Forget brand love: Your customers see you as an employee – not their hero
Sorry, marketers. Most customers don’t want an emotional bond with your brand, but instead want performance, consistency, and value. Alex Vishney, the Sydney MD of research consultancy 5D, explains.
For years marketers have spoken of “brand love” as the holy grail, a kind of deep and emotional loyalty akin to friendship, even romance. The thinking goes: if a brand can make consumers fall in love with it, they will become loyal, advocate on its behalf and maybe even forgive its flaws.
You need to forget that. It’s time marketers stop pretending your customers might fall, or have fallen, in love with their brand. They won’t. Why? Because, if you’re lucky and/or good at your job, they will hire your brand. Hiring is not the same as falling in love.
The most useful way to think about customer relationships is in terms of employment – not love or romance. We don’t pay our loved ones to spend time with us, but we do pay brands. We rarely feel guilty switching from one brand to another, but we would typically avoid cheating on a partner. And we absolutely expect brands to be better tomorrow than they were yesterday, just like we do with employees.
If your brand was an employee, your product is your skillset and your brand image is your attitude. Both are essential (of course) but no employee can thrive on “good vibes” alone. You need to consistently perform, deliver value and continuously improve. The minute that you stop showing up, is the minute you’re on notice.
Now, this isn’t just semantics. It’s about the shift in how we should measure, market and manage brands. Because if customers behave like employers, then we need to understand what they actually expect from their employees.
Just like hiring managers, consumers evaluate brands based on things like competence, attitude, consistency and the ability to deliver on a promise. They use recruiters – think intermediaries like comparison sites, influencers, brokers, search engines – to find options. They run informal interviews via reviews, trials and price-checks. And if they don’t like what they see, they move on. No exit interview. No hard feelings. That’s business.
Alex Vishney
If we look at it through an employer lens, what does that mean for brands?
For one, first impressions matter: just like a job interview, you have a limited window to signal credibility and capability. Product and brand experiences need to create connection and confidence quickly, not with sweeping gestures, but with clarity and relevance.
Secondly, you’re part of a team, not in a monogamous relationship, so stop chasing loyalty like it’s a long-term, exclusive deal. In many categories, most consumers have a brand repertoire. You are one of several in the repertoire. If you want a bigger role, you need to earn it. That means showing up consistently and building the kind of credentials that get you “promoted” to take on more responsibility (get bought in more occasions, for example).
Lastly, doing your job well is the minimum: brands can’t and shouldn’t expect credit for simply delivering what was expected of the job. Consumers assume competence. But if you drop the ball, you risk getting “fired”. In today’s saturated market, there are plenty of qualified candidates waiting to take your place.
This shift also changes how we think about brand tracking and customer experience. If we look at loyalty programs, many brands spend millions trying to generate emotional engagement. But most customers do not want to be emotionally attached to their shoe polish, mobile network or brand of canned vegetables.
There are a couple of key reasons for this. First, customers don’t feel love for your brand because that tends to be an emotion reserved for other human beings. The other reason is that money changes everything. If you ask a friend to help you move a couch, you might feel a bit of love for them if they oblige. However, if you offer to pay them, you’ve switched from what psychologists called a “social exchange” to a “market exchange” mentality, where love isn’t the goal or outcome, but rather achieving value.
Real employees don’t demonstrate value by being flashy but instead by owning mistakes, showing improvement, and responding effectively. The same holds true in customer complaints. We’ve seen through our research that brands which respond with empathy and competence during a crisis can turn detractors into advocates (what we call “Dunkirk Moments”). But that can only happen if they act like the kind of employee you’d keep; someone who’s capable, emotionally intelligent, and accountable.
Brands that behave like high-performing hires will continue to earn attention and therefore gain trust and more budget. Brands that behave like entitled employees, coasting on charm or an inflated sense of self-worth, will be left out to dry. Those who are no longer adding value at their next “review” run the risk of getting retrenched or a demotion.
It’s worth dropping the “love” talk and forgetting the fantasy of emotional loyalty. Your customers are after results instead of a relationship with you. Think about this: if your brand was a person, would they still have the job?
Keep up to date with the latest in media and marketing
Have your say