Feb 14 | 6 minutes read

How To Create A Brand People Adore – A Data-Driven Love Story

Valentine’s Day: The day of lovers, friends, and family. And you want to get a place in there too, right? Despite love being an abstract and sometimes irrational feeling, there are ways you can influence brand perception to get the butterflies whirling. So, let’s explore how you can become a love brand that swipes your customers off their feet – all year round.

What is Brand Love?

We all have a brand that makes our hearts beat a little bit faster. For me, it's brands that dare to stick their neck out with copy and communication that appeals to my (Millennial, I admit) values.

Now, let me ask you a question: What’s your favourite all-time brand?

By now, a brand probably has popped into your head. Maybe you chose that particular one because you identify with the values. Maybe because you think that their commercials are entertaining. Or perhaps because there’s a bit of nostalgia connected to it. Regardless, there’s most likely no sole rational explanation of why. It’s a feeling.

But why should you even care about appeasing to an irrational feeling? Well, emotionally connected customers:

Spend 2,5 times more than satisfied customers
Remains a customer for 5.1 years (1.5 times longer than satisfied customers)
Have a 306% higher lifetime value
Recommend brands to others at a much higher rate (71%).

Meet Your Audience’s Needs

The foundation of all great marketing is to earn the trust you need to gain consent, process data, and turn it into action. This allows you to understand and approach your audience as individuals and give them what they need.

But a lot of customer data is in the same position as Juliet: held isolated. And you don’t want your audience to feel that there’s a disconnect – as if they’re leading multiple lives on multiple channels. So, you need a data platform to tie the (data)knot and bring it together to one.

Once you’ve managed to marry it all, you’ll gain the insights you need to get up close and personal with your audience. By aligning your business efforts with preferences of actual people, you’ll know which pralines to select from the scrumptious chocolate box to satisfy every palate.

Create An Experience That Leaves An Impression

Creating an extraordinary experience goes hand-in-hand with meeting audience needs. Apart from the basics, such as a website with great content and smooth navigation, you should focus on creating an experience that meets your audience’s preferences.

With insights derived from data, you can personalise the experience to their liking. Personalised product recommendations, data-driven paid ads, and website personalisation are a few examples. So, instead of adopting a one for all, you can use data to cherish the personal one to one.

Want this image? Download our Valentine's Day image bundle today!

Fuel Your Brand with Purpose and Passion

For far too long, businesses have focused on the what and the how. But relationships should never be built on money. They should be built on mutual attraction, trust, and passion.

You need to feel devoted to creating a brand that permeates passion and an impenetrable purpose. The internal has a big impact on the external. So, you need to live and breathe your purpose if you want your customers to follow suit.

To have the (cross-departmental) talk and define what you are and where you see yourselves in five years and how to get there is a big step. But to truly understand the purpose behind the what and the how; you need to answer the why. Ask yourself questions such as:

Why do you exist as a company?
What do you do, beyond making money?
What do you believe in?
What aspect of your daily work makes you proud?

Once you’ve made a collective agreement of what makes your hearts sing, it should be the purpose and the guiding star of your company.

In the end, the formula is quite simple: Build your brand in a mechanic and functional fashion, and your audience will view it the same. But if you lead with purpose, you will create a brand that you, and your audience, will love and adore.

A Higher Social Purpose: Creating A Value-Based Connection

Love is an emotion. It’s sometimes irrational and based on identification with brand values. A social conscience is seen as a highly attractive attribute for a brand, as it provides co-sympathetical personal identification. Basically: a value-based connection.

64% of consumers say they trust a brand more if they share values with it.

As we can see in our whitepaper, E-commerce Personalisation in the Nordics, taking a stand and displaying social conscience can make or break your relationship – in particular with Millennials and Gen Z:ers.

Now, some brands build their entire business on a higher purpose – the cosmetics company LUSH (vegan and cruelty-free) is a prime example of this strategy. Whether you do all or just a little bit: the important part is that you align it with your business strategy in a way that feels authentic.

Going Steady: Nurture Always, In All Ways

It’s said that you should treat love like a butterfly: Hold it too tight, it’ll crush. Hold it too loose, it’ll fly away. I admit – the saying is a bit overused. Maybe even a bit corny. But the message is true nevertheless. And it should apply to your brand communications, too.

The second foundation of an impenetrable brand-customer relationship is to create a golden ring of engagement. You need to remind your customers that you exist, and catch them when they fall.

Get this image – and feel free to use it anywhere you like!

The customer journey and sales funnel is generally depicted as a chronological sequence of events. A gradual deepening of engagement. The person visits your site, browses, perhaps downloads a handbook or places a product in a cart. And then, the visitor converts in a heartbeat. And knocks on your door time and time again. Or?

Well, the customer journeys and relationship status are pretty much always set on it’s complicated. People tend to forget about you, and gain and lose interest for various reasons. Eventually, they might stop sliding into your website altogether. And you don’t want them to reconsider and end up selecting a different partner or provider, right?

You want to be on your customers’ minds. Always. So, you need to adopt tools that enable you to do so. An easy way to keep engagement afloat is to get started with, and create, flows for marketing automation, which enables you to communicate with timely precision. For example:

Flows triggered by certain dates, such as birthdays or inactivity.
Whitepaper download flows that encourage people to take the next step.
Recovery strategies for cart abandonment and browse abandonment is a stellar proposal for e-commerce businesses or retailers.
Onboarding flows and/or post-purchase emails with personalised product recommendations that keep the passion from cooling down.

Want more automated inspiration? Check out or top flows for B2B and B2C.

The Bottom Line…

… is that even though love is fleeting, there’s more than one reason to put in some elbow grease to win over your customers’ hearts. It supercharges brand salience, creates loyalty, prolongs the relationship, bolsters the likelihood of social proof and your long-term results. The list can go on, and on, and on…