You heard them: brands are dead, it’s the lovemarks era, when you are supposed to not only respect, but also love a major brand. It’s the time when big is not enough anymore. Since a man from Saatchi & Saatchi discovered the emotional weaknesses of humans, the advertising agencies decided that a big name with big sales is just the right candidate for the Big Love – one that magically occurs between the brand and the consumer. Today the status of a lovemark cannot be achieved by any brand, but only by major brands, such as Apple, Google or Coca-Cola. All major brands along with their advertising agencies have employed a plethora of emotional stimuli with great impact on the humans’ subconscious processes. The emotional stimuli are hidden in some powerful forces thrown against the consumer’s reason: the marketing and the packaging. Under these emotional stimuli, the consumer gets entangled in some sort of “experience” where he discounts the reason and gives in to his heart. It’s blind love, an odd situation in which the consumer is blind to the flaws of a certain product, service or brand even though a comparison with other products, services or brands can be easily made.
The advertising agencies pretend that the today’s consumer is not a consumer with unshakable economic convictions. They say the consumer has become a lover, a human not reluctant to have a relationship with a product, a service or a brand that is ready to touch him in unforgettable ways. Do you remember one Orange advertising? The consumers were invited to dance like Millidge and Doig, the brand’s cartoon characters, and many people performed that dance, recording and sending videos with them dancing. An inconspicuous relationship has formed between the consumers and the brand. That’s the “dance with the brand” that many people have performed without suspecting what that triggers. The brand’s advertising heads planned to ignite the blind love through the funny dancing and, apparently, they have succeeded enough. Thus, the consumer of this age is lured into fueling his loyalty with a blind attachment for a product, a service or a brand. As a result, the consumer starts to see the product, the service or the brand in a more positive light and enters the realm of illusions. In the process, the consumer apparently feels better and just for that he is willing to pay a higher price or to accept the product or the service even if their quality is not as expected or superior to other cheaper products or services of another brand.
The advertising trend to create a lovemark from a brand indicates that the advertising agencies deem the consumers somewhat mentally handicapped and ready to establish, beyond reason, a long-term relationship with a product, a service or a company. In advertising, they do not call this a handicap, but an axis where the consumers’ high level of respect for a certain brand meets the consumers’ high level of love for the same brand. In other words, what makes the man a noble being, the reason, that thing in the brain which is apt to determine the economic value of a thing and establish the criteria for respect, gets numbed by this blind love ignited by the emotional stimuli propagated by the cunning advertising. We all know that the blind love is not new for inter-human relationships, as this may naturally occur as a result of the biological needs of humans. But how do you create a love for a thing? For this, you need the man of these times (one more and more lonely and with less hopes of finding the love that he dreams of) and a crafty story about the thing that may be the object of his love. The story is made by the advertising agencies and is expressed through images, words and music that will eventually charm the consumer. The story’s goal is to create the illusion that the thing is not just a simple thing, but something with human qualities, something you can trust and even love. The advertising will make the consumer think that the thing feels as a human, and stands for the same causes that you stand for. To create that illusion, the advertising makes the (damn) thing talk, laugh, dance, sing, smile or do anything that humans do. In literature, this is called personification, representing a non-human thing as if it were human. The writer of today, as that of the past, knows that the story’s impression in the mind of the reader is stronger when human emotions are injected in the story. To impress the consumer, the advertising will convey or attribute to things like products, services or brands various human emotions or qualities. After this, a relationship between a human and a thing, a product, a service or a brand becomes possible. The blind love becomes possible, too. You can see how various brands are the sponsors of various events from sport games to music concerts. They insidiously tell you: you see, we support what you support, we feel the same, and we love the same. But, as we all know, at a certain point, the blind love dissolves as the reason inevitably bounces back. It’s the human spirit that brings the man back to the truth, to the real world that he lives in. The illusion will then diminish and a new light will shed on the human being or on the thing. The flaws once overlooked are then exposed and the relationship between the two might be worse off than if the positive illusion had never existed in the first place.
Now you know how it works. Whenever you see a story related to a product, a service or a brand (company), that is most probably the story that lures you into blind love. That story may be about the product, about the service or about their creator. Never forget: the story is mostly fabricated and the blind love means blind to the truth!
EXPOZEUS 