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Why we fall for love brands

Why we fall for love brands

Lidl sneakers, a love brand case study

I’ll admit this story made me smile. In the spring of 2020, Lidl launched a small clothing line bearing its own logo in Northern Europe. It included yellow, red, and blue sneakers priced at €12.99, along with slides, terry socks, and T-shirts. In Finland, lines formed outside the stores. In Belgium, Germany, and the UK, the collection sold out within days, and on eBay an “extremely rare” bundle climbed to €784.

On November 16 of that same year, the Lidl Fan Collection reached Italy. From 8 a.m., people queued from north to south, as if outside a boutique on the first day of the sales. Within a few hours the shelves were empty almost everywhere, and social media filled up with memes of every kind, Gollum and his “precious” included. Sky TG24 spotted resale listings as high as €1,500. In May 2021 the chain put the shoes back on sale, given the flood of requests.

Il Post placed the phenomenon within the streetwear tradition: Esselunga shopping bags carried by New York hipsters, Vetements’ DHL T-shirt, the Balenciaga bag modeled on IKEA’s blue tote. Wearing a discount chain’s logo with a wink is a connoisseur’s move. Lidl, though, went a step further: it designed the line in-house, sold it at flyer prices, and aimed it at fashion fans more than at its everyday shoppers.

Lovemarks: love and respect according to Kevin Roberts

The idea of the love brand owes much to Kevin Roberts, then CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi, who published Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands in 2004. In his view, brands had lost momentum, and only an emotional bond could create loyalty “beyond reason.”

His framework crosses two axes, love and respect. Commodities get neither. Fads spark infatuation without esteem. Traditional brands earn respect but stay cold. Only those that win both become lovemarks. The ingredients are three: mystery, meaning stories and myths worth passing on; sensuality, meaning all five senses engaged in the experience; and intimacy, made of commitment, empathy, and passion.

What research says about brand love

Academic research has given the concept firmer ground. In 2006, Barbara Carroll and Aaron Ahuvia described brand love as a satisfied customer’s passionate emotional attachment to a particular brand. They found it stronger in hedonic categories, tied to pleasure rather than utility, and in brands with symbolic value, the ones that help us say who we are. Where that affection exists, loyalty and positive word of mouth grow as well.

In 2012, Rajeev Batra, Ahuvia, and Richard Bagozzi published a seven-part model in the Journal of Marketing. Its main components are integrating the brand into one’s own identity, passion-driven behaviors (spending time and money), a long-term relationship, and the distress people expect to feel at the thought of separation. Among the outcomes is a detail worth pausing on: those who love a brand are more resistant to negative news about it. In short, they forgive.

The brain on a can: Coca-Cola versus Pepsi

In 2004, a team led by Read Montague, with Samuel McClure, published a now-famous study in Neuron. They had 67 volunteers taste Coca-Cola and Pepsi inside a functional MRI scanner. In the blind test, preferences split down the middle. When participants knew what they were drinking, however, three out of four chose Coca-Cola, and areas linked to memory and self-related processing, such as the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex, lit up. In other words, the brand changes how the drink tastes: the glass also holds decades of advertising, childhood memories, and Santa Clauses dressed in red.

Merch that sells out, from tote bags to tumblers

The Lidl case has several relatives in the United States. In early 2024, Trader Joe’s released mini canvas tote bags at $2.99, in four colors. Pushed by TikTok videos, they vanished quickly, and one eBay listing asked $999.99. The chain has long said it does not condone the reselling of its products, but that cooled no one’s enthusiasm.

A few weeks earlier, limited-edition Valentine’s Stanley tumblers sold at Target had caused chaos in stores and sold out within minutes. The mechanism repeats itself: a low entry price, limited quantities, a logo that works as a badge of belonging, and social media amplifying everything. Loyalty points, on the other hand, rarely make anyone fall in love; I wrote about that when discussing gamification.

All the way to a tattoo: when the logo ends up on skin

Some people go even further. In 2012, a Melbourne law firm surveyed twenty local tattoo studios about the most requested brands. Harley-Davidson came first, followed by Nike, Australian football clubs, Vegemite spread, and various Disney characters. Logo tattoos remain a niche, between 2 and 5 percent of the total. In every case, though, the idea came from the customer, never from the tattoo artist. It is hard to imagine a more lasting declaration of love.

The intimacy rankings: Disney, Netflix, Apple

The agency MBLM publishes a Brand Intimacy Study every year. The 2025 edition used AI to analyze more than 4.38 billion words posted on social media by U.S. users, covering over 475 brands. At the top sit Disney, Netflix (up from eighth to second place), and Apple. Tesla slid from second to forty-first, a drop the agency attributes to Elon Musk’s negative impact. The emotional bond also shows up on the balance sheet: according to MBLM, the top twenty-five brands in the ranking grew profits 18 percent more than the Fortune 500 average. Yet love can be lost, and quickly.

My own list: from Dyson to Alfa Romeo

I have my brand crushes too. I’m a devoted Dyson fan: at home I have the vacuum cleaners, hair dryers, and air purifiers bearing that name. And yet, faced with the toothbrush with a camera and AI, I chose to wait, proof that affection doesn’t completely cloud judgment. Then there’s Alfa Romeo, a legend handed down in my family like an heirloom, long before anyone owned one of the cars.

Looking back at the cases told here, from Rossana to the customer support that can single-handedly shape a brand’s reputation, the common threads are consistency over time, a story worth telling, and that touch of self-irony Lidl proved it has. A discount can be bought; affection cannot.

Related sources

Chiara Bonifazi