What’s Love Got to Do With Branding?
by Kathy Seaton
A lot. It might sound crazy, but the idea of loving something (or even someone) is closely tied to building a brand.
Sasha Strauss, well known for global brand building, serves as Managing Director and Founder of Innovation Protocol and is an Adjunct Professor for UC Irvine, UCLA, and USC. He presented From Branding with Love. Wowza! His delivery is absolutely amazing.
Believe it or not, he’s correlated branding with love. His argument? We all want to be loved and we prefer things (or people) if we love them. Makes sense right? The power of a brand can bring people together to create a following in unprecedented ways. Ways that help us make decisions for ourselves. Products, politics, and religion—can all be summed up in a brand. It’s why I prefer the MAC over the PC, Pepsi over Coke, and Rihanna to Lady Gaga.
Brands influence our lives and color our perceptions of the world. But what does it take to build a brand that can make us ambassadors for life? Well, if you follow Strauss’ notion, love has everything to do with it.
This isn’t Branding 101 crap, this is much deeper than that. There was a point in corporate America where businesses realized that building a brand and broadcasting their message was ultimately important. And they carried their message across all sorts of various mediums, in an effort to increase our awareness and persuade us into making a buying decision. Then enter social media, offering the possibility of telling people everything, at anytime, potentially to millions of people.
We have information pushed at us everywhere we go, the TV, in the car, on the freeway, at the airport, online, and the list grows longer everyday. It’s become chaotic—messages flying at us at a pace that we can’t keep up with.
And in this lies the massive challenge for businesses and brands across the world. How to break through the clutter. How to make an impact. How to create remembrance. How to build a following.
These questions, if answered correctly, can be the basis for developing a relevant, an emotional, and thought provoking brand.
But how to you do that? Well, let’s go back to Strauss. You do it with love. And by that he means that it’s not just telling a story, it’s really about building the RIGHT story (true and authentic), and telling it over and over with explicitly and consistency.
Think about it this way, work might be what you do, but it’s not who you are. There is a story that defines you and the same should be true when you’re building a brand.
We’re in a world where “being present” isn’t possible. There’s just too much, all of the time. So to break through that wall, and make a person listen (and present), a brand must make a connection with its audience. A connection that’s built from passion, honesty, and is one that is truly unadulterated.
There is a great opportunity to tell your story. And to tell it in such a provocative way that people will follow and believe in you and your brand whole heartedly.
Where there is love, there is a brand.