Brand Intimacy

by Mario Natarelli

  We found that, while this approach can provide rich data and important recommendations to help a brand improve business performance, the levers are all very rational-centered and do not seem to consider the role of emotion. It is also extremely focused on mapping symptoms as opposed to diagnosing problems.

  To contrast with the more financially-minded brand asset models, we wanted to also acknowledge the many intriguing and relevant methods for measuring the emotional aspects of brands that exist today.

  CUSTOMER INTIMACY

  Customer intimacy is a broad term, rather than a specific process. It focuses on the individual; specifically, it refers to the discipline or business approach that brings an organization closer to its customers by focusing on an understanding of their wants and needs, to better enable individualized product, service, or communications delivery. “Companies that excel in customer intimacy combine detailed customer knowledge with operational flexibility so they can respond quickly to almost any need, from customizing a product to fulfilling special requests.”41 Mutual understanding, value perception, and closeness are all hallmarks of customer intimacy. Once value may have been defined by price; however, for many that concept has been expanded and now encompasses convenience of purchase, after-sale service, dependability, and so on.42

  Customer intimacy also involves meeting the changing expectations of a brand’s users. Businesses that pursue customer intimacy frequently tailor and adjust products and services to fit customer wants. This can be expensive, but customer-intimate companies believe it is worth the cost, as they seek to build customer loyalty for the long term. They typically look at the customer’s lifetime value to the company, not the value of any single transaction.

  Customer intimacy has been found to positively impact relationship commitment levels, behavioral loyalty/repurchase intentions, customer availability, advisor status, and customer-induced word of mouth. Yet for all its growth in popularity, the term itself has not been widely adopted.43

  When a popular business book highlighted the importance of customer intimacy, they suggested it was one of three business models a company could choose, those being: (1) customer intimacy—delivering what specific customers want; (2) operations excellence—delivering quality, price, and ease of purchase and use; and (3) product leadership—creating the best products and services.44 Today, several articles have suggested a company need not choose one but can combine these approaches.

  Interestingly, it has been suggested that business managers should also embrace the “often forgotten value of non-rational relationship aspects . . . The value perception dimension of customer intimacy is not purely rational. Emotional motives, simply enjoying the relationship with the supplier, also matter.”45 Important to note: Where customer and brand intimacy differ is that customer intimacy does not directly address the bonds people form with brands; this is the sole domain of brand intimacy.

  BRAND ENGAGEMENT

  Brand engagement is a broad term/approach, used by many to mean different things. Generally speaking, it refers to promoting interaction between a customer and a brand, rather than just driving sales. Jay Henderson, director of strategy for IBM, wrote, “I think of engagement as representing two-way communication between a brand and consumers . . . Today, brands can listen more effectively to customers and, as a result, deliver a more informed and tailored marketing message. Moreover, there is a huge opportunity for marketers to extend the reach of their marketing campaigns by encouraging customers to share their purchases, their experiences, and their likes—making a good customer not just those who transact, but also those who share.”46

  Brand engagement happens through various forms of brand-consumer communications, which occur at different points of contact, or “touchpoints.” These touchpoints include advertising, social media, retail environments, and the products/services themselves, and allow brands and consumers to interact and share with each other, and build a relationship. The goal of the brand here is to drive consumer loyalty and sentiment toward the brand, eventually increasing the consumer’s value as a customer.

  An interesting brand engagement study by Gensler in 2013 sought to discover the difference between a transaction versus a relationship. They wanted to explore the emotional connection between consumers and brands, and hypothesized that true engagement is emotional, not transactional. They surveyed 2,838 consumers in the United States and found that “high-emotion” customers were more satisfied, purchased their favorite brands more often, and were more likely to recommend the brand. “High-emotion” consumers are nearly two times more likely than “low-emotion” consumers to say that their favorite brand is a part of their daily routine. They also found people connected with brands that shared their values and delivered quality.47

  Engagement suggests a two-way relationship, which is important; most other approaches in the field are one-way. However, success is generally seen as the number of shares or one’s earned reach/influence. Brand engagement doesn’t tell you how to create a brand people will bond with; it just indicates that engaging with them is an important component of brand building. Brands based on rational thought, for example, could try and engage with their audiences and still be unsuccessful because they are not adopting those principles which will help ensure their ability to build bonds. Because engagement involves customers acting and participating with a brand, it can be viewed as a contributor to brand intimacy.

  But brand engagement is not intimacy and does not ensure intimacy. Brand intimacy requires time to allow a relationship to develop through the accumulation of relevant experience and knowledge, which is more than an engagement program can deliver by itself.

