Love Through The Ages (A Brief History Of Brand Love)

Introduced by Shimp and Madden (1988), Brand Love has gained a lot of interest from market researchers in recent years, and for a good reason.

Brand love is concerned with the formation of emotional bonds in Consumer-Brand Relationships (CBRs), the likes of which both parties might have with other people! Interestingly, Brand Love is related to the consumer’s emotional attachment to the brand, which is characterised by a strong positive emotional experience related to the brand, leading to the brand dominating the cognition of the consumer, causing them to interact more with the brand, and reinforcing the CBR (Nawaz et al., 2020).

Such relationships appear to be an essential component in the success of a brand and appear to be closely linked to brand equity and positively associated with consumer purchase behaviour and loyalty, particularly in competitive markets!

Researchers have suggested that, for a consumer to truly feel love for a brand, the brand becomes integrated into the consumer’s sense of self (Ahuvia, 1993). This certainly explains why consumers are so loyal to the brands they love!

The takeaway

To be successful in competitive markets today, every brand should focus on developing and maintaining successful long-term CBRs, and Brand Love is the perfect metric for measuring this.

BrandVision, the Brand Wheel and Brand Love

Given Brand Love’s importance, this metric now makes up one of our eight key metrics in Brand Equity wheel, BrandVision’s benchmark for Equity measurement, combining the best practices from Psychological Research, Marketing Research, Behavioural Economic Theory and System 1 Thinking.

Each metric allows us to identify a brand’s strengths and weaknesses and generates an overall Brand Equity score which can be tracked over time. BrandVision gives our clients the essential tools to understand how their brand sits alongside competitors, giving you the insights you need to better understand and develop your brand to help it grow and flourish!

In the wheel, Brand Love sits alongside Emotion under our ‘Delight’ theme, and a score is generated by evaluating Love on three powerful facets; Relevance, Need and Trust.

Chocolate Case Study

In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, we conducted research on chocolate gift box brands using our powerful strategic brand tracking system; BrandVision.

The Market

The act of gifting chocolate has been around since the Aztecs and the Mayans, but it wasn’t until 1853 that the first chocolate box was created by Richard Cadbury, the Son of the founder of Cadbury. The chocolate box has been a time-honoured symbol of love and appreciation and is regularly bought and received by lovers worldwide on Valentine’s Day. In the U.S., an annual $36 million is spent on chocolate gifting on Valentine’s Day. Each year, Valentine’s Day spending increases dramatically due to inflation, with 2023 set to be the highest Valentine’s Day spending on record.

Heroes, Lindt and Celebrations came out as the brands most loved among the consumers that we spoke to, including most trusted, most needed and most ‘for them’. Although Guylian performed well, it received less Brand Love compared to it’s competitor brands.

When we asked consumers whether they would consider purchasing from each of these brands, Celebrations was the front runner with 63% of the sample agreeing, closely followed by Heroes and Lindt, with 60% of the sample agreeing. In line with their Brand Love score, only 40% agreed that they would consider purchasing from Guylian.

Similarly, when we asked consumers which chocolate gift box brands they had purchased from in the last 12 months, Celebrations was purchased in 48% of the sample (the highest amount), with Heroes (43%) and Lindt (37%) slightly less, and Guylian purchased by only 18% of the sample.

The take-home

Brand Love is an excellent predictor of brand success and is strongly predictive of brand consideration and brand purchase! Contact us today to measure your Brand Love to see how you sit amongst your competitors, and to learn how to become a best-loved brand.

Put Brand Love & Brand Momentum to Work

To find out more, get your copy of Brand Momentum, the groundbreaking book that’s packed with cutting-edge research, innovative strategies, and the psychology behind momentum theory. This is the playbook every marketer and business leader needs in their arsenal to understand how brands truly grow.

To put Brand Momentum to Work in your business, reach out to the experts at Vision One. Our qualitative and quantitative research expertise has helped hundreds of organisations make better decisions and track marketing performance.

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