What Makes Consumers Passionate About Brands?
When the pressures mount on the bottom line, CMOs typically look to the expense side of products, both R&D and marketing. However, one should not miss the opportunity that brand passion creates to convince enthusiastic consumers to spend their financial and social currency…while exhorting friends and family to follow suit.
There are seven key ways to create passion and develop a deep relationship with consumers.
Work the Worldview, Not Age, Race or Gender
The passion brands (Apple, Sony, American Express, Starbucks, Folger’s, Target, Nordstrom, Craig’s List, Whole Foods, Toys “R” Us, Camel, Absolut, Kraft, Cadillac, BMW, Acura, Infiniti, Jeep, and Arizona Iced Tea) rarely target consumers in a traditional way. More often, they identify shared values about the world and how it works and then illustrate how the brand shares that vision.
Differentiate on Design
Consumers respond to clever, intuitive products. Great design engages. There’s a joy in a well-designed idea that trumps other performance features. We just want to get our heads around it.
Passionistas as Brand Stewards
Nothing brings a brand down more quickly than an interchangeable parts philosophy in the recruitment, hiring, and rewarding of the line staff. Careerists who jump from one company may be building their own brand, but they will neither feel nor fuel passion. Passion isn’t static, in brands or people. Once people have become passionate about your brand, it takes true passionistas to ensure that the brand continues to grow and evolve in relevant ways. Don’t take your consumers or their passion for your brand for granted.
Know They Know You Need Them
We are in a tremendously aware marketing epoch. Our vocabulary and humor are shaped by an “insider’s” sensibility to marketing and the co-dependence of the brand/consumer liaison.
Simply, there are no un-focused group people left. Research must get beyond the “been there, done that” savvy of modern consumers. Get out and watch people in bars, malls, grocery stores, movies, sports events, regardless of the category. Talk to them. Follow them while they shop. Engage them. Notice that you are one of them.
Democratize the Brand
Brand engagement comes from mutating, by responding to the beat of the people who love you. Let them in. Easier said that done, if you’re a physical product sold in a physical store and not a web-based entity, but still.
The ability of the consumer to have it “my way” is a tremendous engine of ownership. Starbucks with its “mocha-cappuccino-double-shot-skinny” ethos is the poster child of this tactic; so is the Scion with its personalization of everything from horsepower to pin striping to stick shift knobs.
Mine the Mythos
Passion brands have a heritage and they respect it. They know what makes up the DNA of the brand and how far they can go without putting their genetic code at risk. This doesn’t mean they are stogy, just that they know how their personality can legitimately evolve.
Brand the Buzz
I don’t mean that companies should hire a bunch of twentysomethings to dress in black and ask for your product in clubs. This is about being genuinely interesting and engaging, being a brand that people want to talk ” do?
In a world jammed full of commodity products and services, passion can be a defining quality that can set your brand above the competition and provide a roadmap to help keep you out front for the long haul.
Kate Newlin is the author of “Passion Brands: Why Some Brands Are Just Gotta Have, Drive All Night For and Tell All Your Friends About.”
