A classic headline from the satirical publication The Onion once read: “Man Admits His Top Relationships Are With Brands.” Like all good satire, the humor had a basis in truth. Human nature allows us to form deep attachments not only to people but also to things, and when brands achieve a true connection with customers, they forge emotional bonds that drive loyalty, advocacy, and long-term growth.
We’ve spent years studying how brands earn that kind of devotion. Our LoveCatalyst™ approach is designed to help you identify what fuels emotional connection in your category and turn those insights into action, moving from being liked to being something customers can’t live, work, or play without.
Human nature allows us to form deep attachments not only to people but also to things, and when brands achieve a true connection with customers, they forge emotional bonds that drive loyalty, advocacy, and long-term growth.”
Beloved brands cultivate love, and keep the fire burning by continually finding ways to engage and celebrate their customers. For example, Coca-Cola’s Share a Coke campaign built emotional connections by personalizing bottles with customer names and encouraging people to share them with friends, sparking user-generated content and social buzz. Apple’s Shot on iPhone campaign showcased real customers’ photos and videos to highlight camera quality, inspire creativity, and foster a sense of belonging within the Apple ecosystem. Similarly, Nike’s 2020 split-screen ad highlighted athletes overcoming adversity, reinforcing themes of unity, resilience, and empowerment that strengthened its emotional bond with consumers.
How to build brand love.
We define brand love as a deep emotional commitment. It’s a feeling that life or work is incomplete without a brand’s presence. When it’s there, it creates an irreplaceable bond. When it’s gone, it leaves a void. This emotional depth fuels lifelong loyalty, advocacy, and meaningful growth.
Love can be elusive, and moving a brand from being recognized and liked to feeling irreplaceable takes work. To guide brands through this journey, our team designed LoveCatalyst™, a four-phase research process that helps brands uncover, quantify, and grow emotional connection.
Phase I: Love letters from customers reveal emotional cues for your brand.
Every category has its own emotional codes, a unique “love language” shaped by how consumers use and value brands. We uncover these drivers through open-ended sessions and emotional exercises, asking participants to write “love letters” about what makes a brand irreplaceable in their lives and “heartbreak letters” about how and why it has failed them.
Phase II: Convert love letters into quantifiable attributes.
Voice of Customer insights provide a deeper understanding of a brand’s emotional terrain. We focus on three areas:
- Love Association – How strongly is the brand linked to love-driving attributes?
- Driving Love – What factors actually move the needle?
- LoveCatalyst Index™ – A composite score across six core facets: trust, absence or longing, commitment, attraction, passion, and shared interests.
These insights fuel the Brand Pulse Curve, which maps consumers along a spectrum from indifference to deep devotion. The curve quantifies the emotional depth of the customer relationship and measures how much love a brand has relative to the competition.
Phase III: Personification helps team members connect with customers.
We bring the brand’s love story to life through in-depth interviews with people who show high levels of brand love. These conversations reveal why people love the brand, what they miss when it’s gone, and what triggers commitment and connection. We then share the insights through video montages, illustrated stories, or short animations to help teams experience real customer emotion firsthand.
Phase IV: Build a blueprint for a lasting relationship.
Finally, we turn insight into strategy. In an activation workshop, we partner with your team to create a blueprint for brand love by identifying what drives love in the category, who your brand lovers are, and how to engage and grow this audience. Applications span targeting, messaging, positioning, and customer experience.
Leveraging insights from the first three phases, a cross-functional team co-creates a plan to drive brand growth by expanding the number of brand lovers in the marketplace. The output is a Strategic Blueprint, a framework to track, grow, and deepen brand love over time.
Knowing how to cultivate brand love leads to a deep impact with customers.
Emotional connection with your customers or clients leads to measurable business impact: stronger differentiation, greater customer lifetime value, more advocacy, resilience in the face of setbacks, and loyalty that often defies logic. When the bond runs deep, people stay, even when other options are easier or cheaper.
Want to find out what drives deep brand love in your category, and how to grow it? Contact us to learn more about Radius’ LoveCatalyst™ approach.
