by Alec Foege
illustration by Doug Ross

As web-based tools and communities steal the power of traditional advertising, consumers are falling out of love with big brands. Anyone in the mood for a little brand hijacking?

Love is a word rarely associated with brand names—unless, of course, you’re actually in love with one. Most consumers don’t even realize the depth of their own devotion until the object of their affection is suddenly taken away. How else to explain the popular uprising back when Coca-Cola introduced New Coke only to be forced to retreat and reintroduce its original product as Coke Classic?

Normal people might think that love is an emotion best reserved for, well, people. But for its amorous fans, love of a great brand—whether it is Coca-Cola or an iPod—is a many-splendored thing: mysterious, sensual, even intimate.
A few years ago, Kevin Roberts, CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi, tapped into this idea and ran with it. In 2004, he published a book called Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands, which outlined his method for turning mere branding into a long-term love affair.

Roberts’s goal was to enumerate the ways in which “lovemarking” transcended mere branding. How did consumers fall in love with one particular brand of fizzy sugar water? How did Coke come to represent America? What about its logo and image communicated homespun authenticity even as the product traversed the globe? His resulting list sounded like the formula for a romance novel. But the essence was cogent: to create a backstory and set of emotional touch points that put consumers on an intimate, sensual level with their favorite products.

Which is great if the brand in question is already a world-renowned brand, such as Coke or Apple or Playboy. But how many of those legacy names really exist on the increasingly cluttered brandscape? Perhaps a hundred. So what about the rest? There is love and seduction, and then there is hijacking. Specifically, brand hijacking. In his 2005 book Brand Hijack: Marketing Without Marketing, Alex Wipperfurth of Plan B, a San Francisco-based ad agency, convincingly argues that it doesn’t matter how much consumers “love” your brand anymore. In fact, he claims, younger consumers are so innately suspicious of marketing of any kind that trying to force relationships with them is rapidly becoming a futile exercise. “How do you market to an audience,” wonders Wipperfurth, “that rejects marketing?”

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