An icon.
[01:35:57.16] – Aaron
They’re an icon of you are this person, the rugged work with your hands, then the Ford F150 is for you, it’s part of that identity. Whereas Birkenstocks are also very tied to identity, but just a very different social group, what identity that brand is tied to. And sports teams. Sports teams are amazing on all of this stuff. Part of the reason we love sports teams so much is, well, first, they’re made up of human beings. So That’s really easy. Do you connect the sports team as a brand to people? Yeah, it’s all made up of people. And that’s what people really focus on. But also, it’s a huge part of your identity. It’s a big part of who you are. And it connects you like the Patek Philippe example, where the watch connects the father to the son. Here, the sports team connects you to your buddies that you watch the games with. It’s got all of that stuff wrapped up it really well.
[01:37:01.07] – Andi
So I want to jump back before I forget. You mentioned in the book an example of Oxfam, the charity shop, thrift shop in Manchester, in England, where they got people to leave a little note, a bit of the history of the item of clothing. Tell us about that, because I think that works with the second point that you mentioned, doesn’t it? How it helps brands and helps people tie that thread through.
[01:37:25.24] – Aaron
So this was a really interesting example. Generally speaking, thinking, if you have a used item of clothing or maybe a used tchatchis in housewear or something like this, if people think of it as like, Oh, some person has used this before, it can feel a little bit ucky, a little bit negative, especially… Most used stores don’t sell used underwear, but there has been experiments that have asked people, Would you ever buy a pair of used underwear? They’re like, No, I don’t I don’t care how disinfected, decontaminated, washed, breached those underwear are. I am not wearing it.
[01:38:06.02] – Andi
I am not going near that.
[01:38:08.07] – Andi
I’m not wearing somebody else’s used underwear. It’s just got this… It’s too personal. It’s got too much of their essence on this thing, the body part. Usually, that’s negative. But what this shop did is it got the people who were using the product to tell a story about how they used the product and how they connected with it. And so instead of it being this vague, Oh, some other person has used it, now it’s this specific person is telling me about what it means to them. And it created this really positive connection It’s a connection. So what I talk about as a term, this is borrowed from another great consumer researcher, Russ Bell. I talk about person-thing-person. So it would be the father owns the Patek Philippe watch. So he’s the person, the watch is the thing, and then the son who’s going to inherit the watch or the daughter is going to inherit the watch is the other person that it’s connecting them to. In this case, it was person, thing, person. It’s the consumer, and then the item of clothing, and then the former owner that it’s connecting them to. And when it’s put in this positive way, it becomes a really powerful asset.
[01:39:24.13] – Aaron
It actually led people to be willing to pay more for the items and be much more interested in buying them. And I know of another company I was just learning about. I didn’t hear the name of the company, but it sells products produced in the developing world to more affluent consumers in the developed world. And the way it works is you order the product ahead of time, and then it’s made for you by a person. So they could have done it the other way. They could have, of course, had people make the products, just have them on the shelf. What they actually do is, no, you pre-order the product, and then you know there is this person, and you get a picture of the person, and they write a note to you. I’m so-and-so, and I have just made this basket for you, and here’s how I did it. And it really creates this person-thing-person connection.
[01:40:22.01] – Andi
The great thing about that is that it’s really, really cheap to do, isn’t it? This isn’t something that you need Apple’s budgets to be able to make people fall in love with You can do this in any size, can’t you? Really, that’s a really… Getting that connection, that person-to-person thing coming through can be really straightforward for certain brands, certainly selling things to do to be able to bring into their marketing operation.
[01:40:43.11] – Aaron
Yeah. For small businesses, entrepreneurs, if you’re an entrepreneur, you already know that your social relationships with people are important. But I’m here to tell you they’re more important than you think they are. No matter how important you think they are, they’re even more important than that. And a lot of it is because people’s feeling about the brand is really going to be their feeling about the people that are connected with the brand. I did some research many years ago with the dating services, and you would think this was with a matchmaker. So it was a human matchmaker that you talked to and said, This is what I want in a person, and then they would try and connect you to someone. You’d think customer satisfaction with a matchmaker would be overwhelmingly based on whether you liked the people that you met on the dates. And that did have some impact, but the impact was much stronger for how you got along with the matchmaker. That’s what your personal connection to the matchmaker that really drove that. And I thought, well, maybe this is just about matchmaking. But then I looked at all these studies that were done on doctors and what leads people to be satisfied with their doctor.
[01:41:51.14] – Aaron
It turns out it has very little to do with whether they actually get better or not from their illness. And it has everything to do with their sense of personal connection to the doctor.
[01:42:00.10] – Andi
When you first hear that, makes you think of, Hey, really? But the more you think about it, we’re a social species, aren’t we? That human connection is the thing that drives us. We are much more social than many other types of animals. So, yeah, it makes a lot of sense. But also then in my head, another example I want to get you talking about that you put in the book, which is probably quite an antisocial thing, although you mentioned it as a positive, the IKEA effect and building your own furniture and how that can make your love, your energy and efforts put into something can make you love something. Because my experiences of IKEA furniture are just lots of swear words and falling out with my wife. So you’re going to have to explain how this is a positive to me. How does this work? Why do some people like it?
