Gabriel García Márquez is one of my favorite authors of all time. Recently, a friend posted a photo of herself reading “Love in the Time of Cholera”, and I immediately remembered the first time I read it. I had just started university… so when cozy Autumn came, I devoured the whole thing in less than a weekend and closed the book knowing exactly what love should be like: magical, unforgiving, a little crazy at times, and transformative. Very realistic as I found out later in life.
For anyone who hasn’t read it: Florentino falls in love with Fermina when they’re teenagers. She eventually rejects him and marries someone else. He spends the next 51 years, nine months and four days waiting for another chance.
Seventeen years after reading it, the book brings to my mind a different kind of love. Brand love – a marketing movement where we spend loads of money convincing people to fall in love with us. And not so much time wondering if we’re behaving like a brand worth loving.
Brand love is a strong emotional attachment that a customer develops for a brand. It goes far beyond standard loyalty or customer satisfaction. Researchers describe it in terms that sound remarkably like a human relationship: passion, attachment, even distress at the thought of separation.
Apple, Coca-Cola, Nike, Rhode… brands that have managed to inspire almost unconditional love among millions of people. They’re identities, lifestyles, little communities of people who recognize one another through what they buy. Look at me, still using an iPhone even though I know very well there are objectively better phones on the market. Yet when I see someone with an Android phone or a Lenovo laptop, I immediately see a person without taste 🙂 (No offense. I know I’m brand-trippin’.)
We usually talk about brand love as if it’s made of big campaigns and beautiful moments: the grand gestures, the love letters, the serenades under the balcony. But love shows itself when times are hard. And right now many people are thinking less about shopping and experiences and more about global politics, economic pressure, the rising cost of living and what comes next. In our region, this feels more relevant than ever.
But in all of this, brands still need to sell things. Fair enough. So what can a brand do “in the time of cholera” to prove it is worth loving?
Show restraint
Not every moment needs a campaign. And certainly not another incredible video of a beautiful person living an equally beautiful life, thanks to a product that apparently changed everything.
There are moments when we, marketers, need to read the room. When people are worried about their jobs, their savings or what’s happening around them, another invitation to upgrade their lifestyle might not be particularly welcome. I’m not suggesting brands should stop selling. I’m suggesting we should occasionally ask whether what we’re about to say is appropriate in the current context.
A good example is what happened in our region earlier this year, when the only message we cared about was the security alert on our phones. This is when our marketing plans, KPIs and strategies were turned completely upside down. Even though it is, every year, the best time to sell certain products, we stopped. We paused social media engagement, paid campaigns and calls to action. When, for once, not launching anything was the right decision.
Be there for them
Florentino waited 51 years, nine months and four days for the woman he loved. I’m not suggesting brands should go quite that far, but it is good to show customers that we will be there for them, for better and for worse.
We spend enormous amounts of money convincing customers that we’re always there for them. Then, when budgets tighten, the first things to disappear are sometimes the very services that made those promises believable. Customer support becomes harder to reach, little benefits quietly disappear, the process somehow gains another three steps, and the customer who has been with us for ten years discovers that the best offers are reserved for people who join today. Very romantic…
Being there means protecting the things customers already rely on, even when the business is under pressure. Answer the phone. Explain the problem. Fix what you can. And if you can’t fix it, at least don’t make someone spend forty minutes discovering that for themselves.
Innovate to make their lives easier
In difficult times, perhaps innovation shouldn’t be about “game-changing” new features. It should answer a simple question: what is making our customers’ lives more difficult right now, and can we actually do something about it?
Not everything needs new technology, an AI-powered assistant or a launch event. Sometimes the most useful innovation is removing something that should never have been complicated in the first place.
I remember, back in the Covid days, the bank I was working for noticed that customers couldn’t pay their household staff, who were usually paid in cash. That also meant maids, nannies and drivers couldn’t send money back home to support their families. It took us three days to design the service, launch it in the mobile app, and tell the public it existed and how to use it. No six-month transformation programme. Just a problem that needed solving. It’s still one of the moments I’m proudest of.
Care about what they care about
We spend so much time defining our target audiences: their income, age, interests, salary, lifestyle. We know what they buy, where they shop and which social media platforms they use. But do we know what keeps them awake at night?
Caring about what matters to customers means making decisions that reflect those priorities, including decisions that may not produce the most impressive quarterly numbers.
Customers don’t expect brands to solve every problem in their lives. And I don’t think they particularly want brands pretending to be their best friends. They want companies to understand what matters to them and behave accordingly. It’s not terribly complicated. It’s just considerably harder than putting “Because We Care” at the end of a commercial.
I have personally stayed loyal to certain brands for reasons that had absolutely nothing to do with love: convenience, habit, the difficulty of switching… But a customer who hasn’t left yet isn’t necessarily a customer who wants to stay. Which takes me back to Florentino and Fermina.
Their story is far more complicated than the romantic masterpiece I thought I understood at 19. I no longer believe that waiting forever is automatically proof of love, or that grand declarations mean much without the everyday behaviour to support them.
Maybe that’s what growing older does. You become slightly less impressed by the poetry and much more interested in whether someone does what they promised.
The same applies to brands.
We can keep making beautiful promises and asking customers to love us. But before the next brand love campaign, we should ask a much simpler question.
Are we behaving like a brand worth loving?
