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SBP 243: The Sharp Cut - Let's talk about brand love · Sleeping Barber - A Marketing Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome to the Sleeping Baba podcast.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_01: Well, B, this is the sharp cut as you know as it is.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, a lot of times the marketing runs on these comfort blankets, the things that we all repeat because they're really warm and everybody else is saying them and they feel good.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: And then what we do here is we cut them up.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: Look what's actually inside.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: I'll be honest, I like staying under the covers, these blankets.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's okay.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's just nice and cozy.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: But you're right though.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: We're looking at the real-world evidence, experiments where they exist, and we'll tell you when they don't.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_01: So these are typically short.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, this is one idea and nothing in it.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_01: You couldn't forward to a CFO.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: Or your CFO, your CEO, all the C's, get them all on there.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: Put it, maybe BCC them.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe that's the best way.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_01: Today is brand love.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: The cover blanket is brand love.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: So let's dive in.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_01: Let's start with motorcycles.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_01: Because we all love a good Harley.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_01: And in 2015, Consumer Reports surveyed more than 11,000 motorcycle owners.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the questions was really simple.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: So knowing everything you know now, would you definitely buy the same bike again?
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: And Harley didn't win, by the way.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: That was the interesting thing.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: Because everyone's led to believe like Harley is like a cult gathering.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: But Harley came in at 72%, which is high, don't get me wrong.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: The winner was Victory, though.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: About 80% of Victory owners said that they buy the motorcycle again.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and it was a real player, and they had the number four brand in North America, but it was only selling a little over 10,000 bikes a year at the time.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: And in January 2017, Polaris, the company that owned it, shut it down.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: In their words, Victory struggled to establish the market share needed to succeed and be profitable.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: So the happiest owners in the entire category in a brand's gone two years later.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: That's a problem that if you spent 20 years being told the job of marketing is to make people love you, I don't know.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: And ultimately, again, that's today's comfort blanket.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_01: The idea of brand love, love marks, Ravening fans.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_01: And if you're like us, you've sat in a meeting where somebody said the goal is to make customers love the brand, and everybody in the room nodded.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_01: And it sounds good and it feels good.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it sounds right, but it's that's actually the problem.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: So we'll go in order first where the idea came from, then we take the f the believers at their word and run three tests.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: Are the most loved brands the biggest?
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: Are they growing the fastest?
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: And does the love come first before the buying?
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: And then we'll each own up to something.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: We have got a little bit of a confession.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_01: And then we'll finish uh with what you can actually do with this on Monday.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so before we go looking, it's worth knowing where this all came from because it is a few ideas that grew up together.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: The oldest one is a customer service book, and back in 1993, Ken Blanchard wrote the the one-minute manager, co-wrote a short business fable with Sheldon Bowles called Raving Fans.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: Their point was that satisfied customers aren't enough.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: You need fans who go out and t essentially sell for you.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I remember seeing it right around the same time this really awesome, cool video from Seth Godin.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: It was a TED talk he did in 2003, and he had this word that I got really fixated on otaku.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_01: It was a Japanese word for people who are obsessed with something.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: And he talked about mustard and he talked about hot sauce.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and it's the kind of person who drive across a city like Tokyo to try a new ramen ramen place.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: And his advice was to stop marketing to the middle and to find the obsessed people and then and then let them tell their friends.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and there's an agency version that came essentially a year later.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: Kevin Roberts was the CEO of Saatchi and Satchi, one of the biggest ad agencies in the world.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: In 2024, in 2004, he wrote Love Marks.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: His idea was a grid.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: Respect on the one side, love on the other.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: Get both, and you get what is called loyalty beyond reason.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and then in 2008, Kevin Kelly, who actually was one of the founders of Wired magazine, wrote an essay called A Thousand True Fans.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: I actually remember promoting this to a lot of people at the time.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_01: Oh.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_01: And so if you're an artist and you can get a thousand people to spend$100 a year on whatever you make, that's a hundred thousand dollars living.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_01: And so, but he was his argument was all you need is a thousand true fans that will buy everything you do.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_01: And to be fair, I think Kevin Kelly was writing for the creators, selling directly to their audience, not necessarily Coca-Cola.