[01:42:48.17] – Aaron
It does make a big difference. This relates to the third mechanism of getting the brain to think of something as a human being, and that is to get it to be associated with your own identity. Becomes a part of yourself. And one of the ways that things become part of your identity is that if we invest our time and effort and energy into them, then, as we say, I put a lot of myself into this thing. And so it becomes a part of yourself. And since you’re a person, your brain starts thinking about this thing as if it was a person using those mechanisms to do that. Now, for this to generate love, it needs to be a relatively positive experience or at least a voluntary experience.
[01:43:33.09] – Andi
So a lot of things- I think the voluntary bits where I’ve always struggled because I never felt like I volunteered for it. I was always just told I had to do it. That’s the bit that’s different.
[01:43:41.21] – Aaron
Yeah. So it’s very interesting because a lot of things… I mean, It’s better if it’s a positive experience. But a lot of things that people love are actually things that are very difficult and challenging. So people love running, they love writing, they love making music. And When you talk to someone who is a musician, you say, Well, how is practising? What was the experience of learning and mastering your instrument like? They’ll say, It was a lot of work. A lot of that work wasn’t that pleasant. A lot of it was very frustrating. Some of it was boring. It took a lot of self-discipline. You talk to someone who’s a runner, they’re like, Well, you get tired. Your legs are sore.
[01:44:19.27] – Andi
I’m doing my first marathon in a few days time, so I know all about that.
[01:44:24.18] – Aaron
That’s very impressive. I actually used to run, and I did a half marathon, was my greatest achievement. This is when I was a younger man. I was actually, I think 17 years old at that point. To give you an idea of what a jock I am, the next day in the newspaper, they published all the times of everyone who ran in the race, and they divided by sex and age. I would like you to know that I won the women’s 63 and older age group on the half marathon.
[01:44:57.28] – Andi
If there’s not a medal saying that on your a wall or a certificate, and then I don’t know what’s going on in the world.
[01:45:04.08] – Aaron
Congratulations. I was looking through the age group to see how far up would I have to go before my time was the fastest time. And I’m like, Wait, there are 60-year-old women who are beating me? I wasn’t even All right, but I did achieve it. I might not have been fast, but I made it through the half marathon. I ran 13 miles. I really felt good about that, even though there was a lot of sacrifice that went into it. So in those In many cases, though, it’s that people are voluntarily doing this. If they feel forced to do it, oh, boy, that’s really bad and a really different thing. So generally, you want it to be a rewarding experience. But people, when they love things, If people get a cell phone, part of the way that you get them to love the cell phone is to get them to customise the cell phone, to make it more their own, to make it more unique to them. And we all do this. That’s one of the reasons that cell phones are something that’s loved much is because just about everybody, you put apps on it and you’re doing all this stuff to customise it and turn it into something that’s specifically for you.
[01:46:09.06] – Aaron
So that’s another approach that people can think about with the products or services that they’re selling is getting consumers to personalise them in different ways.
[01:46:18.05] – Andi
I’m looking at my cell phone with a picture of my wife and daughter on it as well. Yeah, so you can personalise it. What I’m interested, I’m just keeping an eye on the time here as well, but we’ve talked about maybe how you can get people to love your brand, but sometimes divorce has happened. People fall out of love with brands as well for all sorts of reasons. And there’s probably two questions here. Firstly, is it a common feature? Secondly, If it happens, is there any way back for a brand?
[01:46:47.29] – Aaron
Yes. Trust is very important to love. And it really makes a difference why people are getting divorced from the brand. You could have two really radically different scenarios. One scenario is you’re really in love with this brand and it does something wrong. And interestingly, if it does something wrong and then notices it and apologises and makes amends, people’s love actually goes up for that brand.
[01:47:27.05] – Andi
I had training 20 years ago from I’m an American guy who was over in the UK, and he called this, and the phrase that stays with me for life, and I use it all the time, turning an ouch into a wow, was the phrase that he used. When you turn round an ouch, so something’s gone wrong because things do go wrong. Customer service problem, whatever. If you spot that, correct the problem and fix it and apologise and make good on it, you change that not just into a, okay, I’m happy now. You Can you change it into a wow, and you can create stronger bonds with your customers by fixing a mistake than you ever would have done if you wouldn’t have made the mistake in the first place. But he was very clear, don’t make mistakes on purpose to do that. And you have to spot the mistake, be genuine and fix it and do it all right, otherwise you just lose the customer. But that was 20 plus years ago. I remember him telling me that.
