Tim Halloran - Romancing the Brand

Table of Contents

A great book with insightful stories about how marketing managers develop romantic, deep, and personal relationships between the brand and the consumer.

Jagdish N. Sheth, Charles H. Kellstadt Professor of Marketing, Goizueta Business School, Emory University

Romancing the Brand shows that a brand's strength, and ultimately its ability to generate significant talk value, lies in creating a meaningful consumer experience. People talk aboutand advocate forbrands with which they have an emotional bond. Aided by entertaining stories about brands that have created love affairs with the consumer, Romancing the Brand is an essential guide for marketers who are looking to strengthen their consumer relationships.

Ed Keller, CEO, the Keller Fay Group, and coauthor, The Face-to-Face Book and The Influentials

Emotional, educational, and effective, Romancing the Brand captures the timeless fundamentals of marketing, using contemporary examples and a framework one can relate to in a primal way. Tim Halloran shares insights that up-and-coming marketers, as well as global executives at the top of their game, will find valuable.

Dick Patton, global chief marketing officer practice leader, Egon Zehnder

Cover design by Adrian Morgan

Cover image Shutterstock

Copyright 2014 by Tim Halloran. All rights reserved.

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Cataloging-in-Publication data on file with the Library of Congress.

978-1-118-61128-9 (cloth); 978-1-118-82896-0 (ebk); 978-1-118-82897-7 (ebk)

To Nancy, the romance of my life

and to

Henry, Jane, and Lydia

Romance and the Brand

I had already been in the dark room for three-and-a-half hours, a bowl of peanut M&Ms in front of me, observing groups of women through a two-way mirror that felt like something out of CSI, as they explained their beverage consumption habits. Observing focus groups was a common practice for Coca-Cola brand managers. We were always striving to understand our consumers better so that we might find a way to connect with them. Our ultimate goal was to give folks like the women in this room a reason to purchase our brand rather than the hundreds of other options available to them.

I found myself wondering how much of what I did every daytrying to meet the needs of a finicky consumer base with some creative new message or compelling product improvementwas pointless. Did consumers really care about these brands? Looking around the observation room, I saw six or seven colleagues in various stages of engagement: among others, the assistant brand manager taking copious notes that would ultimately summarize our findings to our senior management, the agency account rep trying to infer something brilliant from a consumer's comment, and the marketing research manager making sure the moderator on the other side of the glass was covering everything on our checklist. All of us waiting, observing, listening for anything we could use in developing next year's marketing campaign. We needed to understand these women's thoughts and feelings about our brands in order to do our jobs.

But then something happened that subtly but profoundly changed my perception of how we as marketers should think about brands and the role they play in our consumers' lives.

It wasn't a particularly dramatic moment. The eight women sat around the overflowing table of colored cans and bottles of soft drinks. They had just completed what we call a sorting exercise, in which participants arranged soft drink brands in groups based on some organizing principle that they were to develop themselves. I don't remember how they organized the forty-plus brands that day, but what happened next stuck with me. A petite woman in her late twenties, picked up one of the cans and said to the focus group moderator, I drink eight of these a day. It is always with me, no matter what happens. It was there when my boss gave me my promotion last week. It was at my side two months ago when my cat died. It got me through it. I start and end my day with it. It's never lets me down. I can always count on it. To sum it up, it's my boyfriend Diet Coke.