The future beyond brands Lovemarks

I have decided to take a look at the book ‘ The future beyond brands Lovemarks ‘ by Kevin Roberts and I have included my thoughts on this piece of literature below.

My thoughts

This book is about the marketer’s challenge of finding ideas that will last forever by uncovering timeless emotions like love and there is a heavy focus regarding the importance of loyalty when it comes to businesses within this book. Basically the lovemark meaning is where you have a consumer in love, you have a “lovemark” and lovemarks are owned by the consumers not the company. The company is more like a caretaker of the lovemark and the company should always listen to its consumer. This book showcases many examples of how businesses and brands have to do more in this day and age in order to not only attract but to keep clients engaged and keep them coming back for more. Loyalty is a major topic of conversation within this book and the writer encourages brand owners to be loyal to what the brand represents. I discovered that this book was first published in 2004, making it slightly behind the times however I feel like its main message is still relevant in todays society and in the world of business.  Overall the book had a great discussion on concepts for engaging your audience and creating brands and he has and interesting look at what creates and cultivates an emotional reaction with consumers.

The visual layout compliments the great content, this made for a unique reading experience, kind of like a picture book for adults which I always enjoy! The use of the Sticky-note suggestions at the end of each chapter and case studies at the end of the book provided great closure to the concepts he was suggesting, see image below, I thought that this was as a nice quirky element to add.

Some of my favourite quotes from this book:

“Stop racing after every new fad and focus on making consistent, emotional connections with consumers. If you stand for nothing, you fall for everything.”

“The obvious question is, of course, why should a business care whether its products are Lovemarks or not? . . . Because that’s how we create a world we want to live in . . . Without Love, I guarantee even the greatest businesses will topple.”

“The essential difference between emotion and reason is that emotion leads to action while reason leads to conclusions.”

 

“The things we have chosen to live with are not inert objects. We wrap our imaginations around them. We express ourselves through them. We make them into what we care about.”

” Respect is love in plain clothes.”

I found the below page very helpful, he gave reasons as to why as business owners we should do things like be passionate and celebrate loyalty which I found very beneficial. I found the Kevin Roberts to be a very witty and passionate writer and this did make the book less mundane to read. The information below is something that I will return to as reference in the future.

What have I learned from this book?

I learned a lot from reading this book, this book definitely isn’t for everyone as the writing style is quite witty and possibly pretentious at times however the message from the over all book is inspiring. This is a good read for any business person or business owner therefore making it a good read for me in the building of my personal brand and the book is more applicable in an abstract sense rather than how-to sense. However one of the biggest lessons that I took away was the quest to build “loyalty beyond reason” and the the consumer owns the lovemark and that as a business owner I always need to ensure that the consumer is listened to and acknowledged.

How can I take this into my own work and my own brand?

Kevin Roberts has hit a key question here that is for anyone involved in selling anything to anyone: why will people fall in love with this? If I answer this then I am actually answering a lot more questions all of them are vital and will they will make my work and company better. This book talks about how marketing research doesn’t always show you what exactly is going on in the market which is something that I haven’t really thought about before. I now know that it is important to interact and engage with customers, therefore I will make a conscience effort to connect emotionally with my audience and consumers of my brand an ensure they feel appreciated and respected.