Lovemarks

Lovemarks: Future beyond Brands

The narrator of this story is Kevin Roberts the Global CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi a company that creates ideas for life. He supervises an international team of more than seven thousand creative professionals in eighty countries. He is also a CEO in residence of the judge institute of Management of the Cambridge University and teacher of the Limberick University in Ireland and Waikato Management School. And with this curriculum you can not only notice that he is a creative man but a man that for him to keep learning and knowing new things he teach.

Chapter 1: Start Me Up

In this chapter he lets you know a bit of how he started. He says he was born optimist. The deal of being optimist is to see opportunities when everyone else sees threats or weakness. Is to be convinced that if you are in the middle of hell, the only thing you can do is to go on.

While working in his starting years in Lancaster, he always though that there were no impossible. And this phrase became his everyday strength as he became the CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi.

And what I understood is that to become the best in your line of product is not to fear for anything. Be sure with what you have and what you have to give.

When he got to Tony Evans the chief of the international department of Mary Quant a clothes brand and asked for the charge his old boss had earning half of what he supposed to receive, he learned that women wear what makes them feel comfortable whit a sexy air. Women like to provoke. And men love to be provoked.

In this job is where he learned how to launch products. Thanks to this he enter P&G. everything he knows about people, business and marketing, he discovered it in P&G. In here he learned how to connect with the consumers.

Chapter 2: Time Changes Everything

The Chinese have an antique curse that says: "Hope you live interesting times".

This in marketing and for Kevin Roberts is no challenge. The journey made from products to trademarks and trademarks to brands is one of the biggest stories in economy of this last century; is about the impact caused to the relationship between enterprise and consumer and vice versa.

Every step made in this journey has reinforced the consumer, has increased the relationships, brands and the power of people.

From the enterprise point of view, trademarks are a defensive tool. From the consumers point of view is another story because they think that it gives them a warranty. As trademarks started to go further it wasn't enough to trust a name, so they moved from simple name tags to marks of trust and reliability.

"Patents expire, copyrights eventually run their course, but trademarks last forever" (Kate Wilson). The story of trademarks is full of names that in a time were famous and that now are generic; for example the brand Band-Aid has become in the common term to call any bandage that stick by itself to a wound. And like that there a lot of names, being the owner of a trademark doesn't give you warranty of being different, but it is a good start. The idea of differentiating a product from another was good until it become generic; the speed with which an appreciated product becomes in a vulgar generic is a threat that is constantly there. Everything can become generic from a grain of rice to a car.

Nowadays everything we do, everywhere we look we see brands. We live in a world of brands and because of that competition of brands is everyday more difficult to deal with.

People doesn't want a variety of things, people nowadays just want one thing but with everything they need in it, a good example of this is TV, people don't want a hundred channels they just want one that offers what people want to see.

"Brands are out of juiceÐ'...Ð'..."

The brands that have a hard time outstanding in the market and have a hard connecting with people are brands that have this six main problems:

1. Brands are worn out from overuse.

2. Brands are no longer mysterious

3. Brands can't understand the new consumer

4. Brands struggle with good old fashioned competition

5. Brands have been captured by formula

6. Brands have been smothered by creeping conservatism

The journey has ended from products to trademarks and a trademark to brands is over. Today the rules are different; as everything is harder the way to play this game is tough.

So what producers should be focus in is instead of following every fashion that comes and goes and constantly, they should focus in create emotional connections with the consumers.

Chapter 3: Emotional Rescue

In the last years it has been noticed that the world of emotions has dominated the list of the best seller books. Everyone, all over the world wants to live an emotion. The connection between an image with a song and the person that is seen it is everything. If you want to create a connection, there have to be something to relate with, because what moves a human being is emotion not reason, emotion leads to action while reason leads you to conclusions.

There is a minority of consumers that buy products based in facts. There mostly moved to buy by emotions, the relationship they feel when they see a product.

Love is the main emotion that leads you to the rest. If the consumer has this feeling at the time of seeing a product leads him to the rest of the emotions like happiness, sadness, envy, surprise, etc. is the conncetion it exists between product and consumer. A feeling is all there's needed to create a conncetion.

Chapter 4: All you need is Love

As Platoon said: "when love gets us, we all turn to poets", perhaps not in poets, but we get inspire, because that is what love do, it inspires you.

As we all are consumers by nature all of our possessions give a certain sense to our lives, that's why we buy, give away, treasure and keep thing for life. We attach all these things to us, to our feelings. We give certain special significance to it.

There are six true things about love:

Ð'* The first one is a warning. Human beings need love. Without it they die.

Ð'* The