Reshaping Loyalty and Brand Love
Actionable Insights: The Executive's Playbook
A Brief Refresher: Consumorphosisâ„¢
Consumorphosis is the constant, context-sensitive consumer's active identity when buying across their personal, social, professional, and digital dimensions.
Consumorphosis recognises that consumers will fluidly transition between different self-concepts throughout their day. And that brand love is contextual, which I’m now writing about below.
For a longer explanation, read it here.
Emotional Connection Reimagined
For decades, marketers have pursued emotional connections with customers as the holy grail of brand strategy. The underlying belief was simple: forge a deep enough emotional bond, and customers will stick with you forever. Make them love you, and they'll never leave.
Yet this thinking is misaligned with how people experience brands in an identity-fluid world.
The Problem with Traditional Emotional Connection
The traditional emotional connection model assumes a stable customer identity.
It presumes that if Nike successfully connects with your "athlete identity," that connection will persist regardless of changing context. It assumes emotional bonds become part of a consistent self-concept.
It’s wrong.
In a chat with an athletic apparel brand's CMO, he shared that thought, revealing: "We discovered our most passionate customers—people with our logo tattooed on their bodies—would completely forget about us for six-month stretches when their lives shifted. Then they'd return with the same passion when they reactivated that part of their identity."
The traditional model can't explain this behaviour. It would interpret the six-month absence as a failure of emotional connection or brand loyalty. But through the lens of Consumerphosis, this pattern makes sense.
The emotional connection didn't disappear—it simply became dormant when that identity mode was inactive.
The Brand Love Misconception
"Brand love" has reached almost mythical status in marketing literature. Coined by marketing academics in the early 2000s, it draws parallels between interpersonal love and consumer-brand relationships. Research (by Batra, Ahuvia, and Bagozzi in 2012) popularised the term, suggesting consumers could develop attachments to brands akin to romantic partnerships.
But this thinking has problems. It fails to account for the complexity and context-dependence of consumer-brand relationships.
Even "loved" brands experience periods of complete irrelevance in consumers' lives when situational contexts change.
Then we compound our wrong thinking with an assumption:
We think of it as disloyalty or a weak emotional connection. When it isn’t.
Several major brands have misapplied the brand love concept in ways that expose its limitations:
Pepsi's Kendall Jenner Campaign (2017): Assuming its emotional connection with consumers was so robust that it could transcend complex social issues, Pepsi created an ad that trivialised social justice movements. The backlash was severe, revealing how thin and situational brand affinity is.
WeWork's "Do What You Love" Messaging: WeWork built its entire brand identity around an emotional connection to work passion, assuming this would create an unbreakable bond with customers. Yet their customer base eroded rapidly when economic conditions changed and practical considerations like cost and flexibility became more important than emotional resonance.
Victoria's Secret's Identity Crisis: For years, Victoria's Secret operated on the assumption that its emotional connection with customers was linked to a specific aspirational identity. When cultural values shifted and that identity lost relevance, they failed to recognise that customer identity had evolved, resulting in a plummeting market share.
These brands mistook mode-specific emotional connection in each case for a permanent bond. They were designed for a single, static customer identity rather than recognising the fluid reality of modern consumers who inhabit multiple, shifting identities.
True emotional connection in a Consumorphosis world needs us to recognise that love isn't universal—it's contextual.
Chipotle isn't loved as an abstract concept; it's explicitly loved by your "quick healthy lunch" mode or your "family dinner solution" mode. When those modes aren't active, that love becomes temporarily irrelevant, no matter how strong it was in the moment.
Where Emotion Lives in a Fluid World
Patagonia doesn't maintain a continuous emotional connection with its customers. Instead, it creates differing emotional resonance through their "outdoor adventurer, "environmental advocate," and "conscious consumer" modes. When these modes are activated, the relevant emotional connection becomes salient. When customers shift to other modes, the connection becomes temporarily irrelevant.
It also explains why your favourite restaurant can simultaneously hold deep emotional meaning for you, yet go forgotten entirely for months. The emotion isn't gone; it's tied to a specific identity mode that isn't currently active.
Triggers of Brand Recall
What causes a customer to remember a brand when entering a relevant mode? My research identifies five key factors:
Identity Memory - Brands that helped customers successfully express or evolve an identity in the past are remembered when that identity reactivates. When you return to running after a long break, you don't need Nike to remind you they exist—the association lives within that identity mode.