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: And the academics gave it a theory as well.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: So back in 1998, and I was just starting university then.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: Anyways, uh, 1998, a marketing professor named Susan Fernier published a paper arguing people have relationships with brands the way they do simply with people.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: It was built on a three in-depth case studies.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: By 2012, the Journal of Marketing, about as serious as it gets in our field at the time, had a whole paper defining brand love.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: And in the May-June 2026 issue of Harvard Business Review, has Marcus Buckingham, who created Strengths Finder and spent years at Gallup calling love the most powerful force in business.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_01: So just to sum up, there's a lot of history.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_01: Let's call it.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_01: I was about to say evidence, but let's call it history.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_01: That's better way with love marks uh and love brands and brand love.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: So there's a fable, there's a TED Talk, there's an agency book, there's a blog post, there's academics, HBR.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_01: And I get why it's stuck.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_01: It's really it sounds great.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: It's one of the most fun versions of marketing for anybody to work on.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_01: And nobody got into this business dreaming about distribution.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: We want brands to love us.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_01: It sounds great.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_01: Like we really want people to love us.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: I love that.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: I did grow up thinking about distribution.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just working.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: Anyways, there's a money angle too, though, that made this quite powerful, right?
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: Ad Age renamed Love Marks, one of its ideas of the decade back in 2009.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: And when Satchi wrote up its own teaching materials, the success story it pointed to was JCPenney handing the agency a$430 million account to turn it into a love mark.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_01: Which is a funny one.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_01: You think I from what I remember, JCPenney's tank.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_01: So in the recent years.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, that's aside.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_01: So the clearest result anyone can document from Love Marks is that it won an agency client.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_01: And that's really a really strong body of evidence that a lot of people have pointed to.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_01: But and that doesn't make it wrong.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: It just means that we should go check.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll make the case first because it's not nothing.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: In 2012, John Rosseter, an Australian marketing professor, built a stricter measure that separates loving a brand from liking a brand.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: People who loved a brand said that they used it about twice as much and recommended it about twice as much as people who only simply liked it.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and that's a result.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_01: But think about who is answering.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_01: The people who love a brand are mostly the people who already buy a lot of it, the heavy category buyers that already score high give the things they like to buy high scores of everything.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_01: Of everything.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: So of course they say they use it more.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: The study can't tell you which came first.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: Then there's the money.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: In 2015, a brand research firm called Bera or B E R A, working with Professor Rowling's College, published that brands in the top half of their love score returned 16.9% to shareholders in 2014.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: The bottom half only returned 5.4%.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: This AP 500 did 13.7% that year.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's worth knowing that Barra sells a love score.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I looked it up and it seems odd in a lot of ways.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_01: They do a lot of interesting things.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: I've seen them on some effectiveness papers.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_01: They do media mixed modeling and things like that, brand tracking and that and that kind of thing.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_01: And then it they have this love score.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, it's a very odd product, but they make money from it.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's a company that's showing its own product works.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_01: So there's an incentive there.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: And the most recent one is from Buckingham's HBR article earlier this year.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's about Kroger, one of the biggest grocery chains in the U.S., and it's based in Cincinnati.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: Publix, a big grocery chain from Florida, started opening stores in Cincinnati, and Kroger expected to lose sales.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: So Kroger's local division asked its most loyal customers what they love about the store and built on it.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: Staff carried groceries out to people's car.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: Every store got two people whose only job was keeping it clean.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: Kroger still lost sales, but 62% less than it had forecasted, and a few stores grew by 5%.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and there's really two things there.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_01: So they asked the customers who already love them, and the win was losing less.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_01: So both of those things are gonna matter later.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_01: But let's take them for a word and let's run those three tests.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: If love is the engine.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_01: If love is the engine, V, if it's the engine.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: The most love brands should be the biggest.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_01: They should be growing the fastest, and love should come first.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_01: We should be able to see all three in reality.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I agree.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: So are the most loved brands the biggest?
