12 years on from writing Lovemarks: the Future Beyond Brands, Accenture Interactive – a branch of the global consulting company – has produced The Love Index, following an 18 month study involving 27,000 participants in the US, UK and Brazil.
Their conclusion: Love is a science; and there is a formula – Fun, Relevant, Engaging, Social, Helpful. Spelling FRESH. Cute!
Key findings were:
- Each industry has its own Love profile. Relevance, for example, is the highest dimension for the auto industry.
- Disrupters that lead with Helpful, Relevant and Engaging become loved. They cite Tesla and Amazon as examples.
- Digital companies are most prone to be loved, emphasizing the role of technology in enabling brands to be Helpful and Social. Google and Amazon are cited.
Netflix topped the study’s most loved brand.
Several things about this initiative stand out for me.
- It’s good to see further validation of the idea I floated into the world in 1999 by way of speeches and in 2004 by way of the Lovemarks book.
- More significantly is the provenance of the Love Index. Accenture “is a leading global professional services company, providing a broad range of services and solutions in strategy, consulting, digital, technology and operations. With more than 373,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries, Accenture drives innovation to improve the way the world works and lives.”
- According toAd Age, the top 3, and 8 of the top-10 ad agencies are consultancies like Deloitte, Accenture, KPMG and PwC. McKinsey is slowly building an agency arm.
- Ad industry pundit Avi Dan noted in Forbes that in the last 18 months Accenture acquired 40 marketing firms while within a single week IBM acquired three online ad agencies.
- It’s an oft-quoted projection from Gartner that the biggest users of corporate IT will be CMOs. Every one of the trillions of daily consumer transactions in the world adds to the galaxy of data. Highly sophisticated algorithms and data-mining techniques spew out streams of patterns and insights – if only there was time to keep up with the flow.
- Data is a dangerous path to ride. Look at the Clinton and Trump campaigns. Clinton’s campaign was significantly driven by an algorithm called Ada, informing her messaging, ad placement, where she went and where she didn’t. Big fail. Trump traded heavily on negative emotion (loss, fear) and gut feeling. It was ugly, but effective.
For my workover of the Emotion/Data equation, see the Red Paper I published in 2015 Loyalty Beyond Reason. Love remains a winning idea, more than ever in this VUCA world. As the bumper sticker says, “Love Trumps Hate.”