Lovemarks: A Watchmaker’s Perspective
“The Lovemarks of this new century will be the brands and businesses that create genuine emotional connections with the communities and networks they live in. This means getting up close and personal. And no one is going to let you get close enough to touch them unless they respect what you do and who you are.” is how lovemarks are defined by their author Kevin Roberts, a CEO Worldwide of the colossal advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi (the name of the agency originates from the Persian ’saatchi’, translated as ‘watchmaker’).
A few years ago while waiting at Auckland airport one evening on their way to Los Angeles, Bob Seelert - Saatchi & Saatchi’s Chairman, and Kevin Roberts were discussing the struggle of today’s brands to connect with people. “Brands are out of juice” - Roberts pointed out. They both envisioned a future beyond brands where lovemarks build on respect and are bound with customers’ love, thus the spotlight is shifted from a defensed business territory to the individual consumer.
Kevin Roberts published a book and started a website - Lovemarks, to introduce the new perception of brands (that people love) and help the experts and the general public distinguish between mainstream brands, trustmarks and lovemarks. On the site, visitors may add brands from a broad array of categories: beauty, beverage, fashion, food, lifestyle, music, movies, people, places, sports, technology and other, and leave a comment, positive or negative, on that brand. I like the idea, but not the results. Most of the users submitting brands and posting comments, I guess, are Indians, because Bollywood artists are leading the top charts. What we get is rather biased information that cannot be universally considered truthful.
Far more objective results are provided by the Google Zeitgeist (”the spirit of the times”) services that aggregate global and regional search queries to reveal the trends in various aspects of life and business. Google Trends is an interesting tool you can play with - it compares the trends in search for specified terms and presents the results in easy-to-understand charts. However these up-to-date statistics are of little use in the quest for lovemarks, because the emotional connection between consumers and brands is lost in search. Respect and love as indicators or measurement factors of customers’ attitude towards certain brands are still unknown parameters.
A recent start-up caught my attention for it seems to sidestep the problems the aforementioned methods for extracting “lovemark” data experience. Open Brands analyzes (filters) the Twitter’s chatter stream and consolidates fruitful data about what people really think of brands and ideas. Twitter for me is the ultimate tool so far for that purpose.
It is worth mentioning in this regard that Facebook is a potential wealth resource for this kind of information as well. All of us “becoming fans” of a product, a celebrity or a place are listed under the Pages giving companies the opportunity to measure its sustainability merits.
