Perhaps surprising given the comparative costs of its coffee, Starbucks performs better with lower income ranges and older age demographics. This goes to show that when a brand connects with customers in a powerful way, cost is not the deciding criteria.
Less surprising is that the brand excels with women more than men. Whether as a place to meet friends, get some work done, or simply get your morning fix, few brands can match the draw that Starbucks possesses and the behaviors in us that it affects.
Increasingly, we are seeing brands looking to better understand and affect the behaviors of their consumers. Where and how a brand intersects with those behaviors showcases some of the new and exciting thinking we see in marketing today. For brands that do own some form of ritualistic behavior, are they truly valuing and protecting it as much as they can? Given emotion’s role in our decision making process, our sense of comfort and assurance formed by our habits and behaviors create a powerful advantage for brands. And for brands that are trying to embrace this archetype and affect a consumer behavior change, have you fully designed the experience to warrant the desired behavior change? How are you nurturing and fostering frequency? Do you appreciate that these aspirations are elevated and require a degree of cohesion and orchestration that may be extremely challenging to deliver? The good news for brands that do strive to achieve this rarefied level is that where there is a strong association with ritual, we often find more intimate brands.
Brands must have a degree of legacy or history in order to draw on and leverage the powerful archetype that is nostalgia. Recent studies have shown that it proves to be a powerful marketing strategy that can promote prosocial behavior and increase consumer patience.90 As with any of the archetypes, uninspired attempts to draw attention to or highlight the history of a company can easily be seen as kitsch or retro, in a shallow and ineffective way. This archetype goes beyond a simple throwback strategy; it must be referential without being exploitive. The secret to leveraging this archetype effectively is to fully understand and expend the potential nostalgic emotional capital available in the brand.
The LEGO brand truly stands out in its ability to draw on powerful associations from our childhood. Few brands can match the power of LEGO in terms of the nostalgia archetype. It was the highest-ranking nostalgia brand in our study in 2015 (in 2017, we didn’t publish results for toy brands), outperforming the entertainment industry average not only for nostalgia, but for brand strength across all the stages (sharing, bonding, and fusing).
LEGO performs better with men than women, and with higher income levels as opposed to lower. Interestingly, it is stronger among people 18–34 than those older, even though consumer demographics data suggests that the most common purchasing category for LEGO is people 35–44.91 For many, the nostalgic aspects and pleasure of the brand are relived when children experience the same joy of creation, reconfiguring, and rebuilding as their parents did. It’s not surprising that some of their biggest partnerships make use of nostalgia-rich franchises like Star Wars, Batman, and Harry Potter. Parents like to introduce their children to things that they loved as children, and LEGO benefits from this.
Some adult LEGO fans are even buying these products for themselves; the company estimates that a little less than 5 percent of all LEGO sales are by adults that are purchasing the toys for themselves.92 The brand has effectively used nostalgia, while also modernizing and adapting for today with more sophisticated and gender-neutral offerings. LEGO has also worked hard to create more involvement between brand and consumers, offering loyal customers more discounts and featuring customer videos on YouTube that showcase LEGO creations of all varieties.
LEGO’s recent success is an incredible achievement for the brand, considering that just over a decade ago, the company was near collapse. LEGO’s period of decline culminated in 2003, when it had lost 30 percent of its turnover over the past year, seeing a $240 million operating loss in sales.93 In 2004, it began cutting costs and refocusing on its core business, and by 2006, sales were up 19 percent.94
At the time, every big data study that LEGO had commissioned indicated that their products would be abandoned by future generations because millennials wouldn’t have the patience or time for LEGOs and would instead opt for digital toys that delivered instant gratification. However, after some more qualitative research, the LEGO team concluded that playing and developing skills were extremely valuable for attaining social currency in childhood, and that LEGO gives children of all ages a unique tool to do just that.95 This is why LEGO plays such an important role for so many children, both socially and developmentally, and perhaps why so many adults have such strong, positive associations between the brand and childhood. LEGO provides kids with an outlet for creativity that is easy to understand, enables exploration, and produces a tangible, playable result.
Since the mid-2000s, the brand has experienced a powerful renaissance. In 2014, LEGO’s sales rose 11 percent to exceed $2 billion, making it the largest toy maker in the world for the first time ever.96 This surge was due in part to the success that The LEGO Movie has brought the brand, which was even further accentuated with the brand’s co-opting of the 2015 Oscars. Following the song “Everything is Awesome,” performers from their surprise hit movie handed out toy Oscars to A-listers who seemed to covet these statues as much as the real ones.
