Written by Anna Kachur, Brand Strategist
Anna is a visionary and strategic brand consultant for conscious brands. She works alongside entrepreneurs, incubators, and social impact accelerators to create impact-driven brands.
A brand is built on experience, not words. While logos and names may be catchy, they are not what makes a brand stand out in the long term.
Surely, a catchy phrase with a lot of advertising spend can create familiarity.
Nike’s slogan made history. They also used a powerful storytelling framework in their ‘Hero’s Journey’ campaign, focusing on local communities and athletes in Germany, in a 3-minute film titled 'Heroes,' which instantly captivated people.
Though, is it all just about that? perhaps not.
While Nike’s campaigns give a strong presence to their brand exposure, it is their commitment to superior customer experience and their on-point brand strategy that has positioned them as a leader.
What makes a brand great is the experience customers have on all touchpoints of the business, from advertising to digital marketing to product and customer service. This is called brand experience.
Unless the company shows up boldly and authentically in its mission and purpose, people will forget and move on to the next reel on Instagram unless the brand speaks with love.
Customers are people, and they reciprocate love when they feel loved.
Love just like brand experience is a feeling, and a feeling can translate into business.
A company can do it through brand tone of voice, the way that the brand interacts with its community, the way the team responds to a customer ticket, or the way their UX/UI experience makes people feel seen and valued.
There are millions of ways to express it.
Brand tone of voice is powerful
The brands that know how to speak with love sell more than the majority of brands.
The way Mailchimp shows their love by keeping their language simple and outgoing, with a little humor, is admirable. It creates a feeling of comfort and makes everyone feel seen. They know that customers often feel cared for if they are spoken to authentically simply without all the jizzle.
A lot of luxury fashion brands are guilty of using beautiful ‘moving’ product names, but in reality there is no point in coming up with fancy naming if the founders and the brand are not willing to stand by it. Brand names, slogans, and fancy words are just that words.
One of the most valuable tools to get clarity over which tone of voice fits the brand and a way to make an impact is knowing the brand personality archetype developed by Carl Jung. Knowing the brand archetype can help make it clear for entrepreneurs and companies how to speak and serve customers so they feel loved.
The culture of love
There is a phrase, “If you want to quickly solve a problem, be soft on the person and hard on the problem." and that applies to how the ‘brand’ communicates with its employees, clients, stakeholders, and everyone involved.
When things are approached from a place of respect, care, and acknowledgment that extends to customers and all the teams, it eventually affects the bottom-line brand experience. That extends to social media, app development, marketing, and customer experience.
Love is not just a feeling; it’s energy that naturally passes from one person to another. It has the power to multiply and empower entire communities. Influencers and partners that brands choose to collaborate with have a huge impact on brand perception. If one understands that, they can use it to their advantage and have a meaningful experience while building the brand.
Nike’s influencer marketing, using Jonah Kest as its representative in the yogi community, has skyrocketed its presence in the industry. The influencer speaks no less than with love to his audiences, which ultimately translates into Nike’s brand perception in the minds of all yogis who follow him.
Brands that do it well often lead with purpose
Brands that speak with love usually do it in a manner that is tied to their purpose.
Patagonia is so passionate and driven by its cause for sustainability that literally every person who has ever heard of the brand knows their brand story. Not because of the storytelling framework but because it is so ingrained in their DNA.
They also stand for empowerment, creativity, and community staying consistent in their messaging. That evokes trust that every brand is looking to build.
People go to great lengths when they trust someone, and that applies to brands just as much. They reciprocate the love by becoming brand ambassadors and making the brand sustainable over the long run - a dream of every company out there. Investing into the why and authentic expression wins people’s hearts, and as many know the heart is what takes the lead more often than not.
Those passionate about neuroscience might know that the heart generates the largest rhythmic electromagnetic field (EM), approximately 5,000 times stronger than the brain's EM making it the driver of all human’s way of being (before the mind gets to decide anything on the consciousness level).
