Moving Beyond Trust: Making Customers Trust, Love, and Respect a Brand

Rapid digital acceleration, coupled with the global pandemic, has dramatically shifted customer expectations and needs in recent years. These changes exist amid a backdrop of global supply chain problems, concerns about how companies are responding to social injustice and climate change, and growing distrust of major social institutions. This dizzying array of shifts has left companies, executives, and marketers searching for insights as to how brands can withstand and thrive through periods of uncertainty. What North Star concept can marketers follow to navigate these challenging times?

For over a decade, we’ve been gathering empirical evidence on how brands create resonance with customers. In this article, we’ll examine one such North Star for marketers — brand admiration — up close, including why it’s critical to brand health and how companies can harness it to withstand the challenges of the current and future business environment.

Why Brand Admiration Matters

Data shows that trust is declining across the globe, and customers may lack trust in certain social institutions or societal leaders. But when it comes to brands, some evoke feelings of love, trust, and respect: Customers have come to admire these brands and view them as essential and indispensable to their lives. Positive emotions like gratification from brand usage and pride from brand ownership generate a tight link between the brand and customers. Brand trust, love, and respect don’t just give meaning to customers’ lives; they also create a safe haven where things seem right with the world, especially in turbulent times.

When customers admire a brand, they are far more likely to be loyal to it. They demonstrate this not just by buying the brand repeatedly over time but by paying a price premium to acquire it. Customers are willing to endure stock-outs and supply chain problems because the brand is worth waiting for. They’ll even work on behalf of it: Loyal customers are more likely to speak out in favor of the brand, both online and in person, and they seek out and build community with other brand advocates.

Indeed, brand admiration and its effects on customer loyalty and advocacy behaviors allow brands to enjoy higher revenues at lower costs. Brand admiration also protects the brand from competition while creating opportunities for alliances with highly regarded companies. Admired brands earn higher returns for all these reasons and fare better in challenging times disrupted by technological and societal change.

Creating Brand Admiration Through the 3 E’s

Brand choices are largely driven by customers’ perceptions of what brands do for them (that is, their benefits). Benefits refers not to what features the product offers or has but rather how it helps customers meet their needs, wants, and goals. As Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt famously quipped, customers don’t want a quarter-inch drill; they want a quarter-inch hole. Whereas product features can help realize benefits, the benefits themselves lead customers to the marketplace.

We’ve learned that customers fundamentally want three types of benefits in brands. They want benefits that enable, entice, and enrich them. We call these benefit types the 3 E’s.1 Many brands do a good job of offering one type of benefit (usually enabling benefits), but brands that truly resonate with customers stand out by providing all three types. Indeed, our work shows that when combined, the 3 E’s have an exponential effect on enhancing customers’ quality of life and hence the brand’s value to customers. (See “The Brand Admiration Framework.”)

So, what does it mean to say that brands enable, entice, and enrich customers? Let’s look at strategies that companies and marketers can consider for unlocking these benefits.

Solve Customers’ Problems

Benefits that enable customers empower them in their daily lives. They help customers solve problems (physical, social, emotional, and cognitive) in ways that are economically feasible, reliable, efficient, and convenient. When brands genuinely enable customers, they remove negative emotional states like frustration, anxiety, fear, impatience, and anger — which inhibit admiration and loyalty — and instead foster peace of mind and satisfaction. There are several different ways brands can enable customers:

Resolving problems. Brands can provide enabling benefits by giving customers the agency to solve their problems — both small and large — at work or home or in their business or personal relationships. When customers feel a sense of agency in solving their problems, they experience a greater sense of control over their environments. This in turn leads to a sense of relief and security from future threats.

Conserving resources. Benefits can also enable customers differently: By helping them conserve scarce time and monetary, psychological, and physical resources, brands make customers feel less mentally taxed, less tired, and less anxious. When a brand consistently enables customers over time, they begin to trust the brand. They know that they can rely on it to solve their functional problems and conserve their scarce resources.

Make Customers Feel Good

Benefits that entice please customers by stimulating their minds, senses, and hearts. They replace work with play, displeasure with gratification, boredom with excitement, and sadness with feelings of warmth.

The levers brands can use to entice customers include:

Stimulating cognitive and sensory experiences. Brands can please the senses by providing cognitive stimulation, arousing curiosity and imagination, and fostering creativity (through games or puzzles, for instance). Brands can also please the senses when they arouse sensory experiences by activating pleasant sights (such as through appealing product design), sounds (through sonic logos or jingles), tastes and smells (such as signature flavors or fragrances), and tactile sensations. Enticement benefits arouse the mind and senses and preempt boredom and hence are potent drivers for customer experience.

