Lovemarks — a site, then a book — is the product of Kevin Roberts, CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi, the ginormous ad agency.

Lovemarks are brands that “inspire loyalty beyond reason.” (“Lovemark” is a play on “trademark,” I assume.) Roberts analyzes products using The Love/Respect Axis:

BRANDS Low Love High Respect	LOVEMARKS High Love High Respect
PRODUCTS Low Love Low Respect	FADS High Love Low Respect

Because brands “have run out of juice,” his ad agency “looked closely at the question: What makes some brands inspirational, while others struggle?” The 2×2 above says the difference is love. Yet, oddly, the site instead focuses on respect — “At the core of every Lovemark is Respect” — and says nothing about love. Instead, the main explanatory page talks only about the “three intangible, yet very real, ingredients” of respect: Mystery, sensuality and intimacy. The site has a few sentences about each of these, and love — what really differentiates brands from lovemarks — pops up only in the first sentence in the section on intimacy: ” There is nothing more personal than love!” I find this confusing.

Why does Roberts focus on respect instead of love, despite his own analysis? Could it be that spelling out how to get us to love a brand would come across either as cynically manipulative or something beyond the control of marketers? (Note: This is based on the lovemarks site. I haven’t read the book.)

And that gets at why I’m not ready to have my ticket punched on the Lovemarks Express. On the one hand, it’s useful to think about why some products are special to us. And as victims of marketing, we’d probably be better off if companies adopted the Lovemarks approach. On the other — and maybe I’m just projecting my own cynicism onto Roberts — Lovemarks isn’t just a way of analyzing brand loyalty, it’s a formula for creating it. Yes, “Remember only the customer can decide Lovemark status”…but now that you know how it happens, go forth and Lovemark your brand. It’s like “experience marketing” that teaches you the tricks for convincing people that The Olive Garden is a rustic cafe outside of Florence instead of earning their respect as a damn good restaurant on the second floor of the Youngstown Mall. You want brand loyalty? Be a great freaking product. Also, it wouldn’t hurt if I grew up watching my mother use it.

For me, the best part of the site is the page with the latest reader nominations for lovemark status. This morning anyway it’s delightfully loopy in the way we earthlings are — Shah Rukh Khan, the Lotus car, DisneyWorld, Whistler (the town in Canada), books by Nicholas Sparks, the Australian Breastfeeding Association, all of Europe…

(Thanks to Tony Goodson for the link. And Hugh MacLeod suggests a “Lovemarks-Cluetrain Deathmatch.” Hah! In fact, already last August RageBoy was taking a bite out of Lovemarks’ ass.)

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OK, it looks like Roberts meant to type “Love” instead of “Respect” in the sentence: “A Lovemark’s high Respect is infused with these three intangible, yet very real, ingredients: Mystery, Sensuality and Intimacy.” I say this based on another article by Roberts. There the subsection entitled “A Recipe for Love” begins: “By focusing on Mystery, Sensuality and Intimacy business-as-usual can be transformed with new emotions and new ideas.”

Yet, this article is more off-putting to me, precisely because it promises S&S’s clients that the agency can move them from respect to love. For example:

Now the new challenge is Love and Love demands the same investment and the same rigour we brought to the capture of Respect. Our client Toyota gets it. Don Esmond at Toyota USA crystallized the new Toyota challenge: “It’s time to move from the most respected car company in America to the most loved.”

But the elements of love Roberts lists are, well, jejune. For example, he defines “sensuality” by listing the five senses. If that were the case, then everything would be sensual. Sensuality may be a particular quality of sensory experience or it may be the way particular sensations touch earthbound elements of our soul, but it sure ain’t just the five senses. And listing the five senses does nothing to advance our understanding of love. The points about mystery and intimacy range from the pretentious (“Myths and icons — a reference library of the heart”) to the true-but-well-known (“Passion — to energise the relationship”). This “recipe for love” does not fulfill the promise of transforming business with “new emotions and new ideas,” especially since his lead example of a company that does this well is Starbucks. (Hugh Macleod usefully contrasts this with this.)

The more I read, the less I like it. Is the Lovelinks approach better than having to listen to the same tagline 563 times while I’m on hold? Absolutely. Is it still about manipulating me? Yup.

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