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody measures love across a whole market.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: So the closest thing is satisfaction that we have.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: Start with fast food.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: The American Customer Satisfaction Index is a big annual survey that started at the University of Michigan.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: It had a Chick-fil-A at the top of fast food for 11 straight years at about 83 out of 100.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: McDonald's was dead last in 2025 at 70.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: And McDonald's sells more than twice as much as Chick-fil-A does in the U.S.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_01: And Canadian banking is the same.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: I I've I've done some analysis.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: I keep doing these every now and then when I get the chance, but I've done this in the airlines, I've done it in banking, I've done it in now jewelry.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_01: But Canadian banking is the same.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_01: So there's I was able to cobble together some research from JD Power that found the big five banks average 604 on a customer satisfaction index.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's a thousand-point scale.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: The mid-sized banks average around 649.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_01: The smaller banks have a happier, have happier customers.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_01: And and remember that the Victory had the happiest motorcycle owners while Honda, which nobody's is nobody's idea of a cult brand, sells about 20 million motorcycles a year.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's and they sell about 40% of the world market.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_01: So there's this, there's not really any correlation between happiness from what we can tell and across industries either.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: No, exactly.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: So the happiest customers don't belong to the biggest brands.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: Something that gets missed, though every brand does have loyal customers, even tiny ones.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: Every brand has people who l simply just love it.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: What changes is how many and their pattern to it.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: It has a name, Double Jeopardy, and it goes back to the 60s.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: A sociologist named William McPhee noticed it with radio hosts and comic strips.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: The less popular ones were known by fewer people, and the people who did know them liked them a bit less.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and then we've talked a lot about Ehrenberg Bass Institute, but Aaron Andrew Ehrenberg, the British at the time statistician who spent decades studying how people actually buy, showed it holds in just about every category this pattern of brand loyalty.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_01: So small brands have way fewer buyers, and those buyers are a little less loyal.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: So small brands get hit twice.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_01: That's the double jeopardy.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: Picture two coffee shops.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: One's on the busiest corner downtown, one's on a side street.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: They both have regulars.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: The corner shop just has a way more customers coming through them than the one that happens to be on the side street.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody's writing love poems about the corner shop.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's just simply on the corner.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna write a haiku for you, B.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_01: Please do.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you're right.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_01: And so small brands aren't missing fans.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the thing I think is so interesting.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_01: Loyalty is literally everywhere.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_01: But the small brands, they're missing customers.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um, the share of their customers who are fans is about what you'd expect for their size, and loyalty only drops a little bit, which is kind of a shocking thought.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_01: There's the predictability to loyalty based on the size of the brand.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_01: The big difference between a big brand and a small one is ultimately how many people buy it at all.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the famous challenge to this is Apple.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: A few years ago, Mark Ritson, the marketing professor and columnist, argued Apple breaks the rule.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: He pointed to a 92% retention rate for iPhone owners.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and then Byron Sharp, who runs the Ehrenberg Bass Institute and wrote how brands grow and has been really promoting a lot of the ideas from Andrew Ehrenberg and Frank Bass, answered that 92% that number came from a survey of what people plan to do.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_01: And the economist had reported iPhone retention at about 80% in the US and about 50% in China.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: Interesting, right?
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: So same phone, same category.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: The difference is Apple's the biggest phone brand in the US and much smaller in China.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: Loyalty went with the size.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and to make the point that I said earlier, literally loyalty is everywhere.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_01: It's just not the driver of growth we think it is.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_01: And so the second test that I would say is that are the most loved brands growing the fastest?
