Brand Admiration. Weiss Allen M.

humans are occupying the role of B2B customers, B2C customers, sports and/or celebrity fans, or targets of nonprofit marketers.11 Our perspective on customer value is both novel and parsimonious. Specifically, we identify three broad classes of benefits that underlie human happiness: benefits that enable, benefits that entice, and benefits that enrich customers (see Table 1.2).

Table 1.2 Value of an Admired Brand to Customers

      Benefits That Enable Customers

      Customers find value in brands that enable them. Such brands solve customers’ problems. They remove barriers, eliminate frustrations, assuage anxieties, and reduce fear. They provide peace of mind. Benefits that enable customers offer solutions to nagging problems (both large and small): for example, how do I avoid this acid reflux, how can I protect my home from burglars, and how can we get one IT system to talk to another. With the brand as a solution, customers feel empowered to take on challenges in their personal and professional lives. Knowing that they can count on (and trust) the brand to solve problems reduces anxiety and allows the customer to get on with other aspects of their lives. Fear and anxiety are replaced with feelings of empowerment, confidence, and security.

      Sometimes both problems (and solutions) relate to resources, such as money, time, and physical and psychic energy. Brands can also enable customers when they help customers conserve the scarce resources they have or help them acquire the resources they want. Schwab helps customers plan for secure retirements: people feel more confident about dealing with the future when they have a safety net to protect them from life’s unexpected curveballs. SAP helps organizations to streamline their processes, cut waste, and run simple for greater agility and growth. Waze maps the most efficient route from where one is to where one wants to go.

      Brands that solve problems and conserve resources make customers feel empowered, secure, confident, relieved, and safe, and they provide peace of mind. In short, customers desperately want products and services whose benefits enable them. They want to feel that they can live with more security and efficacy and with fewer complications and stressors.

      Benefits That Entice Customers

      Customers also seek benefits that entice them.12 Enticement benefits stimulate customers’ minds, their senses, and their hearts. They replace work with play, lack of pleasure with gratification, boredom with excitement, and sadness with feelings of warmth and amusement. Customers, whether in a B2B or B2C environment, want to feel gratified, engaged, excited, playful, grateful, and warmhearted. For example, they like marketing materials and web sites that are interesting and visually pleasing, and ads that are emotionally evocative. They want to feel cared for and taken care of by the brand and its employees. They want corporate offices and retail spaces to be warm, comforting, and inviting. They want to interact with employees who are friendly and helpful.

      Disneyland epitomizes these sensory and heartwarming benefits. Disneyland creates magic for millions of kids (and adults) every day. Park guests experience these benefits through the beauty of the Magic Kingdom, the thrill of the rides, the joy of meeting Mickey and Pluto, and the vivid fireworks show and parade. Enticing benefits also seem to explain the success of the Hello Kitty brand. How else can we explain how a seemingly deformed and mouthless cat commands such strong loyalty from children, let alone fully grown adults? Hello Kitty offers sense-pleasing and heartwarming benefits that are difficult to explain. Devotees can’t stay away from the brand. In the 40 years since its introduction, more than 50,000 product items have been introduced under the Hello Kitty brand name. Interest in and affection toward this brand are still high.

      Benefits That Enrich Customers

      Finally, customers seek benefits that enrich them and their sense of who they are as people. Customers want to feel as if they are good people who are doing good things in the world. They want to act in ways that are consistent with their beliefs and hopes. They want to feel as if they’re part of a group in which others accept and respect them. They want to be inspired to be the best people they can be, now and in the future. They want to feel proud of their identities and where they came from. Enriching benefits provide meaning to life. Without meaning people feel at a loss and regard their lives as pointless.13 Benefits that enrich customers make them feel inspired, proud, connected, and validated. They motivate people to act with good intentions and with honor and courage, and to be their authentic selves.

      Salesforce.com isn’t just a cloud computing company with technologies that serve all manner of companies in an easy and visually pleasing way. It’s also a company designed to make the world a better place. It supports nonprofits and higher-education customers, and it has donated more than $53 million in grants. Salesforce employees have donated more than a million hours of their time to charitable organizations.14 Customers know that by using Salesforce products, they too are contributing to make the world a better place, both locally and globally.

      Exponential Impact of the 3Es

We call benefits that enable, entice, and enrich customers the 3Es for short. Combined, these three types of benefits have an exponential effect on enhancing customers’ happiness. We argue that the most admired brands enhance customers’ happiness by offering all three types of benefits. Such brands make customers happier than other brands do. These three types of benefits relate directly to all theories of human motivation and to a large body of research on positive emotions. A key finding from our research is that the superior performance of one E cannot fully compensate for deficiencies in the other two Es. The upshot is that the 3Es have an exponential (multiplicative versus additive) effect on enhancing brand admiration. The interactive (or exponential) effects of the 3Es simply cannot be underestimated (see Table 1.3).

Table 1.3 The Exponential Impact of the 3Es

      Let’s illustrate the power of these 3Es. Undoubtedly, Harley-Davidson customers believe that the brand offers a good quality product at a fair price. But that logic can’t describe how the brand resonates with them. Harley buyers invest time, money, and their own reputation in this brand because it makes them happy, and it does so on multiple levels. Its machinery produces an exciting and thrilling ride (enticing benefits). Customers feel protected and in control while riding their Harleys (enabling benefits). Product accouterments, such as Harley jackets, symbolize membership in the Harley community, allowing customers to feel pride in membership in this brother- or sisterhood. Involvement in the Harley Owners Group gives customers a sense of being connected to others, allowing customers the opportunity to gain increasing respect from others as they move from novice to expert status. The fact that the brand symbolizes independence, autonomy, and freedom inspires customers and makes them feel as if they are getting in touch with their authentic selves and who they are as people (enrichment benefits). Chapter 2 describes other examples of brands that have created value for customers over extended periods of time by offering benefits that map onto these 3Es.

      The Brand Admiration Management System

      The perspectives on the value of admired brands to companies and customers provide the foundation for the brand admiration management system shown in Figure 1.1.

The 3Es and Brand Admiration

      Let’s start with the assumption that admired brands provide value to companies by producing the outcomes noted on the right-hand side of Figure 1.1. Companies can enjoy these outcomes when their brands offer value to customers; that is, benefits that enable, entice, and enrich customers. When brands provide

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C. Whan Park, Bernard J. Jaworski, and Deborah J. MacInnis, “Strategic Brand Concept-Image Management,” Journal of Marketing 50, no. 4 (1986): 135–145.

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Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Boston: Beacon Press, 1959).