Building a brand romance
In Italy, there’s a principle called la bella figura. It essentially boils down to the idea that you ensure that your public persona always “looks” good—that you consciously work to control other people’s impressions of you. La bella figura has been the driving principle behind brand marketing for decades. We put gorgeous people in ads using hero packages in gorgeous settings, telling our stories in the most flattering ways.
But today we have nuova figuras—consumers anxious to be a part of brands but also unwilling to simply accept an impression we package and deliver to them. They want to help, but they want their brands to be real. They want to know about the experiences of other real people, and they want to participate in defining and portraying the brand.
As a boomer, I find all this pretty remarkable. When I was little, brand identification was rarer and more subtle. You were proud to wear Levi’s or whatever, but buying a T-shirt emblazoned with a gigantic Levi’s logo—that would have been a bit over the top.
Sometime in my formative years—I think it began when Brooke Shields started talking seductively about her Calvins—all that changed. Today, kids will engrave logos in their crew cuts. Brands can sell logo shirts for $20-plus, rather than having to give away the shirts to get people to wear them. And Flickr is chock full of photos of people proudly sharing the limelight with their favorite products— from Marmite to Tide.
This all poses a remarkable opportunity—but one that requires careful “strategery.”
How do we cultivate relationships with consumers that create lifelong loyalty? I think there are lessons in human relationship building—in dating and marriage. The way we attract, impress, and partner with consumers have strong parallels to the ways in which we find mates. It’s a progression, from dating, to marriage, to having babies, to starting to look, sound, and act alike. People don’t marry us just because it’s what we want. Relationships are joint decisions, and brand relationships are no different.
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