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so the best evidence comes from the week, as far as I was able to find, from John Dawes there in Burk Bass Institute, a marketing research center in Australia, if you haven't heard of them.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_01: And he's got 10 years of UK data in four categories.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_01: So there's cars, supermarkets, airlines, and fast food.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_01: And coffee chains are counted in the fast food one.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_01: So every year, uh people were asked how likely they'd be to recommend each brand.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: In other words, a net promoter score.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_01: And he didn't just ask customers, he asked former customers and people who had never bought from them.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_01: Then he lined it all up against what happened for each of the brands' market share, and there was no clear link.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: Now, to be fair, Ehrenberg Bass has a horse in this race as well, but it's 10 years of data, which is more than anyone on the other side has ever put up.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: And Chick-fil-A fits.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: In 2024, it had the slowest growth in about 20 years, 5.4%.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: And almost all of that came from opening new stores.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: Its satisfaction score, however, did not move.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_01: And then there's Harley.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_01: In 2013, consumer reports found 75% of Harley owners would definitely buy their bike again, which was the highest of any brand in that year.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_01: And that same survey found about one in four Harley owners had a serious problem with the bike itself within four years.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: They'll put up with a broken bike and still say that they'll buy it again.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: That's about as close as loyalty beyond reason as you're ever going to get.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: And it didn't protect them.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: According to Harley's own annual reports, they had about half of the US market for big bikes in 2018.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: Last year, it was 34.5%.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: In 2025, Harley's US sales dropped almost 13% when the whole market dropped about 6%.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: So which brings us back to that Barrow study.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_01: So the Love score is built from four things.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_01: And two of them are basically do you know this brand and do you like it?
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_01: So big brands that win, well, they win that automatically.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_01: And they compared those scores with stock returns from the same year.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_01: And when a company has a great year, people feel better about it.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_01: So you can't tell which caused which.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_01: And the score has a today half and a tomorrow half.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_01: And they never check whether the tomorrow half, the closest part of love, predicts anything on its own.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: I'll give them one thing.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: They at least try to connect love to money.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: Most brand love research never even gets that far.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_01: No, that's true.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_01: And so the third test, and I think this one it does matter a lot.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_01: So does love come first?
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_01: Is it love at first sight?
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_01: Always love.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_01: Always love.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_01: So if love drives buying, somebody should fall for a brand and then start buying more of it.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_01: And so back in 1973, researchers in the UK gave people a long list of statements about different brands.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's the kind of thing you'd see in any brand survey.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_01: Then they compared the answers from people who used each brand with everyone else's answers.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_01: The users of the brands.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_01: You agreed with almost everything a lot more.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_01: And it sounds obvious, but if you think about what it means, whatever you ask about a brand, its own customers will always rate it higher just because it's their own customers.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_01: Like in the case of Harley, we're talking about.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_01: So when you see love and buying go together, a big chunk of that is the buying showing up in the answers.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's like asking flame season ticket holders if the flames are a good team.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: Well, they're not actually.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: They're not a great team right now.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know that anybody's gonna be happy about that one.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: No, absolutely not.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not a 1970s quirk.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: In 2012, Jenny Romanuk and two colleagues tested it again and on 45 new sets of data services, big ticket things like appliances, stores, uh developing countries, online surveys, and it was the same result every time.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so if you think about a regular at a diner, they didn't start going because they love the place.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_01: They started going because it was on the way to the work or it was just convenient, and they love it because they keep going.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there's another one I find really interesting.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_00: Researchers asked people what they thought of brands, then came back later and asked the same people again.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_00: Only about half gave the same answer the second time.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: Their buying didn't flip around just like that.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: Their opinions did.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_01: So what people buy is steady and how they feel about it bounces around.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_01: If feelings were really driving the buying, then you'd expect the exact opposite.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: And this year we got the most direct test.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: Ehrenberg Bass surveyed over 1,500 Americans about cars, running shoes, banks, and beer.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: About four in ten people loved at least one brand in a category, but for any one brand, only somewhere between three and a half to 15% of people loved it.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I would just as a like an aside, like we're talking about Erenberg Bass a lot, but I can't find a lot of other great research that is that's really in it.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_01: And so when I've been doing the research, I've been looking for other places, and it it's just it's not either easily accessible or just not there.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um, yeah, so just to come back to that.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_01: So the people who love the brand did say they planned to buy more of it.