3 Strategies to Spark and Encourage Brand Love

Love makes the world go round, even the world of business. What else would explain over 70 percent of consumers spending more on a product sold by a brand they love even when there’s a cheaper alternative of the same, or even superior, quality?

As a business owner, this makes building a brand that your target customers will love one of your top priorities. If you can inspire brand love, you’ll generate more sales revenue and it will be easier to foster brand loyalty.

Here’s the thing with love, though. Sometimes it’s at first sight. Other times you have to work hard to pursue someone and demonstrate that you and them can be a beautiful love story. In business, it’s often the latter.

The good news is there’s a formula for brands looking to capture the hearts of their customers. Implement these branding strategies:

1. Humanize Your Brand

People fall in love with people. But when they fall in love with things, those things will usually have human-like characteristics. This is why you need to humanize your brand.

Start by cultivating a brand personality that you know will elicit an emotional response from your target audience. If you’re a luxury watch brand, for example, build a personality around sophistication. If you’re an outdoor living brand, you want to exude ruggedness.

There are many things that go into humanizing a brand, including the choice of your business name, logo, color palette, tagline, and even location. Ensure your employees are well-trained in customer service so that they’re able to give customers personalized brand experiences.

Your messaging also matters. Use the “about us” page, for instance, to tell the world the story of your business, as well as its mission and vision.

2. Shared Values with Customers

Ever fallen in love with someone so quickly only for the feeling to cool down after you got to know them better? They might have had the looks to make your heart throb, but perhaps they had a habit of lying—a deal breaker for you.

The same applies to brands. It doesn’t match how much you invest in making the brand visually appealing. If your brand values don’t align with those of your customers, the love will be short-lived. Over 80 percent of consumers want to do business with brands with aligned purposes and values.

This means you need to establish what your customers’ values are and infuse them into your operations. For example, if your customers are passionate about making the world a better place, your brand has to show and demonstrate a commitment to the same.

You can invest in corporate social responsibility programs that solve socioeconomic issues in your community. If you do, your business will reap several other benefits of corporate social responsibility.

3. Gifting Is a Love Language

Fewer things show love and affection than a thoughtful gift. Your customers are special to you and gifts will help strengthen the love they have for your brand.

Gifting doesn’t necessarily mean sending gifts to individual customers—although that won’t hurt if the nature of your business allows it. Running a loyalty program with attractive rewards, such as unbeatable discounts and crazy promos (buy two for the price of one), will yield a similar effect to gifting.

Brand Love Is Real

Love isn’t just for humans. Brand love is a powerful emotion that leads to meaningful (read profitable) relationships between businesses and their customers. But you have to make the first move.

What are you doing to make your brand more loveable? Please share with us in the comments section below!