  LOVEMARKS

  On the surface, Lovemarks bears a resemblance to brand intimacy. Its website states, “Lovemarks reach your heart as well as your mind, creating an intimate, emotional connection that you just can’t live without. Ever.”48 Developed by former Saatchi & Saatchi CEO Kevin Roberts and seen as the ultimate goal of a brand, to qualify as a Lovemark a brand must be nominated by a site visitor, who shares a story about the brand. There is also a 30-question Lovemark Profiler, which states, “If you can answer YES to all the questions, congratulations, your brand is a Lovemark!”49 The questions target individual opinions about the brand; for example: “Are you confident that _____ would never do anything you wouldn’t want to be associated with?” “Does _____ fit perfectly to the way you dream about yourself?”50 Site visitors can then vote on whether they love a certain brand and whether they feel it should be added or removed from the list of the Top 200 Lovemarks. (For example, 3,665 people voted that they love Apple while 375 voted to lose it.51) Because Lovemarks are based on consumer opinions rather than more deep-seated motivations, they tend to be highly popular brands that have passionate fans, not just customers. This makes a Lovemark an admirable and valuable status for a brand to achieve.

  However, while consumers who have an intimate relationship with a brand are also likely to be passionate fans, this is where the similarity between Lovemark status and brand intimacy ends. Lovemarks does not address what is the true focus of brand intimacy—the underlying psychology that describes why and how a close, personal relationship is formed, maintained, and lost between a consumer and a brand. Additionally, Lovemarks’ idea of falling in love with a brand and buying only that brand is not reflective of actual consumer behavior; it’s a popular exaggeration, as was explained in the Loyalty section of this chapter. Also, Lovemarks doesn’t really address the causes and effects of “falling out of love” with a brand, which as we all know from personal relationships, happens relatively frequently.

  Lovemarks serves as an outline of a particular marketing philosophy and assigns a status to those brands that most successfully embody that philosophy. Although these brands do receive a love score, these scores are based on consumer clicks on the Lovemarks website, making it more of a participation-based demonstration rather than a statistical representation of consumer sentiment
. This also means that only the most zealous fans have an impact on the results, while brand intimacy accounts for and includes different levels of intimacy between brands and consumers.

  In fact, in Kevin Roberts’s book, Lovemarks: The Future beyond Brands, he answers the question, “What makes a truly great love stand out?” with, “Mystery, Sensuality, and Intimacy,” suggesting that intimacy might just be one piece of the Lovemarks puzzle. Overall, Lovemarks is a theory supported mainly by anecdotal evidence, used to inspire rather than inform marketing strategy and conceptualize the success of the world’s most beloved brands.

  EMOTIONAL BRANDING

  Emotional branding describes (and advocates for) a more emotional approach to marketing strategy, one reached by understanding consumers, engaging their senses, and creating more innovative brands. Written by co-founder and former CEO of Desgippes Gobé (now Brandimage) Marc Gobé, Emotional Branding: The New Paradigm for Connecting Brands to People uses countless branding anecdotes and case studies to explain various elements of emotional branding. It offers a significant change in perspective compared to most marketing materials and extols the virtues of linking brands with emotion.

  Gobé’s Emotional Branding starts by looking at successful brands from recent history to glean valuable lessons in brand strategy, all of which relate to the overarching philosophy of emotional branding. The book begins by introducing the concept of emotional branding, explaining, “By emotional, I mean how a brand engages consumers on the level of the senses and emotions; how a brand comes to life for people and forges a deeper, lasting connection.”52 He goes on to explore how emotional branding relates to consumer demographics and trends, sensorial experiences, and brand innovation.

  Like brand intimacy, Emotional Branding suggests that emotional connections build stronger, more effective brands. The two approaches appear conceptually compatible, even though they employ different techniques and serve different roles. Emotional Branding looks at branding history to inform our perspective, while Brand Intimacy analyzes the psychology of consumers to draw meaningful conclusions about their relationships with brands (and has proprietary data and research behind it).

  Emotional Branding does little to address the different levels of brand-consumer bonds and how these bonds can change and weaken over time. Rather, the book focuses on ways to create and strengthen connections with consumers without capturing or explaining the stages in these relationships or the process by which consumers grow to bond with brands. For the most part, the book also does not explain or leverage modern understandings about how the brain works and how people make decisions. Although consumer attitudes as preferences are often described, little is done to explain the psychology behind the way consumers feel toward brands.

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  UNDERSTANDING INTIMACY

  We wanted to learn more about human intimacy to test our hypothesis that people can form relationships with brands in the same way they form relationships with other people. This required a comprehensive understanding of the meaning of intimacy and how thinking on this topic has evolved and advanced over time.

  THE DEFINITIONS OF INTIMACY

  “Intimacy” has many connotations—perhaps the most widely known is the physical form of intimacy—but in virtually every case, intimacy refers to a relationship in which there is a feeling of closeness. There have been a variety of definitions of intimacy. Intimacy has been described as, “[K]nowing that I am not alone in the universe . . . the sharing of closeness, of bonding, of reciprocation. It is the engulfing of warmth and care. It is the experiencing of another.”53 Marketing academician Barbara Stern cites the following definition of intimacy: “A knowledge of the core of something, an understanding of the inmost parts, that which is indicative of one’s deepest nature and marked by close physical, mental, and social association.”54 Psychologist Dan McAdams notes intimacy “refers to the sharing of one’s innermost being, or essence.”55 He states that no other desire may be more compelling than the desire for intimacy and asserts that this “universal intimacy motive” is “fundamental” to human experience—though the degree of motivation varies by individual.

