‘Brand Love’ – another misleading and distracting idea that professional Marketers

should avoid.

John Dawes, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute

Abstract
Marketers are induced to believe that they can engender ‘brand love’ for their brands – a
deep emotional connection between consumer and brand. The idea of brand love is
counter to widespread evidence about how consumers actually behave. Nevertheless,
consultants, researchers and assorted gurus promulgate the idea, often with a financial
incentive to do so. Marketers should eschew the idea of brand love.

Introduction
This morning I woke to the sound of my Panasonic clock radio. I had a shower using
Palmolive shower gel. I ate some store-brand oats with a brand of milk I don't recall. I
brushed my teeth with Colgate toothpaste and a brand of toothbrush I have never taken
notice of. I worked at home for a while on my Apple Macbook, using Microsoft Excel
and Word. I picked up my iPhone and wallet and left home to catch the bus, the bus
service run by a branded contractor the name of which escapes me. I had lunch at a
Mexican fast-fresh outlet called Burp and drank a brand of fruit juice I can't recall. This
evening, I consumed a West End Draught Beer, had spaghetti bolognaise with Dolmio
spaghetti sauce. So far that's about ten brands used in the day. There will have been
more, but I don't recall them. If I thought harder the list might stretch to 20 brands I used
in the course of one day. The point is I gave little thought to any of these brands - they
are just there, waiting to be used. As long as they perform as I expect, I don't think about
them for more than a microsecond at a time. Indeed if I'm not actually using them at the
time, or buying them at the time, I don't think about them one iota. Take this test - what
brand of shampoo is in your shower right now - what brand of tires are on your car - what
brand of yoghurt is in your refrigerator ? Likely answer - you don't even know without
looking !

So these brands are important in your life - as mine are to mine - in the sense that we
have access to them, we buy them, we use them. They allow us to live our life with the
level of convenience and quality that millions of other consumers are used to.

In the main you and I are satisfied with our brands. Some of them, I really like - one is a
local drink called Coopers Pale Ale - but I only buy it as an occasional treat. And of
course, while I buy and consume these brands, I don't have any sense of a 'relationship'
with them. I'm too busy with important things - family, career, finances, health - the big
things. I have relationships with other people. I don't need relationships with beer,
toothpaste or insurance brands. And neither do you (well, ok you need an insurance
provider, but you don't need to be engaged to them).

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But that's not what many marketers and academic marketing teachers think. Marketing is
rife with the idea of building brand - customer relationships - building them on the basis
of humanistic concepts of love and attachment. Consider these examples I found from a
web search at the time of writing.

Falling in love is a good analogy for the branding process... All across America people
are falling in love with their brands.

Brands sit on a love curve … at the Beloved stage, consumers become outspoken fans
…[who] would never switch …

Many marketers are great at wooing a "first date" with consumers -- yet lousy at creating
a lasting marriage between buyer and brand

Companies must create brand passion, and "business as usual" just won't do.

Brands can become "Lovemarks [that] reach your heart as well as your mind, creating
an intimate, emotional connection that you just can’t live without".

A prominent US Professor says he will ... explain what exactly brand love is, how it
works psychologically, and how to create brand love relationships with consumers.
Presumably for a fee.

A recent study in the prestigious Journal of Marketing (Batra et al., 2012) extensively
canvassed the romantic love literature to delve into the concept of brand love. The study
used a survey that asked respondents - i.e., college students - to rate their level of love for
an electronics brand, but the students were told to pick a brand that I love. So they told
people, you love that brand. Do you think that's leading people a bit ? I do.

There are even web sites for 'most loved brands,' and even most loved industries ! But
with the finance industry scoring only 5.2 on a 10-point 'love scale' the whole concept
becomes even more ridiculous. Plainly, what people are scoring is something along the
lines of likeability, not 'love'.

