Marketers like the idea that consumers "love" their brand as they expect that love drives loyalty, premium pricing, and long-term commitment. But many struggle HOW to achieve it. Neuroimaging studies revealed how Brand Love is represented in consumers’ brains and with that how to make consumers “love” your brand.
A meta-analysis by Watanuki & Akama (2020) across 21 compared the neural substrates of brand love with interpersonal love like maternal love and romantic love. The findings fundamentally challenge how we should think about building brand relationships.
The Misconception Of Brand Love
Marketing literature has long promoted brand love as the optimum of customer relationships. The logic seems intuitive: if consumers fall in love with brands the way they love people, they'll exhibit loyalty, pay premium prices, and defend the brand against criticism. Researchers supported this idea by applying interpersonal love theories to consumer-brand relationships.
But when a consumer says they "love" their smartphone or their favorite sneaker brand, is their brain doing the same thing as when they look at their spouse or their child?
The idea that consumers love brands the same way they love a person contains a fundamental error. Yoon et al. (2006) clearly demonstrated that brands aren't processed as persons in the human brain – they're processed as objects. This shows that applying interpersonal love frameworks to brand relationships is flawed from the start.
Brain Imaging Reveals The Nature Of Brand Love
The meta-analysis revealed that brand love primarily activates the dorsal striatum – a region which is known to be part of the brain's reward system. It is associated with reward expectation, habitual behaviors, and implicit valuation processes. It activates when the brain anticipates reward delivery. Critically, it doesn't activate during emotional bonding or empathy.
In stark contrast, maternal love activated cortical regions related to empathy, theory of mind, social cognition, and pair bonding. The cortical activation pattern reflects the complex social-emotional processing involved in caring for another person. Brand love is not associated with these regions.
Romantic love showed activation in the areas associated with impulsive desire and pleasure. Romantic love activated hedonic, passionate, and intimate-related regions associated with addiction and intense desire.
This neural evidence demonstrates that brand love fundamentally differs from interpersonal emotional bonds. Brand love doesn't activate empathy circuits, theory of mind networks, or pair-bonding systems. It activates expectation of instrumental reward delivery. The mechanism is clear: the dorsal striatum encodes the expected value of choosing a brand based on anticipated outcomes. Consumers "love" brands that they expect will reliably deliver desired rewards – whether functional (product performance), social (status signaling), or emotional (change emotional states) jobs-to-be-done.
Re-Defining Brand Relationship: Brand Love Is Instrumental
Brand Love is instrumental and self-oriented and with that very different from love between people. Consumers don't form emotional attachments to brands the way they bond with people. Instead, consumers develop strong preferences for brands based on reinforcement learning – repeated direct (usage) or indirect (communication) experiences where the brand delivers expected rewards strengthen the association between brand and reward in the striatum.
This explains several marketing phenomena:
The putamen specifically values brand choice via repeated, consistent reward delivery through brand experience. Each positive brand experience strengthens neural pathways associating that brand with reward expectation.
Instrumental value trumps emotional appeals. Brands that consistently deliver on their reward value proposition – functional, social, or emotional – build stronger "love" than brands attempting to manufacture emotional connections without instrumental reward delivery. Brand Love is not about emotional connection – it is about delivering what consumers desire and value.
Value is dynamic. The same consumer who "loves" a brand in one situational context may show no preference in another because needs change, the value expectation of brands might change. This is why brand love often does not correspond with actual brand choice.
Strategic Implications: How To Build Brand Love
If brand love operates through reward expectation rather than emotional bonding, the path to building it becomes clearer – and more actionable.
Identify the specific rewards your target consumers seek. Are they pursuing functional performance, social status, identity expression, or want to change an emotional state? Your brand needs to be perceived as the best means to get the desired outcome.
Reward expectation is based on implicit brand-reward-associations built over time. Inconsistent delivery weakens the brand-reward association and reduces value expectation. Consumers need to confidently expect that choosing your brand will deliver the desired outcome better than other brands. This will make them “love” your brand.
Create and reinforce associations between your brand and the desired outcome through consistent delivery, communication, and experience design. The striatum learns through repeated pairing of brand exposure with reward delivery. Every brand touchpoint should strengthen the brand-reward association.
This is why we at DECODE help brand uncover the desired outcomes they are willing to pay more for to help brands identify what consumers desire and guide them how to build reward-brand-associations valued by consumers.
What This Means For Brand Strategy
The neuroscience reveals that "brand love" is a fundamentally different construct than marketers assumed. It's not about creating emotional bonds modeled on human relationships. It's about becoming the most reliable route to desired outcomes in consumers' lives.
Stop trying to make consumers love your brand the way they love people. Instead, focus on becoming the brand they reliably expect will deliver specific valued outcomes. Build strong associations between your brand and desired rewards. Deliver consistently. Increase frequency of positive experiences.
Brand love emerges not from emotional manipulation or manufactured intimacy, but from the brain's reward system learning that your brand reliably delivers what consumers actually want.
The instrumental nature of brand love isn't a limitation – it's a blueprint. You can't manufacture interpersonal attachment, but you can build reward associations through consistent value delivery. That's the actual mechanism of brand love, and it's entirely within your control.
Follow me on LinkedIn for more neuroscience-backed insights: in/dr-dirk-held/
Source:
Watanuki, S., & Akama, H. (2020). Neural Substrates of Brand Love: An Activation Likelihood Estimation Meta-Analysis of Functional Neuroimaging Studies. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 14, 534671.
