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Creating and retaining consumer emotional attachment to brands

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Karl Treacher is the CEO of Brand Behaviour, a brand psychology and intelligence group. Brand Behaviour’s team of psychologists and behavioural scientists observe, audit, report and commentate on the relationships that customers have with all brands in select commercial arenas.

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Brands that turn their backs on their consumers’ emotional bond to them do so at their own peril, writes Karl Treacher.

Do people call you ‘big rig’? Do you tell yourself that you eat because you are unhappy and you are unhappy because you eat? Well, this isn’t an article that will help you understand why you have chosen to decrease the number of days you have on the planet in return for a doughnut. Overweight or not, you will be aware of the expression ‘love handles’. Love handles are the fat deposits above your hips that supposedly give your lover something to hold onto.

While this definition does an excellent job of taking the magic out of physical intimacy, it also does an equally excellent job of providing a wonderful analogy around human brand association. People love to ‘hold onto’ things, and brands are no different.

What is it about your brand that people can hold on to? Humans want connection. People look for ‘handles’ or something they can hold onto for everything they come in contact with. It makes sense that ‘brandles’ are the emotional components of a brand that avail themselves for human connection. The brands that we find ourselves most attracted to, and feel strongest about, have brandles that we love; ‘love brandles’. In marketing terms, love brandles are compelling emotional brand values that resonate with a market or market segment.

Most love brandles are well recognised by brand custodians, managers and the like, and accordingly these brands tend to position communication from this appealing and distinct place of relevance.

For instance, when Nudie Juice launched, it did so from a position of purity and simplicity: fruit squeezed into a bottle without anything else. “Naked, as nature intended.” This was done in a market flooded with nutrient-based sales lines like ‘antioxidant stack’ and ‘3xRDI of Vit C in 275ml’. Nudie quickly became the brand of choice in juice because people loved the very tangible values of purity and simplicity. Some of the other brandles included the fact that Nudie was a privately-owned Australian company, and the cuteness of the brand concept’s visual identity was for many a brandle in its own right. Only time will tell if the latest Nudie ventures (soup, yoghurt and a joint venture with Nestlé) will enhance its customers’ grips, or see them let go in confusion.

Another brand that has poured millions into its love brandles is surf-turned-fashion brand Quiksilver. Any surfer (myself included) will tell you that ‘Quiky’ has always stood for a hardcore, ‘go hard or go home’ brand experience. Seen as a brand that promotes unconventional excellence, Quiksilver has done a magnificent job of sustaining the things its market loves about it, while deviating heavily from its initial product offerings. Twenty years ago Quiksilver was all about wetsuits and short boards. Now it competes as one of the world’s top 10 lifestyle clothing companies.

Billabong is also in the same league, thanks to international western trends of casualness and anti-conservatism. While being seen as a much more mainstream brand, both Billabong and Quiksilver alike continue to pump significant money into the values that their customers love to hold on to.

In Quiksilver’s case, some of its critical brandles are surf legends. This being the case, it is important that the affection attributed to such a brandle is acknowledged and maintained. Arguably Australia’s most famous surfer, Tom Carroll, is one such legend. After signing a five-year contract with Quiksilver, making him surfing’s first ‘million-dollar man’ in 1989, Carroll has remained on the payroll and performed many brand associated functions, embodying many of the brand’s values through his personal and sporting behaviour. Billabong’s Dave Rastovich performs the very same role, despite the obvious disparity of behaviour between the two.

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