The force of love on trailers

I started to talk about love due to one big question that would not go away. What comes after brands? Brands have had a dream run pumping the global economy. They have defined and grown marketing by improving its complexity and scale. They have spread out around the globe and come back home again.

The journey from products to trademarks to brands is one of the 20th. Now this journey is coming to an end and it's very late for Brand-Aid. Trademarks have long been table-stakes. Now brands too are table-stakes.

Both are useful in the quest for differentiation and are still basic to survival, but 1 they are not winning game – breaker. It is time to admit it. Brands are dead. They are struggling to deal with the demand for improvement, flexibility and speed, together with the requirement to establish close relationships with consumers.

A powerful dynamic has been driving business for decades and brands are trapped in its path. It's a relentless process, turning what we truly value into the common place. Commodification – the process that wears down distinctions, rapidly cycles through innovations and pushes for higher standards of performance and quality because that is what everybody else is doing.

Everyone in business is straggling with this problem in one guise or another. The inevitable result? Pressure on margins and on price at the very time consumers are pushing in the other direction. They are more demanding, less loyal, extremely cynical and difficult to persuad of anything.

Most people nod at the idea that traditional transactions should be changed into relationships but 2 they don't know what to do next. My advice is to get your nose out of reports and statistics and look to emotional associations.

And,

certainly, look most closely at the strongest emotional connection of all – love. Love is the path to deep emotional associations within businesses, with consumers, with partners, with allies. Here are eight insights that exemplify the role Love is born to play.

1) Love Creates Lovemarks
Some brands are so far ahead of the pack that they have become not just "Super Brands" or "Brands plus." They have escaped the commodity trap and evolved into something different altogether.

Charles Darwin would have got it straight off. Fish to lizard. Monkey to man. Product to Trademark. Trademark to Brand. Brand to lovemark. Lovemarks are a game-breaking opportunity to reinvent branding. They place brands where they should be, at the emotional heart. Lovemarks stir locality beyond reason.

Lovemarks are personal. They can be local or global or anywhere in between. Whatever the scale, they stand out from the crowd. Lovemarks are the charismatic brands that people love and fiercely guard. If you made a list of Lovemarks, it would be different from mine because that is the nature of Love.

2) Love Stirs People
All the stuff we pushed out of business in the last century needs to feel what is basic personally, not just analyze it in others. We basic transform management with inspiration and engage both head and heart.

This is exactly what Love can do. A study of neural activity at Emory University, Atlanta, revealed that the small act of assisting with another person, of choosing conviction over doubt, generosity over selfishness, makes the brain light up with quiet joyfulness.

Success today should be about more than management and doing things right. And it should be about more than leadership and doing right things. What do all leaders need to succeed? Followers. Who wants to admit to having "born to follow" tattooed on their back?

Success in business today depend not on management or on leadership however on inspiration – and at its best, inspiration is about Love.

3) Love Brings Back Emotion
We can all feel it. Emotion is back in vogue. In the grand old brand days, emotion was a clip-on. Brands flourished in the rational world of benefits. The advertising team was there to pipe on some emotional icing – and that was that. However over the past two decades, science moved deeper in the human mind.

It turned out that the human brain is more complex, more densely connected and more mysterious than any of us dreamt. Study after study has showed that if the emotion centers of our brain are damaged in some way, we don't just lose the ability to laugh or cry. We lose the ability to make decisions.

The neurologist Donald Calne illustrates it brilliantly: "The basic difference between emotion and reason is that emotion leads to action while reason leads to conclusions." More emotion equals more action. That's what the "motion" part of emotion is all about.

Now there is a big loud alarm bell for every business right there. Emotion and reason are knotted, however when they conflict – emotion wins every time. Without the fleeting and intense stimulus of emotion, rational thought winds down and disintegrates. Emotion is an unlimited resource. It controls our rationality and guides our decision-making.

4) Love Gives Respect New Meaning
I talk more about Love than respect because we all do respect so much better. We have made enormous investments in performance, innovation, quality, trust and all the rest for decades.

And we would all be in agreement that we made fantastic progress. The problem is that it was all in one direction towards what I call the "er" words – newer, brighter, stronger, faster. And the really big problem is that they take us head on against the most frightening "er" world of all: Cheaper.