[01:48:23.03] – Aaron
Yeah. I find that really fascinating. And part of that is that in interpersonal relationships, In order to love someone, our brain is hardwired to be on guard for someone who’s pretending to love us because that’s a real risk. We want to know that they really care about us. If somebody makes a mistake, spots it, turns it around, and does something to make it good, that’s good evidence that they really care about you. They’re actually trying to… They’ve got your best interest at heart. And that works with companies as well. But what can happen there is you make one mistake and the customer forgives you. Then you do it again and again. At a certain point, it’s like a rubber band. The love is like a rubber band. You start stretching it, well, the attraction actually gets more. But at a certain point, it brand snaps, if you pull it too far. And so when that happens, that van snaps, then you get the worst case scenario. Because people feel like jilted lovers. The There’s nothing like a consumer scorned for real problems with your brand. And when you look at people who go out there and they make it their business to really hurt some brand.
[01:49:48.13] – Aaron
So they go online and they lie and they say, I bought this product just so they can give you a one-star review. And then they create a new user identity and do it again so they can give you 20 one-star reviews. These people can be incredibly damaging. And those people are often people who once loved the brand, who felt that they were betrayed, and then they want to get revenge for that. And so that’s one of the reasons that brand love isn’t the right strategy for every company. If you want to adopt a brand love strategy, you need to make a commitment to actually being concerned with the customer’s best interests and trying to do that. Even if there are times when that means sacrificing a little bit of profit in the moment. It might mean not squeezing every last dime of profit out of every interaction. Because our model for what love is about with people is exactly a relationship where they’re not trying to squeeze every last ounce of benefit out of every interaction. They’re in this relationship to help you. And then in the long run, they also benefit from that. So if you’re not willing to do that, you’re better off not trying to create that relationship and then violating the rules of that relationship, which then leads people to feel they want revenge on you.
[01:51:05.29] – Aaron
So that’s one scenario of a divorce, which is very bad. But there’s another scenario of divorce, which is a consumer who is really happy with the brand but no longer needs it because something has changed in their life. So this, the classic, would be the parent who just loves this baby product, but then the kid grows up and they don’t need the baby product anymore because their kid’s older. They may get a little bit of a divorce from a brand, but you know who the most likely people are to recommend a brand? They’re not people who buy the brand the most regularly. The most likely people to recommend a brand are the people who used to buy it regularly and don’t buy it anymore because they don’t need it anymore, not because they don’t like it. Those are the people who run around telling everybody, You want to buy this brand because they still feel this emotional connection to the brand, but they can’t express that through buying the brand. So they express that through recommending the brand to other people.
[01:52:13.16] – Andi
That’s fascinating. And Exactly, because you often hear marketers talk about once the customer’s gone, they’re gone. And I understand that we spend all our time focusing on either new customer recruitment or repeat business or brand loyalty, whatever you call it. And if someone’s They’ve moved on from being a customer, trying to win them back. Now, in some cases, like you say, in baby products, they don’t worry too much about that because obviously, they know it’s only for a certain part of your life. But it’s really interesting. Actually, you probably should try and keep those people in your bubble because they love your brand and will refer you more. That’s fascinating. Do you know any brands who do that really well, who still work with those people? Or is it just It’s hard to measure and to put into a marketing plan?
[01:53:05.14] – Aaron
I just don’t know. It’s a great idea to work with that. If any of the viewers or listeners to this podcast know of a brand that’s using that strategy actively, please send them my way. I’d love to talk to them, but I’m not aware of any companies really doing it now. Right.
[01:53:26.08] – Andi
Fascinating stuff. That’s blown my mind, that. Brilliant stuff. Well, look, we’re getting to the end, Aaron. So my last question to everybody is always the same. Can you recommend a book, a podcast, or something where you would send people, something you would recommend to the audience? Not your own, though, obviously, because I’m going to recommend that in a moment.
[01:53:44.10] – Aaron
Very good. So there’s a book called Creating Superfans by Brittany Hodak. And superfans and love are the same thing. Superfan is just someone who loves a brand. There’s a lot of different words out there. Consultants really want you to use their word. I don’t care whether you use my word or somebody else’s word. It’s the same stuff psychologically, and it’s all important. What she does is she’s not an academic. She doesn’t go into the science behind everything, but she’s very good on applied mechanisms. Here’s what you need to do every day at work to get people to love your brands a little bit more, or using her terminology, get them to be bigger super fans of your brand. So I think it’s a really nice book, and she’s done a good job with it, and it’s got a lot of useful advice in it. So that would be something I’d recommend.
[01:54:50.03] – Andi
Brilliant. Well, there’s a link in the show notes to that. And I will give one final recommendation to The Things We Love by the love doctor himself, Aaron Ahuvier. So thank you very much for your time, Aaron. And again, there’s a link in the show notes to be able to get that book. Where do people find you online if they want to reach out to and if they want to get in touch?
[01:55:09.01] – Aaron
I have a website, Dr. Brand Love. So it’s D-R-Brand Love, or you can spell it out, drbrandlove. Com. And that’s got information about my speaking, ways to contact me, and that’s probably the best place to get more about me.
[01:55:30.02] – Andi
Brilliant. Well, look, thank you very much for coming on today, Aaron. I have loved having you on the show, and I hope everyone else out there has loved listening to this episode and found it useful. Thanks very much for your time.
[01:55:40.02] – Aaron
Andi, thank you so much for having me. It’s been a blast and a privilege.