Off Kilter 212: Love Over Clicks.

tl;dr: Brand love isn't romance. It's pricing power.

Love as Emotional Surplus

I recently started work with a new client and was delighted to learn that one of their primary goals is to be loved. Not because this surprised me—I’m a child of the love era of branding, and it’s why I’m in this business. But because, as marketing slides ever deeper into nihilism, I haven’t encountered a client with this mindset in quite some time.

Now, before I go on, please stop for a second while I challenge the straw man argument that’s almost certainly forming in your head about brand love.

No, I’m not suggesting you treat your brand like a romantic partner. I’m not going to tell you that customers want to marry your soap, date your software, or buy flowers for your sneakers. That’s just the wilful mischaracterization critics use to undermine the argument.

Brand love isn’t interpersonal affection misdirected at corporations. It’s something much more specific and considerably more valuable: emotional surplus.

When businesses shape products and experiences around deep customer understanding—removing friction, solving unarticulated problems, creating moments that feel personally designed—something accumulates beyond satisfaction. Through sustained storytelling, service design, and brand behavior that consistently demonstrates “we built this for someone like you,” the customer achieves more than just their goal. They feel understood. They experience small moments of delight. They integrate the brand into their identity because it reflects how they see themselves or want to be seen.

This isn’t love in the sense of wedding vows. It’s surplus emotional value that exceeds the functional transaction. The delta between “this gets the job done” and “I can’t imagine using anything else.”

And that delta has a direct commercial translation: pricing power.

When Costco maintains 90%+ membership renewal rates year after year while competitors scramble for loyalty programs, it shows that customers willingly pay for access because the emotional surplus feels worth it. When Patagonia commands premium prices while publicly telling customers not to buy new products, that’s emotional surplus converted into economic durability.

The academic research calls this “brand love” because it shares psychological characteristics with interpersonal attachment: identity integration, willingness to forgive mistakes, advocacy behavior, and resistance to alternatives. Brain imaging shows that loved brands activate the ventromedial prefrontal cortex—regions involved in self-conception and value judgment.

But the commercial reality is simpler: emotional surplus creates economic surplus.

And this is the fundamental problem with our slide into nihilism. It led us to trade value creation for value extraction, to stop building brands worth loving and start optimizing brands to be noticed and remembered. And in doing so, we accidentally gave away the keys to the economics that justify marketing’s existence.

The Equilibrium of Mediocrity

The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has observed the following unexceptional patterns in buyer behavior: Bigger brands have more customers who buy slightly more often. Distinctive assets aid recognition. Mental and physical availability predict market share in mature, stable markets where innovation has stalled, products are interchangeable, and everyone competes on availability rather than meaning.

All true. All useful. All catastrophically incomplete when turned into a prescription.

Here’s why. These pattern-recognizing observations have been framed as “laws”—suggesting they’re as immutable as gravity rather than descriptions of what happens when nothing exceptional is occurring. But there’s a critical difference between natural laws and market equilibrium. Gravity is physics. Market patterns are the result of choices—what happens when brands accept parity, when innovation stalls, when everyone competes on availability rather than meaning.

As a result, the Ehrenberg-Bass research describes the equilibrium of mediocrity, not the limits of possibility. Unfortunately, modern marketers are drawing the wrong lesson. Rather than viewing these patterns as the current state of play and then asking themselves how to break the equilibrium for competitive advantage, they’ve begun accepting it as destiny. It’s the equivalent of the Wright Brothers concluding there’s no point trying to fly because Newton observed that apples always fall. They’ve accepted that marketing should be reduced to optimizing distinctive assets for recall, maximizing mental availability in stable categories, and treating performance marketing as sophistication—endlessly testing ad variants to shave pennies off acquisition costs, while the brand itself slides into meaninglessness.

This isn’t rigor. It’s surrender.

What Equilibrium Can’t Explain

Let’s test these limits against reality, building on an example I used in Off Kilter 211 to show how worldview creates emotional surplus.

In 2007, both Apple and BlackBerry had strong brands and devoted customers. BlackBerry’s keyboard was more distinctive than Apple’s nascent home button. Both had mental availability. Both had passionate users. Both had profitable businesses and resources to invest.

But their worldviews pointed in opposite directions.

BlackBerry’s worldview was built around serving IT administrators—security, data-efficiency, and enterprise email. Apple’s worldview was built around the creative empowerment of consumers—enabling rich internet experiences, self-expression, and possibility.

One worldview led to the optimization of email compression and the BlackBerry Enterprise Server. The other led to the App Store, the camera as a creative tool, and an integrated ecosystem where the phone became an extension of identity.

BlackBerry built features that IT buyers valued. Apple built systems that generated emotional surplus among users—experiences that made people feel more creative, more capable, more themselves. That surplus converted to pricing power, which funded deeper investment in distinctive systems, which generated more surplus.

Thus, an unfair fight unfolded between Apple’s compounding loop and BlackBerry’s optimization cycle.

By FY2024, Apple’s gross margin reached 46.2% overall and 73.9% on services. Meanwhile, BlackBerry vanished almost a decade earlier. Not because of distinctive assets or mental availability, but because one company’s worldview and ensuing systems created an emotional surplus that compounded into an unassailable competitive advantage, while the other’s worldview optimized for functional efficiency that generated no emotional reservoir when the market shifted from IT to the consumer.

