by David Tandet
Try if you will. A Lovemark — like Zen, your favorite pizza, and writing in the zone — can not easily be defined.
Actually, a Lovemark is definable enough. But like Zen and great pizza, it can’t be truly understood until experienced. Lovemark degree of separation from a product, service or idea is no separation at all.
So what’s a Lovemark, you ask? It’s a combination of love and consumer loyalty that makes for emotional bonding, and it’s Saatchi & Saatchi CEO Kevin Roberts’ creation that goes beyond branding. Think sights, sounds, aromas and textures that bring on a special mindset.
My mother used to wear this and I remember smelling it on her skin and on her pillow when I curled up on my parents’ bed. Whenever I catch a scent of Chanel No. 5, dreams of me and my mother return and I feel her with me once again.
That’s one Lovemark website reader’s description of what a Lovemark is to her. And who could call that ordinary consumer attachment? It goes way beyond — to the stuff of art and literature. Emotion-evoking imagery that a company could only dream of creating in its lifetime, and pray its product is part of. But it’s happening all the time now for clients of Saatchi & Saatchi.
And like Zen and great pizza, there’s more than one book out there on the subject. Two, at present, to be exact: The Lovemarks Effect and Lovemarks Expanded.
In this era of ever growing competition for consumer focus, Kevin Roberts reminds us that the best marketing, like politics, is really local. Create the kind of individual trust that shouts out like a long-ago sunset from every corner of a consumer’s being, and you’ve placed a Lovemark degree of separation between your product and the person who experiences it.