As my counterpart, Josh Schooler, shared recently – AI is increasingly offering the most prominent opinion when consumers research a product or brand. But real human sentiment is the foundation of these digital tastemakers. As the crawlers crawl and the LLMs chomp and spew content, real conversations and human interactions are still taking place across platforms, forums, and comment sections. These genuine opinions carry great weight in the algorithm – which is a refreshing reminder for brands to be human.
To be meaningful.
To matter.
To real people.
In real life.
When it comes to premium brands, conversation, passion, and emotion are still major drivers of choice (although I have also heard some impassioned treatises on toilet paper brands).
Inspire someone to fall in love with your brand first, then the “reasons why” are simply joyous justification. The branding equation is almost the reciprocal of the innovation equation. Details are everything when building a breakthrough product. But the nuts and bolts ride in the backseat of branding.* Put the experience before the science. Don’t get into the weeds in your lead messaging. Paint the sunset over the lake.
Sentiment is bigger than a datapoint.
Purchasing a luxury watch is an irrational choice. I have not thoroughly researched this, but I feel confident that 99.9% of people considering a luxury watch already carry around a smartphone with perfect atomic time, chronograph, date, and moon phase complications. The new Rolex Land-Dweller is the brand’s most accurate mechanical watch ever. It boasts the revolutionary Dynapulse escapement, 32 patent applications, and an accuracy of +/- 2 seconds per day.
The “most accurate mechanical watch” is a concrete reason to justify a new Land-Dweller. But the human selling point for the $15,000 watch is the artistry and aura.
As Jack Forster, global editorial director of the 1916 Company, put it in the New York Times:
“Clearly, there’s a huge market in the luxury world based on the completely irrational, but also very understandable, idea that a mechanical watch is alive on the wrist in a way that a quartz watch is not and could never be.”
Humanity, beauty, and discovery lie in the crannies of imperfection. Every facet of your brand doesn’t have to be slick and calculated. It just has to mean something. Make it mean something big enough to transcend the noise.
*Let me be clear, you do have to get the details right. If your product is rubbish, branding will only get you as far as a dumpster fire r/subreddit or class-action lawsuit.
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