  Indeed, intimate relationships play a central role in the overall human experience.56 Aristotle, one of the first thinkers to address how humans form relationships, suggested that utility, pleasure, and virtue were the underlying factors for all relationships. Only those relationships built from virtue and based on partners liked for being themselves had the potential be long-lasting. This was the prevailing thinking on intimate relationships until the twentieth century,57 when William James penned The Principles of Psychology. In it, he described the many ways in which the self can manifest, including the material self, the social self, the spiritual self, and the pure ego.58 James felt a person’s self-concept must be seen within the context of his/her relationships with other people. Freud would later examine relationships with this in mind, and proposed that a human being’s first encounter with intimate behavior is with his or her mother, during the act of breast-feeding.59 This thinking has been developed further in social psychology, as noted by Maren Cardillo: as a child matures, her or his need for autonomy and individuation influences his or her intimate interactions with peers. These interactions, often characterized by autonomy, sensitivity, empathetic concern, and the ability to verbalize emotions, have been found to influence the formation of intimate friendships later on.60

  During adolescence, much changes, both in terms of social development and the role and focus of family and friends. This is the period when the amount of time a child spends with their parents is reduced by half.61 Adolescents seek out those undergoing similar physical and emotional changes and prioritize increased interactions related to their new needs and stresses. Thus, intimate interactions increase between friends during this life stage because they provide teens with a foundation for self-understanding and clarification. Some also suggest intimate relationships in early life ultimately give rise to an individual’s personality.62

  As we mature, intimacy can take on additional nuances. Robert Sternberg, a psychologist and psychometrician, has developed a triangular theory of love which includes intimacy as one of its three components. In his theory, intimacy encompasses feelings of attachment, closeness, connectedness, and bondedness. It is the emotional part of the triangle (whereas the other two areas, passion and commitment, form the physical and cognitive components, respectively).63

  While the predominant thinking in psychology has largely focused on the romantic aspects of intimacy (versus platonic, parental, or friendship relationships), Perlman and Fehr identify three consistent themes across multiple interpretations that are relevant and aligned to our discussion of intimacy as it relates to branding:

  1.The closeness and interdependence of partners,

  2.The extent of self-disclosure, and

  3.The warmth or affection experienced.64

  ERIKSON’S APPROACH TO INTIMACY

  Psychologist Erik Erikson articulated what is generally accepted as the definitive definition of intimacy in his work on the stages of psychosocial development, which identifies eight stages through which a healthily developing human should pass as they go from infancy to late adulthood. In each stage, the person confronts, and hopefully masters, new challenges. Each stage builds upon the successful completion of earlier stages; likewise, the challenges of stages not successfully completed may be expected to reappear as problems in the future.65

  Erikson found that intimacy is a stage that generally occurs in young adulthood, when people begin to share their true thoughts and feelings with non-family members in an exploration of relationships that can lead to longer-term commitment. Once people have established their identities, Erikson felt they are ready to make long-term commitments to others.66 They become capable of forming intimate, reciprocal relationships (e.g., through close friendships or marriage) and willingly make the sacrifices and compromises that such relationships require. Avoiding intimacy, or fe
aring commitment and relationships, can lead to isolation, loneliness, and sometimes depression. He asserted that, “Intimacy is really the ability to fuse your identity with someone else’s without the fear that you’re going to lose something yourself.”67 This definition is significant, because it identifies the two elements that are essential to our understanding of intimacy as it can relate to building brand relationships:

  1.First, the idea of fused identities describes a relationship in which there is a close personal connection and a feeling of belonging together.

  2.Second, the thought regarding a lack of fear—a sense of security people develop in a relationship through experience and over time, which enables them to take down their emotional “walls” and be themselves.

  MODELING INTIMACY

  Intimate relationships can take a number of forms, but these two elements—a feeling of fused identities and a sense of security that enables people to feel that they can be themselves—are always present, whether they’re consciously considered or not.

  Decades after Erikson’s seminal work, additional thinking, constructs and models have been developed to articulate the process of forming relationships. Interestingly, several models have already been established to measure or consider intimacy as related to advertising and marketing.

  Levinger’s Five-Stage Model: Psychologist George Levinger proposed a five-stage model related to the development of an adult romantic relationship, which has since been used and adapted to study other types of relationships, both personal and commercial. The model’s five stages are: Acquaintance, Build-up, Continuation, Deterioration, and Ending68.

  Levinger developed this model to explain how and why heterosexual married couples come together and fall apart, and described the process as somewhat of an inevitability. However, the model is also used to study a variety of relationships, oftentimes serving as a road map for preventing or avoiding the Deterioration and Ending stages of the process.69