Do Consumers Really Want a Relationship with Brands They Buy? Myths and Fantasies

Relationships are hard enough with other humans.

It is not clear that any sentient being wants to engage in that way with a brand or logo or mascot.

Much of the relationship building between consumers and brands is based on hope. Which is, usually, a strange brew of desire and faith, rarely freighted with much in the way of credible data. One problem is that this is all so new; Facebook, for example, is barely seven years old. A lifetime in internet terms, you say? Perhaps, but in terms of product adoption cycles and comparable data that might shed quantifiable light on the enduring strength of such situations, not so much. Another is that this point of view presumes more contact means more positive response. Whatever happened to too much of a good thing? It is not at all clear that the more consumers engage, the happier and more committed they will be with what they find.

The basic premise on which many of these cloud castles are built is that 23% of consumers believe they have a relationship with their brand. Putting aside, for a moment, that this means 77% are not on such intimate terms, the question remains as to what that relationship comprises. Marriage? Dating? Hooking up? Hanging out? Not yet clear.

The larger point is that neither marketers nor customers have much to go on - yet. Drawing conclusions during times of uncertainty is usually a mug's game. It will take a while to sort out whether people really yearn for a 'relationship' or are just hoping to score some discounts and better service. Whichever it may be, the lesson to business is the same as to lovers: if you want it to last, you had better treat the opposite number with respect and affection. JL

Ron Shevlin comments in his blog Snarketing 2.0 (hat tip Greg Satell):

The HBR Blog Network recently published an article titled Three Myths About What Customers Want. The authors defined the following myths:

1. Most consumers want to have relationships with your brand.
2. Interactions build relationships.
3. The more interaction the better.

According to the authors, “Most marketers think that the best way to hold onto customers is through ‘engagement’ — interacting as much as possible with them and building relationships.”

My take: The authors’ are spot-on in their identification of the myths, but misinterpret what engagement is — or, rather, what it should be.
The authors offer consumer research results which showed that “only 23% of the consumers said they have a relationship with a brand” and advise marketers to “understand which of your consumers are in the 23% and which are in the 77%, and apply different expectations to those two groups and market differently to them.” The authors tell marketers to “stop bombarding consumers who don’t want a relationship with your attempts to build one through endless emails or complex loyalty programs.”

This advice ignores two questions:

1.Do the 23% who have a relationship with a brand, have a relationship with a brand from the same industry or product category? In other words, maybe some types of products lend themselves more to the prospect of a brand relationship than others. I say “maybe” when I believe damn well that the answer is yes.
2.How did the 23% get that way? Did the 23% just magically come to have a brand relationship? Or was it the result — or at least the partial result — of “endless emails” and/or “complex loyalty programs”? Isn’t it possible that if the study had been conducted 10 years ago that the researchers could have found that just 13% of consumers had a brand relationship? And that it was the result of email and loyalty marketing that grew that percentage to 23%?
While the authors rightfully identify three myths that many marketers have, they do a disservice by not distinguishing engagement from interactions.

It’s usually a fool’s quest to try and impose a definition on a murky concept, but I’ll try anyway. Engagement is:

“Repeated interactions that strengthen the emotional, psychological or physical investment a customer has in a brand.”

What this definition does–and what the authors of the HBR article fail to do–is recognize that not all interactions are created equally.

The myth that the authors define–”interactions build relationships”–is correctly identified as a myth, as stated. But it is not a myth that “interactions that strengthen the emotional, psychological or physical investment a customer has in a brand.” The challenge that marketers have is understanding which interactions strengthen the emotional bonds.

The authors of the article want marketers to believe that “shared values build relationships” and offer up the usual suspects of Patagonia and Harley-Davidson as examples of brands that have “higher” values that prove out their point.

Personally, I can’t wait to see what kind of “demonstrable higher purpose” Fruit-of-the-Loom comes up with. Or any of a million other types of products in categories that just don’t lend themselves to this kind of nonsense.

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One of my favorites brands is REI. I couldn’t care less what its “higher purpose” is. All I know is that every time I deal with REI, I get great advice.

If REI’s “higher purpose” was “rip off consumers by making them think we really care about them” I’d have a hard time telling a researcher that that was a “shared value” but it wouldn’t change my opinion of REI.

An opinion that is borne out of REPEATED, POSITIVE INTERACTIONS which strengthen the emotional, psychological or physical investment I have in REI.

In the case of REI, the type of interaction that produces the emotional connection is advice. On more than one occasion, REI employees have steered me to a less expensive product because they thought it was the one that was right for me.

It isn’t the shared value or the higher purpose that drives my relationship with REI — it’s the engagement.