Obviously, with today being Valentine’s Day, I was going to mention love. However, over in the USA, it appears that people are falling out of love with celebrating today. The National Retail Federation’s “Valentine’s Day Data Center” shows that fewer people plan to buy gifts today than in previous years. Worse still, they aim to spend less when inflation is taken into account. Over the past 20 years, fewer people have celebrated Valentine’s Day, down from 63% to 55%. That’s not good news if you are a gift company or a florist.
Part of the reason for falling out of love with Valentine’s gifting is that we have “commercialisation fatigue”. We are simply fed up with the constant advertising for chocolates and flowers. Of course, there is the cost-of-living crisis to consider as well. Plus, there are significant demographic shifts, with more people living alone than before and a rise in the number of people still living with their parents into their mid-30s. That makes it tough to be romantic.
According to the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, love depends on three things. These are passion, closeness and commitment derived from Sternberg’s Theory of Love. It’s hard to be close and passionate when your mum and dad are sitting opposite. And if you are living alone, closeness to others is not easy either. Solving such problems involves costs, such as booking a hotel room. That’s tough when financial pressures are high. So, it is hardly surprising that fewer people want to celebrate romance than they did 20 years ago.
Interestingly, though, people are increasingly celebrating their love for the products and brands they admire. Social media is full of people declaring their love for a brand. Indeed, 94% of us say something positive about our favourite brands on social media. Just try stopping an iPhone user from uploading an image of their device to some social network. Or see the look you get if you criticise a Nike footwear fan for telling the world how comfy their feet are. You do not have to go far in your journey on social media before you bump into someone telling you about the latest product they have fallen in love with.
In a recent study, YouGov investigated the Top 50 Brands across 28 global markets. This research showed that the brand the world loves the most is WhatsApp. Yet in the USA, it does not even feature in the list. That’s because even though the rest of the world loves WhatsApp, the vast majority of people in the USA regularly use Apple iMessage instead. You might notice a “love factor” from that Norwegian research here. Closeness. The brands people are closest to are the ones they love most. Here in the UK, for example, the most loved brand is Marks & Spencer. You can’t move for M&S in garages and service stations up and down the land. Most of us are never far away from M&S. Closeness again. But closeness is not just physical. It is a habitual presence in daily life.
There’s another of those three love factors in play again here. Commitment. Repeated use of WhatsApp or Apple iMessage, for example, shows a commitment to the brand. No wonder you love it. Equally, the convenience of M&S or that Amazon app, for example, means you gain commitment and thereby start to fall in love with the brand.
That only leaves passion. You are probably not passionate about an M&S egg, tomato and salad cream sandwich, even though it is tasty. But you cannot mistake M&S’s passion for food. It helps build the “romance” and confirms your commitment to the company.
The question, therefore, is what you can do in your business to demonstrate you love your customers. First, show some passion for your company and its products and services. None of your customers is going to fall in love with your firm if you don’t show them you are enthusiastic about what you do. Secondly, get closer to your customers. Never miss an opportunity to meet, talk to, or engage with them. Third, demonstrate your commitment to them. You can do this with exemplary customer service, for example. In “business speak,” this means passion is your internal culture. Closeness is your distribution and engagement strategy. Commitment is about service reliability and trust-building.
If you are among the majority and do not celebrate Valentine’s Day by showering your loved one with chocolates and flowers, you could use the occasion to start a new romance instead. Be passionate for what you do, get closer to your customers, and show them you are committed to them. Before long, you will have something far more valuable than Valentine’s flowers: customers who choose you repeatedly.