This is what happens to you when you slip down the value chain. You become willing to give away more for less just to hang aboucontinue in the game even worse you put all your effort into what has just become table-stakes. Lots of puff for not much stuff.

In the twenty first century, great performance is no more than what consumers look forward and demand. Cars start first time, the fries are always crisp and the dishes shine. Today every one has to earn Respect just to stay in the game. Now the new challenge is Love, and Love requires the same investment and the same rigor we brought to the capture of Respect.

Love needs Respect right from the start. Without it, we're not talking about Love; we're talking about a fad or infatuation – compelling and fun however certainly not capable of stimulating loyalty of any kind.

5) Love Draws on Mystery, Sensuality and Intimacy
We all know the power of mystery, sensuality and intimacy from our own lives. The obvious next question, then, is "Why should relationships in business be any different? My answer is straightforward. They are not.

Business too needs mystery, sensuality and intimacy. Mystery draws together the stories, metaphors and dreams that give a relationship texture. Not surprisingly, after the metric mania of the twenty firstcentury, mystery is again taking centre-stage.

What we don't know starts to be as basic as what we do know. The five senses pull us towards sensuality – vision, sound, smell, touch, taste. This is how human beings experience the world. Sensuality is a portal to the emotions and intimacy, where thinking and feeling come together most closely; the art of knowing the right thing to do is called empathy.

Inspiration pulled back to a positive attitude and Love diluted to "like". By focusing on mystery, sensuality and intimacy, business-as-usual can be changed with new emotions and new ideas.

6) Love Connects with Consumers
Consumers are the heart of any enterprise, and eventually, businesses are starting to comprehend it. People want control over their lives. They are more sophisticated and, best of all, they keep changing. This is the new consumer.

To respond to this new reality calls for a profound shift in how to develop ideas and insights that can truly touch consumers. What has the power to get us there? The emotional commotions created by love.

Our new evolved consumers want to connect in more ways with brands. They are seeking new emotional associations. More people are living alone and it is projected that far more will be alone over the coming decade.

To touch these customers straightforwardly you ought to listen to them. That's how you can feel the shifts in temperature, not just read about them in market research reports. Most businesses never get that close. They set up a program of consumer contact, rather than taking the pulse. Invest in Love and you can connect with people and you can cultivate stable relationships.

In their most evolved form, these relationships give consumers a direct impact on design, production, distribution and marketing, and give you stable new opportunity to create long-time value.

7) Love Revivers Market Research
Researchers turned down a dead end a decade or so ago and they have been struggling to read the sings ever since, once they had corralled what could be measured, everything that couldn't was simply ignore. The problem was, certainly, that everything of value cannot be measured. In fact, not much of value can.

We are in danger of valuing most highly those things that we can measure most accurately. Hence we are in danger of being exactly wrong rather than approximately right. A further problem is that the information collected by most conventional research methods has become a commodity. All the big players have access to pretty much the same information.

And not only do they have the same data, they have the same processes for dealing, with it. That's not where the game is going to be won and it is of course no help in creating emotional associations with consumers.

We need research to help us find out what we don't know. And then we need research to stir us to go further and deeper. We need research to absorb many perspectives – and make sense of them. And, primarily, we need research that puts consumers at the centre rather than at the base of a very large pyramid.

This is the only kind of research that will come close enough to Love and to emotional connections to make a difference. To have a meaningful understanding of consumers calls for creativity and insights as well as accuracy and depth.

8) Love Loves the Local
People live in the local. They live in real, distinctive places and they love it there. I have never met a global consumer and I never look forward to. We define ourselves by our differences. Differences have huge value because they are the energy of powerful emotional associations.

Take the assault on China. Emerging markets remain critical to growth. There are millions and millions of people wanting to take part in the ease, opportunity and spirit of the modern. However they want it their way.

International corporations do not have to move back. Billion-dollar brands remain an inspiring goal. We certainly want more of them for our clients! We just need to get smarter. "Think global, act local" is the wrong way. And "Act global, think local" is not much better. Starting with the local is totally right, but "think" is all wrong.

"Think" is not action, "Think" is not fast or transforming, emotional or inspiring. What works better? "Act local, go global" – action at both levels. Only Love
encourages loyalty beyond reason. Lovemarks are a very plain idea. They come from deep inside what every human being wants and needs most – Love. How contradictory that the loyalty beyond reason we are searching for should be only a heartbeat away from each of us.

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