Love works, actually, even in business

Saatchi & Saatchi's Loveworks explains how top brands create an emotional bond with their consumers.

Lovemarks by Kevin Roberts.

In 2004, Kevin Roberts, a former executive at the advertising firm Saatchi & Saatchi, published a book called Lovemarks. Its central tenet was that emotion is at the heart of sustained relationships between producers and consumers.

The work divided its readership — winning praise from those who thought it revealed a hallowed truth and drawing criticism from those who thought it stated the obvious. Nevertheless, the trade magazine Advertising Age included it among its top 10 ideas of the decade.

Now, almost a decade later, another former Saatchi executive, Brian Sheehan, has written a follow-up to Roberts’s work called Loveworks. This book selects a variety of examples from Saatchi’s advertising campaigns to demonstrate how the Lovemarks theory works in practise and even offers a “how-to” guide for getting consumers to fall in love with your product. Examples are taken from a variety of sectors including food and beverage, cars, telecoms, hotels and clothing.

“Lovemarks is a Saatchi & Saatchi belief system and it’s based on a simple premise that humans are far less rational than we like to think,” explains Adil Khan, the firm’s chief executive for the Middle East and North Africa. “Our clients will say, ‘How do we become a Lovemark?’ And what we are trying to do with Loveworks is to demonstrate and show people that this is how brands have done it.”

As a business journalist, it’s always interesting to gain an insight into how people do their jobs. The key to any successful Saatchi & Saatchi campaign seems to be gathering up a “tribe” — a diverse group of creative and strategic thinkers — and whisking them off to an isolated location to focus on the issue of the day.

I particularly enjoyed the story of how the company won back consumer confidence for Pampers after the disastrous launch of its DryMax nappies in March 2010 by devising its “Miracles” campaign in December that year that focused on babies rather than diapers.

The book is appealingly illustrated although, perhaps, just a little bit smug in tone. If you can get over that, it’s a pleasant enough read.