This is an incredible achievement for the brand, considering how a few short years ago the company was near collapse. But through focused restructuring, a broadening of product offer, a focus on the educational aspect of the brand’s image and a powerful set of brand partnerships, the brand is now thriving.97 In fact, LEGO replaced Ferrari as Brand Finance’s “world’s most powerful brand” in 2015.98
One of the surprises in our study was the performance of Sephora, the beauty products retailer. Though relatively new in the United States (the first store opened in the U.S. in 1998),99 the brand’s intimacy score ranks it in the top 50 overall, seventh in retail, and first in its category for the indulgence archetype. As one might expect, the brand ranks highly among female consumers; it is the second highest retail brand among women aged 25–34 and generally performs better with younger audiences and lower income brackets. More impressively, the brand scores extremely high in the indulgence archetype, exceeding the performance of other retail brands, as well as all brands in the health and hygiene category.
Certain products and services link to indulgence more than others (as is the case with almost all the archetypes). For example, use of this archetype is frequent in food, beauty brands or luxury brands. Status images, giant product shots, and staged scenes, while common, may not be the optimal way to connect on an emotional level. Brands who leverage indulgence may want to think about ways to reframe this important archetype to build better, stronger emotional bonds.
Enter Sephora, with its ability to essentially take the department store makeup counters and create a more self-serve and focused experience. By combining hundreds of brands (as well as shaping many of their own), Sephora has given women the ability to focus their attention across the spectrum of beauty care products and beyond the family of any one brand. What’s more, the store staff is well known for offering recommendations and providing information and creating an environment of positive excitement. A recent study found 90 percent of women say visiting Sephora is a highly anticipated event.100 The brand caters to the indulgence of beauty by offering an upbeat experience complete with samples, stylish displays, and the glorification of pampering.
Therein lies the power of the Sephora brand. It trumps beauty brands by giving consumers the opportunity to cross product lines and sample multiple brands for different aspects of their beauty regimen. For more than seven decades, women in the United States have been fed a steady diet of marketing by cosmetic and beauty product brands. Some of the most iconic advertising of the Madison Avenue era can be attributed to this category alone. From “Avon calling” to the infamous Enjoli perfume (“I can bring home the bacon,
fry it up in the air and never never let you forget you’re a man...”), products have built and maintained a strong bond with their consumers. The concept of “I’m a Clinique woman” or “I only wear MAC cosmetics” became well-formed behavior, and historically, most women did not mix and match beauty products. Perhaps this is why 87 percent of women said Sephora is the first place they go to browse beauty products. Sephora has also made its retail presence a destination, with millennials and their friends turning Sephora shopping into a social occasion.101
Indulgence can be a powerful archetype if matched well to behaviors that align. Learning to express indulgence presents more opportunities to celebrate self, the senses and moments of pampering, in ways that heighten sensorial experiences and deepen emotional connections.
2-4
MODEL: STAGES
Similar to how people bond with each other, people bond with brands in a series of distinct stages. Stages reveal and measure the depth and degree of intensity of an intimate brand relationship. Together with archetypes, they form the foundation of the Brand Intimacy Model.
There are three core stages: sharing, bonding and fusing. Each stage builds on top of the other. In general, most brands have the majority of customers in the earliest stage of intimacy, sharing, and numbers generally drop as the stages grow in intensity. Like human relationships, positive experiences build stronger connections and deepen intimacy, while negative experiences pull the relationship down toward indifference.
Brand intimacy stages are unique for several reasons. First, they focus on reciprocity. Few other approaches highlight the idea of mutuality. What’s important to take away across any of our three stages is that this is a relationship between two equals, like any good relationship on a personal level. This is no longer about traditional brand “push” or consumer “pull;” rather it suggests both are contributing and adding value. Second, these stages are more intense since they already involve being in a relationship. The stages are based on the fact that anyone who reaches the stage of sharing has already passed through earlier stages like awareness, consideration and preference. They are therefore more advanced and are associated with a powerful connection to a brand. We often say that brand intimacy is more of an elevated goal, one that is meant to measure, nurture, and enhance the bonds that exist.
Through our work in correlating the degree of brand intimacy with financial performance (see the section on Value and Return), we have been able to demonstrate that the more customers are intimate with a brand, the better the business performance of the brand and the better the return on marketing investment. And the more intense the bonds are with your customers (e.g., fusing versus bonding or sharing), the better the performance yet again.
Brand intimacy stages help frame two ends of the marketing spectrum. At the outset, they help define the maturity of bonds a brand has with its stakeholders. Benchmark research can further detail the degree to which the brand is establishing emotional bonds and the relative percentage of those bonds by stage. Tracking movement across stages, as well as the overall percent of customers forming intimate relationships, is extremely valuable to remaining on top of one’s public image and industry performance. At the opposite end of the spectrum, stages can inform how a brand goes to market. It can be an effective tool for aligning channels to those activities that are determined to build more sharing/bonding or fused stakeholders.
While there are distinct stages in brand intimacy, the “stages” referred to in our model are designed to make it easier to understand the process that consumers and brands go through. This comprises a number of emotional and rational milestones achieved when brand relationships become more intimate.
The real-life process, however, may not resemble the clear-cut, step-by-step progression depicted in our model. People might vacillate between two stages before moving forward; some stages, due to a variety of potential factors, might move faster or slower than others. A consumer might leave a brand relationship for a numbers of reasons, only to return with a stronger predisposition to the brand. The stages acknowledge and recognize the flexible and fluctuating nature of relationships. They are grounded in psychology and have been further corroborated by our quantitative research with consumers.
