Love Is Not Equal

Whatever people say about love, it is not equal. It is not felt equally, it is not offered to others in the same, evenly proportioned amounts. Yes, you may love your kids equally, but you are attached to them differently.

And we can think of love in the same way as it applies to brands. We don’t adore the brands in our life in equal amounts, and yet we are attached to them uniquely, all for different reasons. In fact, many brands we don’t even love, we don’t like, and quite honestly we don’t even use. We reject them for a variety of reasons.

These varied relationships with brands, from “disgust” to “like” to “love”, is actually something that can be scaled and measured. What we call it is brand engagement, and it is the starting point for thinking about where your brand is today in consumers’ minds and where it could possibly aspire to be.

What we always find to be helpful is putting a personal lens to brand engagement, because it helps to set context about how you feel about brands and their meaning, only and especially to you. This personalization forces you to scale varied brands uniquely, and we classify the five different “degrees of engagement” as follows:

Recognition is different than “equity”, and it does not imply you even use the brand

You interact with and utilize the brand, but if you could use another, you probably would.

You are a consumer of the brand in your every day life, but it is a transactional or functional relationship

You enjoy the brand, think of it highly, even get pleasure from it

You are a passionate advocate of this brand, to the point of telling others how great it is.

There are a multitude of brands that we know, we recognize, but for some reason or another we have little functional relationship with. I don’t take long bus trips like Greyhound offers, I know of RadioShack and its long history but never go there, and I don’t play tennis, so Penn tennis balls fall into this category. Recognize them all, I just don’t personally use any of them.

This is the most ominous category of the bunch, because it says that you are using the brand but don’t really like it. It also says that you would switch from it if you could and if there were a better alternative. For me personally, Staples is one of those brands in my life that I do not adore (along with the NY Metro Subway), but I occasionally use simply out of convenience, maybe 4 times a year. Remember, the brands you categorize don’t all have to be retailers, they could be CPGs or services too. Also, the brands that I am charting and scaling here will be totally different for you.

The third category within the Brand Engagement scale, transactional or functional, implies that you have an unemotional relationship with the brand. It is sterile, somewhat lifeless, a little bit of a cold fish in your life. Doesn’t mean you hate it, but the relationship is purely functional, devoid of texture and resonance. My bank fits into this category, Bank Of America, just as the stapler does (Swingline, the #1 stapler brand) that sits in my desk.

So you get the idea of how to think of brands in your life first as you are applying the Brand Engagement tool. Now, let’s flip the script and apply it to retailers’ Private Brands.

Strategic Partner & Co-Founder

This is where the Brand Engagement model gets really interesting, because when you apply it to a retailer, the conversation becomes a provocative starting point to developing Private Brand actions, a strategic pathway and goals for the brand.

If we are to stay with the third category, “Transactional Or Functional”, I would probably put Walmart’s Great Value into this group, and maybe the shopper/ consumer would tell me different. But, for many Walmart shoppers, I believe the relationship with the wide-ranging brand is unemotional and based upon everyday needs. It suffers from a lack of passion in its engagement, and this would be the opportunity, to move it to the right one or two categories on the scale.

The fourth category is a positive place to be if you are a retailer or a supplier, because it signifies that your brand has meaning in a consumer’s life. There is an emotion attached to the brand, it transcends the lifeless world of being merely transactional, and the consumer enjoys interacting with you. The shopper wants you in their life, but it is not all-the-way-tobright like the final category.

Retailer brands that I think fit into this category are Target’s Up & Up, Whole Foods 365 and Wellsley Farms at BJ’s. These are not only well-constructed brands, but there is an underlying layer of optimism within them, and they are verging on an emotional relationship. They are enjoyed.

Recognition is different than “equity”, and it does not imply you even use the brand

You interact with and utilize the brand, but if you could use another, you probably would.

You are a consumer of the brand in your every day life, but it is a transactional or functional relationship

You enjoy the brand, think of it highly, even get pleasure from it

You are a passionate advocate of this brand, to the point of telling others how great it is.

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Shangri-La. Utopia. The Promised Land. In my personal life, to flip back to Brand Engagement through this lens, I consider brands like Peets Coffee & Tea, Amazon and Patagonia to live within this hollowed ground. I love these brands. I don’t think I could have survived without Amazon during the pandemic, and each of these brands has a highly emotional relationship with me.

Love is not equal and it never is. This is why the Brand Engagement model makes sense, and why you can apply it to own brands. For many of you and your brands, you will fall right in the middle today, and that is probably ok. Getting the organization centered around where you are and galvanized about where you could go is the point of the model. It is a provocative conversation starter, there is a methodology that underlies all of this, and it starts with the different consumers you have and how they feel. If you would like to learn more, we would love to talk.

The amazing thing is, there are some Private Brands that have achieved this status, like Kirkland Signature at Costco or President’s Choice in Canada. They don’t rest on their laurels, because they are constantly inventing, and even in this place, are unafraid to fail. Kirkland is $58 Billion annually and counting, and you know you are not afraid to experiment when they launch an own brand golf ball (and their members love it).

Perry Seelert is retail branding and marketing expert, with a passion for challenging conventional strategy and truths. He is the Strategic Partner and Co-founder of Emerge, a strategic marketing consultancy dedicated to helping Retailers, Manufacturers and Services grow exponentially and differentiate with purpose. Please contact Perry at perry@emergefromthepack.com