Perhaps some people do feel a strong connection to say, their local school, or a sports
team - these are sometimes invoked as brands that engender love. But such examples are
hardly a good representation of the myriad of brands we encounter and use. When was
the last time you craved for and felt passionate about a brand of garden fertiliser, power
tool, flyspray, telco or dry-cleaner ? Or yoghurt, photocopy paper, washing powder or
refrigerator ?

Now, people might sometimes say “I Love my new TV” or “I love a Beer after work.”
But that use of the word love simply does not correspond with what we commonly
understand the word love to mean – i.e., a deep emotional attachment to another.
Whereas branding consultants and other players are trying to make marketers believe

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they can achieve that deep emotion for brands as exists between people. They cannot.

So we need to question this popular idea of brand love / relationship that seem so counter
to commonplace experience. Perhaps we should also remind ourselves that the people
promoting these ideas usually want to make money from them - they want to sell
consultancies, database systems, IT and market research. So perhaps a profit motive gets
in the way of objectivity - or, the promulgators of the idea simply get carried away with it
because it seems so hot.

It is also a sobering thought that this brand love / brand relationships movement flies in
the face of decades of research on actual consumer purchasing. That research shows
most consumers are only semi-loyal to any given brand. For example, the average
consumer of a package goods brand gives it about 1/3 of their category requirements
(Uncles et al., 1994, Bhattacharya, 1997). Solely loyal brand buyers are rare, often only
around 10% of the customer base in a year (Uncles et al., 1995, Ehrenberg et al., 2004)
and tend to be infrequent buyers of the category. Purchasers of popular brands of cars and
IT products typically have about a 50% repeat purchase rate (e.g. Colombo and Morrison,
1989, Colombo et al., 2000). Therefore, brand love, or relationships, involving super-
high loyalty and advocacy, if they exist at all, exist only among a tiny minority. So while
companies that sell the idea of brand love – like say, Lovemarks – publish touching
anecdotes written by consumers about a brand they have some sentimental attachment to
(like, “My first watch was a Casio …”) – remember these are exceptions to the millions
of other consumers to whom the brand is just a brand that they know and use.

Conclusion
The moral of the story is, everyday experience tells us there are too many brands, and too
little time, to develop 'relationships' or 'brand love' or 'brand attachment' to anything like
the extent some misguided marketing professors - or canny industry players who sell the
latest fad to marketers - say. Many brands have a few people who love them - take the
fellow who has eaten 10,000 Big Macs as reported in Super Size Me. But realistic
marketing should consider the people who represent the majority of your customer base,
not fixate on the tiny few who are really quite unusual. Go for customers wherever they
may be, and don’t be distracted by love !

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Batra, R., Ahuvia, A. & Bagozzi, R. (2012), "Brand Love", Journal of Marketing, 76, 2,
1-16
Bhattacharya, C. B. (1997), "Is Your Brand's Loyalty Too Much, Too Little, or Just
Right? Explaining Deviations in Loyalty from the Dirichlet Norm", International
Journal of Research in Marketing, 14, 5, 421-435
Colombo, R., Ehrenberg, A. & Sabavala, D. (2000), "Diversity in analyzing brand-
switching tables: The car challenge", Canadian Journal of Marketing Research,
19, 23-36
Colombo, R. & Morrison, D. G. (1989), "A Brand Switching Model With Implications
for Marketing Strategies", Marketing Science, 8, 1, 89-99
Ehrenberg, A. S. C., Uncles, M. D. & Goodhardt, G. G. (2004), "Understanding brand
performance measures: using Dirichlet benchmarks", Journal of Business
Research, 57, 12, 1307-1325
Uncles, M., Ehrenberg, A. & Hammond, K. (1995), "Patterns of Buyer Behavior:
Regularities, Models, and Extensions", Marketing Science, 14, 3, Part 2 of 2,
G61-G70
Uncles, M. D., Hammond, K. A., Ehrenberg, A. S. C. & Davies, R. E. (1994), "A
Replication Study of Two Brand-Loyalty Measures", European Journal of
Operational Research, 76, 2, 375-385

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