To better demostrate the role that stages play in forming intimate brands, we will illustrate the differences of each stage and how different brands manifest their performance.
Sharing
“I like when companies and customers participate together. This lets customers know they are important. IKEA is a good example.”
German consumer
Bonding
“Nike is a brand I trust. I feel like they really understand me.”
Japanese consumer
Fusing
“I love the Nabisco brand fully, and Nabisco loves me back by making me feel good with each bite I take! It returns its love to me through goodness of taste.”
U.S. consumer
SHARING
This is the earliest phase of brand intimacy, when a reciprocal relationship is established. There is knowledge being shared; the consumer is informed about what the brand is all about, and vice versa. At this stage, attraction occurs through reciprocity and assurance. Here, that sense of security mentioned by Erikson begins to be fostered (see Understanding Intimacy for more details on Erik Erickson’s intimacy definition). Should the relationship advance, it would evolve to bonding, the next stage. Should it decline, it would likely cause disengagement fueled by indifference.
Disney and Netflix both engage consumers with entertainment—but from two opposite ends.
These two brands, both dominant forces in the entertainment industry, have a similar sharing performance despite wildly diverging business models. Disney is the iconic film, theme park, and global merchandise-churning behemoth, while Netflix is the young upstart video streaming service that perfectly typifies the digital disruption in entertainment delivery. Disney shows 47 percent of its users in some form of intimacy with the brand, while Netflix has 52 percent.
While these companies couldn’t be more different, they are both building intimacy most dominantly through the sharing stage. Both brands take a different approach to gaining and remaining relevant—Disney, through its iconic characters, movies, and attractions, and Netflix through the ubiquity of devices and the ability to make personal the movie and TV show watching experience. Disney has the benefit of decades of brand building and a diversified portfolio that services families and their children from infancy through their teenage years; Netflix is the explosive upstart that is benefiting from the increasingly mobile and habit-forming behavior of its young users. Netflix ranked 25th overall in our 2015 study and rose to 5th position in 2017, moving up 19 spots. Now it is only two places behind Disney.
At present, however, the breadth of appeal for Disney’s brand and its leadership in its category with a variety of users is stronger than Netflix. Disney’s brand intimacy is fueled by the strong archetypes of nostalgia and identity—these are powerful assets for this iconic brand; a company that is synonymous with family entertainment and an emotionally powerful blend of magic and fun.
Netflix, the challenger, has instead built their brand intimacy around fulfillment and ritual. Their ability to deliver content and cater to the preferences of their users creates a very friction-free experience that further builds on the ritual of using the service. The ability to consume content at one’s pace, especially in the form of binging (a behavior Netflix basically invented), creates a new world where time shrinks and the characters of the content become one’s reality. Ask anyone who emerges from a binge session and you will hear how hard it can be to return to a normal routine—a form of detoxing or re-entering of society is often required.
An example of blurring real life and entertainment, Netflix celebrated the 16th anniversary of Gilmore Girls and its revival of the show on Netflix, by taking over 200 cafés and recreating the fictional café ‘Luke’s Diner’ from Gilmore
Girls.102 Snapcodes were printed on 10,000 coffee cups that were distributed at the pop-up cafes for free. Once people took a picture of the Snapcode using the Snapchat app, they were prompted to apply the sponsored Gilmore Girls filter to their photos for one hour. The sponsored filter was viewed 880,000 times. Snapchat reported that the one-day marketing event reached more than 500,000 people.103 This one small example hints at how to engage and build a two-way relationship with consumers. Instead of asking consumers for something, Netflix created real Luke’s Diners that people could visit and get free coffee and a mug from.104 Fans got access to an exclusive filter (which could be activated only by taking a picture of the Snapcode). This, in turn, created wider reach for the brand because consumers shared their pictures.
Consumers respond to both Netflix and Disney by building relationships that seem to be strongest in sharing. This is the most common phase throughout all brands in our research. Disney, a mature and strong brand, also has a higher than average percentage of intimate customers in the ultimate stage of fusing; thus, by also increasing the funnel of new fans in sharing, Disney keeps itself strong with a broad range of customers in various stages of intimacy. It is successful at bringing in new audiences and parlaying those relationships into fusing.
One example that demonstrates Disney’s focus on sharing can be seen with its #ShareYourEars effort.To acknowledge the 100,000th Disney wish granted and the Disneyland resort’s 60th anniversary, Disney teamed up with the Make-A-Wish Foundation and invited Disney fans to send images of themselves wearing Mickey Mouse Ears with the hashtag #ShareYourEars. For each shared photo, Disney pledged to donate $5 to the Make-A-Wish Foundation, with a limit of $1 million. Fans who donated $5 to the foundation were entered into a sweepstakes to win big prizes from Disney.
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