Contextual Signals - Environmental cues trigger mode shifts, activating brand associations. Passing a Starbucks might activate your "coffee enthusiast" mode, with all its associated emotions and preferences.
Utility Anchoring—Brands that solve a specific mode-based problem effectively earn a privileged position in that mode's memory. For example, the meditation app that actually helps you sleep becomes automatically associated with your "seeking rest" mode.
Mode-Specific Emotional Imprinting—The strongest emotional connections occur when brands participate in identity transformation moments, helping someone become a new version of themselves. For example, the running app that helped you complete your first 5K creates a powerful emotional imprint in your "runner" identity.
Intelligent Prompting - Timely, relevant prompts can reactivate a dormant relationship only if they align with an emerging or active identity mode. Sending a camping gear promotion when someone starts researching national parks demonstrates mode awareness.
Actionable Insights: The Executive's Playbook
From Brand Love to Identity Resonance
Rather than pursuing a singular emotional connection, try striving for (what I call) "identity resonance"—becoming meaningfully integrated into specific identity modes.
Mode Mapping - Map which identity modes are most relevant to your offering and how they may manifest in behaviour, language, and needs.
Modal Alignment - Then create experiences that resonate with each mode's emotions, needs, and aspirations.
Transition Support - Wherever possible, help customers move between identity modes where your brand plays a role.
Memory Creation - Design distinctive, emotionally resonant moments that become anchored in mode-specific memory.
Apple has this approach. They don't attempt to maintain continuous emotional engagement with a single customer identity. Instead, they create deep resonance with their customers' "creative professional" mode, "connected family member" mode, and "privacy-conscious digital citizen" mode. When these modes activate, Apple becomes emotionally relevant. Between activations, they comfortably recede until Apple is needed next time.
You're not designing for a persona anymore.
You're not guiding a linear journey. You're building relationships with living, shifting, self-authoring humans who expect you to meet them—not where they were yesterday, but where they're becoming tomorrow. We've been told repeatedly that rational benefits are table stakes, while emotional connections drive loyalty. An entire marketing philosophy has emerged around creating "brand love"—that magical, hard-to-define bond between customer and company that supposedly transcends functional benefits to create lifetime value.
This approach gives us tearjerker commercials, purpose-driven mission statements, and endless talk of "tribes" and "communities." The underlying belief is simple: forge a deep enough emotional bond, and customers will stick with you through thick and thin. Make them love you, and they'll never leave.
But there's an inconvenient truth: this approach is increasingly misaligned with how real humans experience brands.
The Problem with Traditional Emotional Connection
The traditional emotional connection model assumes a relatively stable customer identity. It presumes that if Nike successfully connects with your "athlete identity," that connection will persist regardless of context. It imagines that once a customer emotionally bonds with a brand, that bond becomes part of their consistent self-concept.
This is where the model breaks down.
When a customer shifts from "weekend warrior athlete" mode to "busy professional" mode to "present parent" mode within hours, which emotional connection remains active?
The reality is that emotional connections themselves are mode-specific, not person-specific.
Consumorphosis Elevates Emotional Connections
Far from relegating emotional connection to lesser importance, Consumorphosis actually elevates it — but in a more nuanced, context-aware way.
In a world where consumers constantly shift identities, emotional connection becomes more valuable precisely because it's more difficult to achieve authentically.
The outdated approach sought broad emotional appeal that often felt generic. The Consumorphosis approach creates deeper, more authentic emotional connections within specific identity modes, acknowledging the multifaceted nature of modern humanity.
When a brand truly understands and supports who I'm becoming in a particular mode, that emotional connection feels profoundly personal. It's not about loving a brand unconditionally across all contexts — it's about a brand loving exactly who I am at this moment without expecting me to be the same person tomorrow.
And isn’t that the most emotionally resonant experience of all?
👉 I’m asking a small favour: It will take a few seconds. If you enjoyed this newsletter and value my work, please consider forwarding it to some of your friends.
Thanks for reading!
Michael
a sensible way to think about brand disruption, the reasons (I didn't see this) and the remebdys
Thanks for the insights. As you say, tough to do, but makes absolute sense to me. Are you doing tutorials on your thinking? Tame.