Building warm and authentic connections. Brands can also provide enticing benefits by stimulating and warming the heart. They can induce feelings of sentimentality, poignancy, humor, empathy, gratitude, and nostalgia, which help customers develop genuine affection, admiration, and love for the brand.

Build Self-Affirming Identities

Benefits that enrich customers affect their sense of who they are as people. Customers want to feel that they are good people who do good things in the world. They want to act in ways that are consistent with their beliefs, values, and hopes. They want to feel like they’re part of a group in which others accept and respect them, yet they also want to show how they are unique and different.

The following approaches can help brands affirm and enrich customer identity:

Offering opportunities for self-expression. People derive meaning and value from being able to convey and signal their own distinct personal tastes, aesthetic sensibilities, lifestyle, and uniqueness to others. Consumers come to respect a brand when it offers them opportunities to express their identity and connect with others. For example, a brand could offer an online game in which customers could express their individuality or personal tastes and thus signal and affirm their identity, making them feel special and distinct.

Enriching by self-expansion. By purchasing and using brands that make people feel part of a group, customers have an expanded sense of self. They are not alone; they are a part of one or more groups. This sense of belonging is symbolically meaningful to customers, particularly if they can use the brand to signal their group membership to others. Brands are respected when they help consumers create a sense of belonging. Consider, for example, the respect that consumers have for their alma maters. These institutions connect consumers with others and expand their sense of who they are.

Enriching by self-transcending benefits. These benefits focus on going beyond one’s self-interests to engage in helping improve the welfare of all people, cooperating with others to enhance social harmony, and preserving the beauty and power of nature. It comes from the notion of moral beauty, which involves caring for the well-being of all people. We are all part of the same world; we help one another to make the world a better place and do what is right for the sake of the larger good. Thus, the essential characteristic of self-transcending benefits is that the brand is moral or benevolent.

Our findings show that when customers experience pleasure from a brand’s self-affirming enrichment benefits, they begin to respect the brand for what it stands for and supports. Such esteem, it turns out, appears to be a powerful driver of brand admiration, brand loyalty, and brand advocacy behaviors.

In short, our research finds that when brands enable, entice, and enrich customers, brand admiration and the subsequent pro-brand behaviors are all maximized.2 That said, all brands can benefit from regularly evaluating customer perceptions and assessing pathways to enhance brand admiration.

Companies Leading the Way in Brand Admiration

Let’s look at Caterpillar, Salesforce, and Patagonia as examples of companies in different industries that are leveraging the 3 E’s with customers.

Caterpillar’s heavy-duty machinery and its efficient supply chain enable customers to get the most challenging construction jobs done and ensure that dealers receive urgently needed specialty parts in the shortest time possible. The company alleviates longer-term needs, too: Dealers are concerned about the future of their businesses once they retire, mainly because many of the dealerships are family-owned. To address this concern, Caterpillar organizes conferences and networking events that introduce dealers’ children to Caterpillar and get them interested in the company. This activity serves as an enticing benefit because it helps build excitement among dealers’ families. When it comes to enriching benefits, as members of the Caterpillar community, dealers are self-affirmed that they are doing good things for the world by aligning with the company’s mission to “help our customers build a better world.” This belief gives dealers a sense of pride, and it provides a powerful signal to others about who they are and what they do.

To remain competitive amid uncertainty and shifting trends, companies must take building
brand admiration seriously.

In a similar vein, Salesforce’s easy-to-use software enables users to get more out of their current customer-brand relationships, time, and customer data, leading to greater efficiency and helping their clients serve customers better. Numerous products, resources, and support ensure that customers can find the help that they need. At the same time, Salesforce prioritizes customer experience and satisfaction by offering numerous learning events for educating customers. Finally, Salesforce’s ethos of dedicating itself to humanitarian causes such as helping people gain access to higher education and celebrating the success of all of its employees enriches people’s lives and builds community.

Patagonia empowers its customers to overcome common outdoor sports challenges by offering high-quality apparel and hard goods that perform in any weather condition. Its products entice customers with clothing that’s soft and gentle and backpacks that are comfortable to wear on long hikes. Most importantly, Patagonia is effective at enriching its customers by offering hope for the future, and indeed for humankind, by being a leader in addressing climate change through sustainably sourced and ecologically minded product materials. Patagonia’s products are built to be used for years (or even decades). The brand empowers customers to make their own repairs and encourages them to resell to like-minded individuals via its Worn Wear program.

The takeaways from our research are clear: To remain competitive amid uncertainty and shifting trends, companies must take building brand admiration seriously. We know that successful brands do so by offering enabling, enticing, and enriching benefits in authentic ways, and becoming an essential and indispensable part of their customer lives.