'Brand love is an outcome of doing the right thing for customers again and again'

At the e4m Pitch CMO Summit 2021, marketers from across verticals convened to share their insights about brand love as the perfect remedy for pandemic consequences. The Delhi edition of the virtual summit also witnessed a power-packed panel discussion on the topic - ‘Role of Brand Love in Consumer Brand Relationships’.  

Chaired by Neha Ahuja, Head of Marketing, India, Spotify, the panellists for the session were Ashish Mishra, Executive Vice President - Marketing, ACKO General Insurance; Harish Narayanan, Chief Marketing Officer, Myntra; Hitesh Malhotra, Chief Marketing Officer, Lenskart.com; Lucky Saini, Head of Brand, Vedantu and Prasanna Rai, Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Wipro Consumer Care & Lighting. 

Ahuja kick started the discussion with her remark on brand love as one of the most important and timeless strategies in businesses. "I think if we become even more relevant in the current time, we also believe that once built, this emotional connection called the brand love serves as the foundation for long term customer to brand relationship. And we often feel its impact for a very long time.” 

Malhotra said that the more staggered the category, the higher the energy one needs to create brand love. “"Earlier, in communication the focus was quite utilitarian where it talked more about value purchase, quality or simply speaking, the whole proposition that a customer can take out of the product. But over a period of time, we discovered that the only way to go about this is to accentuate brand love because the larger your category staggered or scattered across unstructured marketplaces or unstructured retail, the higher is your energy that you need to create brand love.” 

Explaining what brand love means to ACKO, Mishra shared: "We are really focusing on a simple principle: if you consistently exceed customer expectations, eventually it will result in a great brand love for the brand. So it's not a marketing strategy for us, but it's something that we would like to have eventually.” 

Highlighting the importance of consumer journey, Saini said, “For us, it's really about experiences. Because we really operate online only; we are by DNA online. So everything needs to be crafted, constructed from an experience point of view. And truly speaking, service orientation is extremely important for us. So, the way we look at brand love, it's not a stream of work to drive for us, I think it's a lens for us. Advertising is a very small part of the entire play for us. A lot of our experience building happens online.  

Narayanan stated that brand love is an outcome of doing the right thing for the customers. “Love is a very loaded word, we have not been able to define it in real life, or personal life as well. So I don't see it being defined very well in terms of brand. For me, brand love is an outcome of doing the right thing for the customer again and again." 

Citing examples of brands like Santoor and Maggie, Rai explained how each brand is at a different stage of a brand journey. “I see it as an outcome. And each brand is at a different stage of this journey towards brand love. So if I take in my portfolio, I have Santoor, which is a well-established brand over 25 years, where the concept of brand love is absolutely true. It's as good as what we've been hearing about Maggie. There are people in some parts of the country where they swear by the brand. And they think that it does everything that a soap has to do. At the same time, if you take a new brand, it's at a completely different space and different time in its journey."