A deep-soul connection with your brand

What's the connection you and your customers have with your product's brand? Here's a marketing lesson from the leader of the pack.

Harley StyleLoyalty
Creating cultural value fosters deep-soul connections with consumers. 
An analysis of a Reveries.com survey
by Dori Molitor, CEO, WomanWise.
(A free PDF download of this entire article is available by clicking the title.)

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Every year, some 20,000 bikers rumble their way along the 50 or so miles between a Harley-Davidson dealership in Glendale, California, and Castaic Lake, where they are treated to a huge barbecue and concert...

The Love Ride, as the event is known, it is just one of the many ways in which Harley-Davidson helps guide its acolytes to astonishing levels of brand loyalty.

The appeal is not just to the brand’s storied attraction as a metaphor for “freedom.” Nor is it purely a payoff on the promise of feeling good by doing good. It is both of those things — in addition to the camaraderie it creates among Harley’s faithful, which, for some, borders on a religious experience....

The result is a deep-soul connection between Harley-Davidson and those who love their motorcycles.

It is the highest-level relationship a brand can have with its consumer. It transcends the brand’s own products and services as well as those of its competitors.

The outcome is undying brand enthusiasm for, and loyalty to, the brand... where brand loyalty is concerned, Harley is a leader of the pack.

Other brands earning widespread plaudits included Apple, Starbucks, Nike, Coca-Cola, Mini Cooper, BMW, Target Stores, Southwest Airlines and Volkswagen.

However, a few respondents suggested that the kind of deep-soul connection  enjoyed by Harley is either not possible or even necessary for some brands.

For example, as one survey participant wrote: “I don’t particularly like American Airlines, but I give them most of my travel so I can enjoy the perks and free travel as an Advantage elite-level customer.”

That may be true to a point, but inertia does not equal loyalty. If consumers don’t even like your brand — or are even just indifferent to it — that means you are not relevant to them. It means that, for all intents and purposes, your brand is a commodity that can be replaced by someone else’s faster than you can say Southwest Airlines.

The Biggest Threat
The biggest threat to brands today is not from Wal-Mart, your competitors with deep pockets, nor from spiraling media costs. The biggest threat is consumer indifference to your brands.

The greatest challenge is projecting your brand into your consumer’s conscious awareness, because with so much marketplace noise and clutter, most consumers have simply stopped listening.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: Okay, sure, that’s easy for Harley and Apple and BMW and Nike. A deep-soul connection is practically a given for them. What about my brands? I’m in the consumer packaged goods business and it’s pretty hard to create a deep-soul connection with a tube of toothpaste.

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That "deep-soul connection with a tube of toothpaste" (just ask Oxyfresh users) or child-friendly shampoo, leading-edge nutritionals, miracle-provoking jungle juice, etceteras, etceteras, goes deeper in network marketing than most other conventional sales and marketing models, because this business is personal. A network marketer goes beyond providing a name, face and voice for the brand. A network marketer IS the brand.

It's one more thing that makes network marketing the most remarkable form of free enterprise ever created.

It's time... for Network Marketing.