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um but when researchers looked at how much of the buying actually went to that brand, the link was pretty weak in every category.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: One more thing actually made me laugh.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: The definition of brand love, most of this research was built on.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: From a 2026 paper from Carol and Ahuvia that describes it as a feeling a satisfied consumer has for a brand.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_00: So even the people who believe in it define it as something that happens after you buy.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's a good point.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I'll admit I fall for this myself.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_01: I only buy Heinz Ketchup.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_01: If you ask me, true facts, I would tell you that I'm a loyal fan of Heinz Ketchup.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_01: But it's also on the shelf in every single store I've ever been in.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a pepper sauce I used to buy it every single time as well, called Matooks.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_01: Then my grocery store started swapping a bunch of brands for their own private label stuff, and Matooks disappeared.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_01: I can't find it, so I don't buy it.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a dill dip at the grocery store that it's gone.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_01: I loved it, it's gone, I can't find it.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_01: And I still look for it every time I'm in the aisle, but I just can't get it.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_00: So what you're saying is the love didn't go anywhere, the shelf did.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: And the store didn't lose you, it just moved your money over to its own brand, potentially.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_01: Totally.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I've been trying to buy other dips to replace it.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_01: I haven't found one that I love yet, but I'm still buying them.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_01: And if if I'm out for a burger, I use whatever ketchup's on the table.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_01: I don't refuse to eat the burger if there's no Irish ketchup.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, I'm not I'm loyal, but it's a it's a mix of things.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_01: And and they're good and they're easy to find.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_01: And when they're easy, the easy to find part went away.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um, the love didn't keep me buying.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: I've got one too, but it's not as funny as yours.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: So be be weary there, listeners.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: So at when I was working for a sporting life group and working on the Golftown brand, we ran this thing where any order of about$150 got a little letter thanking the customer for their purchase that was also personally signed by our VP of marketing at the time, essentially for just acknowledging for their loyalty and their return, because we were coming out of bankruptcy at the time.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: And we also gave them a free bag of teas in the box.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: Didn't really cost the business anything.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: But what we received was like a lot of positive comments.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: People would go to LinkedIn or they would write us directly.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: It didn't matter, but we got a positive reinforcement at the time for that action.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_00: Now, what was interesting though is the reason why Golftown did it in the first place was basically trying to re-establish themselves in in Canada.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_00: So the connection was making sure that they that Golftown was still like the preferred destination for all things golf.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: So when they said that they loved it, I loved it.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_00: And that really makes it feel that this is why I'm even here and I'm even doing marketing in the first place.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_00: It was just a positive correlation there.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and that's what love marks is supposed to look like.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_01: Consumers writing in, and I don't know if anybody got golf town tattoos that you have, but no, no, I don't think so.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_01: But talking about why they love you and why they're loyal to you.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_01: That's what we want to hear.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm gonna be honest about something here.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: Every one of those people had already bought, right?
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_00: So the purchase had already happened, and we were opening the as we were packing the boxes, we were adding these T's and these and this letter.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_00: So all of that love showed up after the money had already shown up in our books.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: So we had already received the sale.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_00: Did it bring anyone back?
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_00: Guess what, man?
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_00: I I honestly don't know.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um, nor did I ask to be.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_00: The thank yous made it feel worth it, though.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_00: And that was enough for me at the time.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_00: And looking back, I'd probably still do it.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_00: Just not because I think it grew us.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's the kind of surprise and delight that can be it or serve as a backbone to a marketing strategy, for an example.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_00: But I can't tell you if it worked.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_01: It's funny, I've made some purchases in in the past and I've justified, I've questioned, I've done a whole bunch of research before making the purchase.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_01: Then I justify the purchase afterwards.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_01: And then I think, well, that was the best thing I've ever bought.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_01: Because I've chose to buy it and I want to make it, I mean, already invested in it.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, it's the best thing I've ever done.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_01: I'm thinking about getting another guitar, and I'm like, I should get one, and I'm gonna justify it because I just think it's the best.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_01: And then I would say, Well, this customer service was so great, I had to get it.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_01: So, but to be your team.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: And my pepper sauce, so the same lesson, really, from two different sides.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_01: And the love is real and it showed up after the buying.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_01: So we took them at their word and we ran these three tests.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_01: The most love brands aren't the biggest, they aren't the ones most reliably go growing the fastest.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_01: And the love mostly shows up after the buying's been done.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: So what do we actually do with that?