Research conducted by neuroscientist Rollin McCraty shows that the heart responds to stimuli milliseconds before the brain. This way, it plays a crucial role in intuition, which people often refer to as 'gut feeling’, which can, in turn, influence the way an ideal audience follows a brand.
The motive that the brand chooses for itself sets them apart from the others and brings a unique footprint, just like a TEDx speaker would with their individual story and voice. Every brand can learn how to be a speaker of purpose for their audience.
Being human always helps
It is not so much about coming up with a pain point or pain solution in a sales copy as it is about having a conversation with people just like one would do with a friend. When the brand doesn’t try to overcomplicate things, like some people when they overthink and then end up blubbering a whole bunch of stuff that they would rather avoid and speak clearly but genuinely the magic happens. People respond with attention and respect.
An interesting fact is that when someone stops trying to sell and starts to show natural human qualities such as thoughts, emotions, and actions that one would expect from them - then all fall into alignment. Consciousness, empathy, creativity, resilience, and the pursuit of happiness and purpose are what unite people. If a brand can express those human qualities, then it has already gone far and beyond the majority of revenue-driven brands.
Customers will feel that they clicked just out of curiosity and out of a momentary emotion or, worse insecurity. They might purchase one time or download an app, but just as fast to quit it. As we know, this is a waste of money and effort, just like poor quality leads that never convert.
They might appear promising at the onset yet fail to deliver value to the brand equity.
So, taking another approach one with love will do a much better job. Great brands want people to buy for life, stay loyal, and stick around at hard times. Love is clarity, authenticity, transparency, and a sense of human traits.
Brand equity and philanthropy
Brand equity is typically measured using market share, price premium, brand value, and customer loyalty. Sometimes, it also includes analysis of brand awareness and brand associations. A big chunk of it is brand reputation, which is measured through customer surveys, sentiment analysis, and online reviews.
Gen Z and Millennials are sharp in their purchasing power, they are intelligent and emotionally mature which means they have high standards for brands. 43% out of all Gen Z and Millennials are daredevils, which means that they won’t be afraid to voice their opinion about how a brand operates.
One of their top 5 values is contributing to the community, and accessing a community is one of the top five drivers for purchase. 66.2% are loyal to the brands they like, which explains why some brands get so much love and traction vs other brands.
According to GWI, 29.5% want to feel represented in the advertisement. That is almost every 3rd person. Now, monitoring brand actions and their role in a customer’s journey, we know that being eco-friendly, socially responsible, transparent, and helping them improve their image or knowledge are the expectations that Gen Zs and millennials have from brands today.
In other words, if brands don’t start operating from love, the current generations will not buy. Conscious decisions have never been as important for brands as they are today. Some may say it’s the new age transition, which may be true, where human evolution rapidly takes place by replacing old capitalistic structures and welcoming more of a unified and considerate experience on the planet.
The majority of customers are aware of global issues and the true side of business and have access to all the data they need to make a decision. This means that working with charities and philanthropic causes has never been as important as it is today for brands. It’s not just the heart-led approach, and it is a necessity for evolution where business plays a crucial role.
CSR (Cooperate Social Responsibility) a term a bit outdated as of today, has once been used to describe the basic requirement or responsibility of a brand towards its community. In simple words, it is a way to keep the company socially accountable. This has become the standard for every brand out there.
And as usual, social proof is at record high importance. When a brand operates from love, the social proof will show.
We are all living in a community. That means we are not alone, and we have responsibility. Working with Charities and Philanthropists is essential for brands today to show that they are serious about what they do.
Read more from Anna Kachur
Anna Kachur, Brand Strategist
Anna is a strategic brand consultant for conscious brands. She has a lifelong love for psychology and aesthetics, paired with a dire passion for expression through branding and content strategy. Anna's purpose is to bring positive change through clear communication, intention, and harmonious balance in society.
