How To Get People Hooked On Your Brand

 

One model that makes people get hooked on brands happens in two stages:

• The routine stage: This is when we simply use certain brands or products as part of our daily habits or rituals. These are the products that we buy regularly and replace or replenish whenever they break or run out. They are essential to our everyday functioning
• The dream stage: Here, we buy things not because we need them but because we’ve allowed emotional signals about them to penetrate our brains.

We slip into the dream stage when we’ve let our guard down, when we are relaxed.

According to a former Phillip Morrison executive, that’s when a real attachment to a brand happens to take root. Here’s how it happens. During a brief respite from the routine stage, or “work mode”, we feel more relaxed, less inhibited, and more open to trying new drinks, new clothes, new cosmetics, new foods. Pretty soon, we’ve subconsciously linked the good memories or pleasant emotions of the dream stage with the taste of that new cocktail or the feel of that new face cream against our skin. So once the dream is over, we try to ‘reactivate’ this feeling by integrating those brands and products into our daily routines. And once something is part of our routine, it becomes almost impossible to shake.

This is why most beverage brands are so ubiquitously present at music festivals and concerts. Red bull, for example, got its start by distributing free caseloads of the stuff at cool “hangouts” like malls & surfing shops, where teens and college kids tend to gather to escape the mundane routines of their everyday lives. The company knew that if it caught these kids in their dream stage, once Monday rolled out and went back to normal routines, they would associate red bull with the care free feeling of hanging out at the surf shop.

But this doesn’t work every time. In order for a product to truly take root, its makers have to imbue it with some addictive- whether physically or psychologically- qualities.

The secret ingredient behind most top food & beverage brands is craving. At Coca-Cola, marketing executives spend hours discussing how many bubbles they should feature in their print ads and in-store refrigerators.. Realizing how much craving bubbles generate- they make us think of that cool refreshing feeling of carbonation hitting our palates. Some executives actually come up with a model for how many bubbles they need to trigger our cravings.