Brands and Irrational Love
Brands love to be loved. Love helps their bottom line. Customers are typically willing to pay a premium for that brand and exhibit a reasonable amount of loyalty.
But there is another level of brand love--Irrational love.
When brands are loved irrationally, not only does this result in higher transaction prices but it also means that customers are loyal beyond reason. It makes the brand forgivable, should it stumble. It creates instant new product desire--sight unseen.
Irrational love is what creates the most valuable brands in the world.
Apple as Irrational Brand
Perhaps the most valuable and irrationally loved brand is Apple.
Over the years, Apple has built irrational brand love through a killer combination of products, services, and experiences:
- Breakthrough products that perfect and simplify existing technologies to make them useful, transforming everyday life
- Extending this experience across their seamlessly crafted eco system
- Creating emotionally compelling advertising that simplifies the product proposition, while vividly bringing the experience to life
- Introducing new products at a regular cadence, with great fanfare and instant demand
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| Apple iPhone launch used their traditional irrational love formula: simpler, useful, better |
Vision Pro-Love or Hate?
Apple's recent announcement of it's new Vision Pro mixed reality glasses met with polarizing reviews. While praised as being the best mixed reality headset ever, two big questions seemed to come out of every review:
- The Price
- $3,499 is at least twice, and sometimes as much as 7 times as expensive as other headsets on the market -- can it be worth it?
- The Purpose
- Harvard Business Review seemed to summarize the over-riding sentiment in one sentence- 'Thus, they have produced a device capable of both [AR and VR] but have not found compelling use cases in either domain.'
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| Great...'but still searching for a purpose' |
And that lack of specific use cases was evident in the way Apple described the Vision Pro. Previous breakthrough Apple products were described from the start with a specific, easy to under stand purpose--'1,000 songs in your pocket' (iPod), 'the internet in your hand' (iPad). The Vision Pro on the other hand was described in a number of ways at its debut, none of which really indicated a specific purpose:
- 'Spacial computing'
- 'Free your desktop, and your apps will follow'
- 'Be in the moment, whenever you want it'
- 'Get on the same page, in the same space'
So, can Apple maintain irrational love without the simplicity and transformative usefulness that has always driven it?
The Science Behind Irrational Love
It turns out, irrational love is measurable, diagnosable, and statistically linked to economic performance. BERA's Brand Explorer tool, with its scale of 0-100 does just that. And Apple's score of 97 is a good indicator of the most intense or, put another way, irrational love that one can have for a brand.
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| BERA Love Score is computed using a number of inputs including usage and loyalty, 5P's ratings, and purpose and emotional drivers |
In looking at some of the key contributors to BERA's overall score that are rated 99 or 100 indicate that purpose, differentiation and relevance are key drivers of Apple's irrational love. (1)
Thus, it will be incumbent on Apple, perhaps with through collaboration with app developers to define a clear and differentiated purpose behind this breakthrough technology if it is to justify the hefty price tag. Otherwise, Apple might find that it's reached the breaking point of irrational love.
(1) Actual BERA scores: Innovates With Purpose' (100), 'Stands Out' (100), 'Culturally Relevant' (99)
