Rekindling the love between brands and customers

Is it possible to "love" a brand? It’s an inanimate object for goodness sake. How do brands create mutual love with their customers?

An interesting view on the state of most brand/customer relationships is summed up neatly here.

How do we at KMP help brands to get loved by their customers?

Well to start with, at KMP we say yes to loving brands but only if the brand actively demonstrates that it loves us back in a way that we want to be loved. The final bit of the last sentence is the key bit here. We as customers need to be loved in our way. This whole brand love subject has been a topic of discussion around our office the last few weeks because amazingly in this online, web 2.0 world many brands still just broadcast messages at customers instead of actively engaging with them in a two way process.

One of our favourite brands is, www.oakley.com.They love customers who are “passionately unconventional” and Oakley have worked out if they demonstrate this every day then they’ll be loved back by their customers until the end of time. Everything about Oakley is passionately unconventional. Their investment in customer engagement is nothing short of phenomenal. And that’s without talking about the science that goes into their products, which is often just thought of as the added value bit.

So how are we rekindling the love between our clients and their customers? Well first, we ease our clients into the fact that there are conversations going on about them, both good and bad, in Blogs, Forums and in social media apps like Twitter and Facebook.

Then, using our network analysis tools,we enable clients to see the overall sentiment, positive or negative, of these conversations, exactly who the online influencers are and even drill down into the individual conversations themselves.  This self-realisation by the client can often be a big shock for them. How can my customers say that? We try so hard ? We tell them stuff? After careful analysis of the conversations and sentiments we devise anengagement strategy which could include a social media outreach program, development of new social media applications, new website functionality or even, God forbid, offline engagement! After all this, we stick around to make sure our clients don’t get lazy and slip back into their old unloving ways.

Its an old fashioned point of view but for brands and customers to love each other they have got to get engaged first!