In the very first episode of ‘Mad Men’, a show that finally explained our advertising jobs to our spouses, and no, not the drinking and promiscuity, Don Draper scoffs at the concept of love.
He says love was invented by ad-writers like us to sell things.
Oh, what a far place we’ve come from that thought process today. We now have leaders; agency, brand, and the new-age branding gurus using the phrase ‘brand love’ so casually that I sometimes wonder if I’m the problem. Am I emotionally unavailable to my laundry detergent or even my soap? Why don’t I “love” brands? Am I incapable of that feeling?
Let’s see. I love my family, some of my friends, and dogs. Of course, dogs. But when I see someone else drinking my brand of coffee, I feel no jealousy. I dug deeper and uncovered an uncomfortable truth: brand love doesn’t exist.
“But we’ve used this brand for three generations” or “I know someone who drinks only one brand of tea.”
We hear such examples often and mistake them for evidence that brand love is real. They’re just personal stories, not broad behaviour.
Flip the question: How many of your brand’s customers actually feel this way?
If you study that simple figure, you’ll realise you’re strategising a fairy tale. The percentage of people who have feelings for your brand is so tiny that it might as well be zero. Nobody loves your brand.
So why did this fable spread? Easy. We’re an industry of extremely undertrained professionals with a lot of confidence. Four accountants will land on one solution; four marketers will give you eight.
A basic understanding of the NBD–Dirichlet model shows that most brand buyers are light buyers. Most of your sales come from people who buy so rarely they don’t even think of you until they need to. You don’t need a stats degree; even a shallow dive into the model will bust half the myths cluttering your marketing mind.
Here’s another example from Byron Sharp’s ‘How Brands Grow’ (Chapter 7: Passionate consumer commitment).
Do you think Harley-Davidson is a loved brand? Of course, you do. People get Harley tattoos. Imagine a brand so loved that people are willing to burn their skin and permanently emboss the logo on their body.
Now guess how much of Harley-Davidson’s sales come from these passionate fans? 3.5%.
That’s it. Makes for a great story but barely contributes to the sales. Imagine if Harley spent most of its time trying to micro-target this segment because they agree with the Beatles that all you need is love. It would be a disaster.
Another contributor to this confusion is research specifically, misinterpreted research. Countless case studies highlight how people who bought a brand claim they “love” it. But peer-reviewed evidence shows behaviour shapes attitude, not the other way around. People justify their purchase decisions by claiming love. A physicist-turned-marketer once explained it to me with a darker analogy: people in abusive relationships often publicly defend their partners because the dissonance would be unbearable if they admitted they were unhappy yet stayed.
So if love for brands doesn’t exist, what should brands actually do?
Simple:
Be mentally and physically available when people are buying from your category. Nothing replaces broad-reach, impactful, salient advertising that refreshes memory structures. When you understand that light, infrequent buyers drive your sales, this becomes obvious.
The tiny minority that claims to love you will remember you anyway. The ones who don’t care about you — the real source of your revenue — need reminding you exist.