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not throwing love out completely.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_00: I think it does protect you.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: It creates a moat, maybe.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: I still have to think about it.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: But if we go back to Kroger, public shows up, and the people who love the store stuck around.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_01: But I guess did they because if those customers really love Kroger in the way that we think about Kroger love, as in a monogamous relationship, publics or any other company showing up in their markets shouldn't have touched them.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_01: That's what the loyalty beyond reason means.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_01: So Kroger still planned for losses and still lost sales.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_01: The best case was losing less.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_00: Or the people who left were the ones that who never loved the brand in the first place, right?
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_00: So those are the casual shoppers.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_00: The regular stayed, and maybe that's my whole point.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, maybe.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_01: And and the Marcus Buckingham doesn't say who left, and so neither can prove it.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_01: But I think about how people actually buy groceries.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: Most of us split it across a few stores.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um and Byron Sharp has a name for this in how brands grow.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_01: And so he calls it polygamous loyalty.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_01: So you can love Kroger and still grab milk at Publix because it's on the way home.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_00: Sure, but a bad experience can end up quite quickly.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_00: Love might not start the relationship, but losing it can definitely finish one.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_00: So I think great service is worth more than people give it credit for.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if your best customers walk, I think that one hurts.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I totally agree.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_01: And if it's your biggest customers that leave, that's a real big problem.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_01: So I agree service matters, and I agree in its defense.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_01: I just don't think defense is a growth plan to lose less.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_01: It sounds like Blockbuster.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_01: Kloger lost less than it expected, and and it's worth doing for sure, but it isn't getting bigger, which is what it wants us to do and what they expect marketing to do.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_00: But they say defense wins championships, no?
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: That's or maybe the sports analogy that's maybe that's important.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_00: I'll be honest, I don't buy that just stable stakes either.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: We're not gonna settle that one today, though.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so there's also a question of whether people even want a relationship with a brand.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_01: In 2012, the corporate executive board and advisory firm that's now part of Gartner surveyed more than 7,000 customers.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_01: And only 23% said they had a relationship with any brand.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_00: And even if real fans any brand.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_00: I know it's insane, right?
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't want to use a focus group here, a personal focus group, but I don't know if there's a brand brand like I really, really love that I will go out of my way for.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_00: But, anyways, and even if real fans needed a push, Mark Schaefer, a marketing author with a big following, tried an experiment.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_00: In 2019, he put out an ebook and just told his audience about it.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_00: One blog post, an email, a few podcast episodes, and some social posts.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_00: It sold about a hundred copies in that year.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_00: Now, he also ran a paid promotion, investing over$10,000 in marketing, and then he was able to hit number one in two Amazon categories.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and even uh Seth Godin's own examples point the same way.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_01: And that same TED Talk, his big success story was silk soy milk.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_01: Sales tripled and not because of obsessed fans.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_01: They put it in the fridge right next to the regular milk.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_01: Like in the store, like the silk distribution fee back to your distribution in the grocery store coolers.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_01: They put it right beside the regular milk and made it like a comparison.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's the physical availability part, getting it to where people already shop.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's like my Matoux pepper sauce in reverse.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, fair.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: And Doseki's is the mental side.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_00: The most interesting man in the world launched in 20 in 2006, and Heineken says it helped triple the brand's volume over the next 10 years.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_00: That's a famous campaign everybody saw, not a relationship.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_00: Then Heineken replaced the actor in 2016.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_00: By last year, Dosecki's retail sales were down 8%, a lot worse than Modello and Corona.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_00: In January of this year, they brought the original guy back.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so for anyone listening, there's a few things here.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_01: If you measure love or satisfaction, ask everyone who buys in your category, not just your customers.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_01: Your customers will always like you more because they're your customers.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_01: And second, before you celebrate a score, compare it with what's normal for the brand your size.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_01: And then the third point is that you should put your money into reaching more people and being easy to buy.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_00: And keep the service great, not because it'll grow you, but but because losing people just simply hurts more.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, people love the brands they already buy, and that's the love worth protecting.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_01: It just isn't what grows a brand.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_01: That's our episode.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for keeping us in your ears.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_01: Stay sharp, everyone.