Be my valentine: How to get your brand some lovin'​

Be cool. I was considered a shy guy growing up and this was the best love advice I was ever given. I often mucked up my early forays into the land of love because I tried too hard to compensate for my own lack of self confidence. It’s a paradox facing brands today. Boast about your abilities and get smashed. One small misstep for brand, one giant headache for customer relations. Have you looked at a Jetstar Facebook page recently? They offer a free flight and the world responds by arguing it’s probably because you’ll never get home. You can’t even offer free stuff and get any love! If you are a smaller brand you have to hustle, endlessly offer up new content, novel product combinations, more and more tid bits from behind the scenes to sell the same amount of stuff, all the while worried crazy about the crowd falling away like a holiday romance does upon return to reality.

Is it because we have collectively fallen out of love with modern life?

We live in the age of fatigue and you really have to ask yourself if we have fallen out of love with modern life and modern things. Brands included. You spend your holidays doing a digital detox. Days spending surfing a wave rather than surfing Insta, reading a book, not the room, and you remember simpler times, simpler pleasures. One ice cream, one beer on tap, one group of great people to spend the day with and then boom, you check back in. The check-in sucks. Very few wake up on the first weeks back on the tools excited to get back to the digital vortex with the delights of beeping, alerts, pushing and pulling.

I personally keep thinking among the distractions about the joy of seeing my eldest ride up a hill for the first time. My love affair is now with simple, boring, mundane beautiful things. Not modern things. No posted photo just my memory of her accomplishment smile only a select few know. Me and her connected versus me and everyone I have ever met getting a photo. I love that more every day. I admit I have fallen out of love with the digitalisation of my life.

Are we really trading up? Instinct versus intellect.

At an intellectual level I understand it all. The digital age is speeding life up because it speeds up the transfer of value from one party to another. Instant information, Google. Instant food, Uber Eats. Instant Infamy, Instagram.

At an instinctual level though it feels more like a Nas lyric, like black rats trapped. Into this cage of our own making brands are jumping feet first with absolute faith they can be the ones to deliver the best bang for the currency of modern life and get us to fall in love with them all over again. Time, the reserve currency of advanced economies bought and paid for in our own personal data.

We all think it will pay off and that any one of us can be adored if we just get evey busy customer experiencing, reducing frictions, mapping journeys, Power Pass apping and anything we can think of to give someone back the only thing that gives the masses the opioids they seek. Time. Give me my time back and in exchange I will happily give you my data. It’s the modern version of a date set up by mutual friends. It always feels forced but something you feel obligated to do.

A marriage made in heaven?

The paradox of the time/data deal is that I value my time more than I value my data. One I directly experience, the other only the people inside my phone really see. If you think about who is in your phone you get a great insight into why whoever is in there will win in the long run if you play by the same rules. Life is no longer a fair game of attraction and most find out the hard way just like at school that it’s difficult to keep up with the popular kids when they are physical asset lite, cash rich, better resourced, digitally born brands built closest to the source of your side of the value exchange. Simply, they have better data and are therefore more attractive. They are literally drinking from the well of eternal youth, will end up with whomever they desire while the rest will spend their lonely evenings sipping a bottle of luke warm mineral water. Most businesses are ill equipped to win in a data based world by playing by exactly the same rules. Of course you have to give people ease, gather data as you can but the question to then ask is how can I change this game in my favour?

Embrace your ugly bits

Is friction actually an important part of your value? Maybe focus on frictions. They are a bit ugly but they make you…well, uniquely you. Think about what in your own experience makes you worth spending time with. Think about how to get customers off their phone. Be the shop where people still stop to chat to your staff, be the food worth driving out of the way for who refuses to deliver, be the hotel with quirk. Maybe the answer is focusing on giving people back value for their time, not their time back. Don’t journey map, take a journey. Don’t solve their every problem, if you can, go big and solve the biggest one facing us all. Give back simple.

This year, have your brand give the truest expression of love. Perspective.

Be better to each other.