Equilibrium thinking can explain share in mature markets, but it cannot explain surplus—the pricing power, the margin expansion, the self-reinforcing advantage. This is where love lives. And that difference is worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

McKinsey’s analysis shows that the world’s strongest brands yielded almost 2× the total shareholder returns of the MSCI World index over 20 years. Kantar’s research demonstrates that brands with pricing power—those that can maintain premium prices without losing customers—consistently outperform category averages. Bain’s loyalty research shows that NPS leaders grow at more than 2× the rate of competitors.

These aren’t rounding errors. These are existential competitive advantages that equilibrium thinking cannot explain.

The Nihilistic Turn

This shift to nihilism didn’t happen by accident.

Consider Nike. For decades, the brand stood for something—athletic transcendence, the democratization of human potential, the belief that if you have a body, you’re an athlete. The Swoosh was a symbol of aspiration encoded into business systems: athlete partnerships, retail experiences, and product innovation that pushed boundaries.

Then came the optimization era. Nike became obsessed with direct-to-consumer efficiency. They reduced their brand’s surface area by shifting from broad reach brand marketing to algorithmically targeted performance ads while also cutting wholesale partnerships. Then they fired their innovation leaders who’d kept the brand ahead by deeply embedding themselves within sporting subcultures. They began treating the brand as a logo to be placed rather than a worldview to be embodied.

They measured everything while increasingly meaning nothing.

The result? Between 2021 and 2024, revenue declined, margins compressed, and market capitalization dropped by roughly $50 billion—nearly a third of its peak value. Nike had efficiently optimized itself into just another shoe company. The Swoosh remained a distinctive asset, but was no longer supported by the business systems necessary to create the emotional surplus required for its continued success.

This is what the nihilism of modern marketing looks like in practice: high-functioning mediocrity. All the assets, none of the meaning. Measurable efficiency producing unmeasured declines. By which I mean unmeasured until it’s too late.

Nike’s trajectory reveals a pattern. Marketing has lost its seat at the strategy table over the past two decades. CMO tenure has remained stubbornly short—around 4.2 years compared to 7+ for other C-suite roles. Finance has tightened its grip on resource allocation. And boards have demanded proof that marketing is more than just expensive art projects.

Marketing responded to this by adopting what I call “Measureship”—the doctrine that nothing counts unless it’s countable, that measurement equals rigor, that dashboards reveal truth. When a discipline loses authority, it clings to whatever ideology makes it legible to power. Marketers sought legitimacy in the only language the board still respected: the language of the spreadsheet.

But here’s what got traded away: innovation, imagination, and love. The capacity to create value rather than merely capture it. The ability to identify emergent customer needs and build businesses that generate meaning rather than a collection of distinctive assets. The ability to create emotional surplus, not just the aspiration to do so.

Put bluntly, when marketing stopped building for love, it ceased to be a discipline of value creation and instead became a bureaucracy of measurement.

The problem is, the more marketers speak the language of measurement, the more boards believe this is all they’re suited for. Directly contributing to the 50% of CEOs who view the CMO as solely an operational role, with no strategic value.

The Wrong Kind of Rigor

Real rigor in social science—and marketing is a social science—requires mixed methods, not just empirical “proof.” What anthropologist Tricia Wang calls “thick data” alongside thin data. Thin data tells you what happened. Thick data tells you why. Dashboards show you salience. Ethnography shows you significance.

When P&G attributes its recent growth to pricing rather than volume—repeatedly, across quarters—that’s evidence of pricing power earned through decades of building brands that matter. When Chick-fil-A generates $22 billion in revenue with pricing discipline that prioritizes experience over transaction volume, that’s distinctive business systems creating emotional surplus.

These outcomes are measurable. But they’re not reducible to the metrics most modern marketing organizations track. You can’t A/B test your way to brand love. You can’t ROI your way to emotional surplus. These emerge from sustained, empathetic innovations encoded into business systems.

While equilibrium thinking brilliantly describes stationary conditions in mature, parity markets, it’s worse than useless as a prescription for how to compete.

Competitive advantage doesn’t come from accepting equilibrium—it comes from breaking it.

Reclaiming the Generative Capacity for Imagination

Marketing stands at a philosophical crossroads.

One path accepts equilibrium as destiny. It treats customers as predictable, brands as memory structures, and marketing as the science of harvesting existing demand through optimized efficiency. This path leads to competence without distinction, measurement without meaning, and the slow commodification of everything you build.

The other path treats marketing as generative and creative—the discipline of creating value that doesn’t yet exist through empathetic innovation and distinctive worldviews. It recognizes that competitive advantage comes not from better execution of the same playbook, but from planting seeds and building systems that generate emotional surplus others cannot replicate.

In Off Kilter 211, I argued that distinctive businesses beat distinctive assets because worldview-driven systems create durability that memory triggers alone cannot. Apple’s ecosystem. Costco’s membership model. Netflix’s content algorithms. These aren’t marketing campaigns—they’re business architectures designed to generate and sustain emotional connection.

The systems create the conditions for love. Love creates pricing power. Pricing power creates economic surplus—higher margins, greater capital efficiency, lower customer acquisition costs, improved retention. This surplus compounds through balance sheets, not brand trackers.

The choice isn’t between rigor (marketing science) and romance (brand love). It’s between accepting equilibrium or building systems that deserve affection. Between describing gravity or designing for lift. Between harvesting existing demand and creating new value.

And increasingly, it’s a choice you must make consciously. AI is about to amplify whatever logic we encode into our systems. If we encode reductionist metrics and backward-looking efficiency, we’ll optimize ourselves into commodity status. If we encode empathetic innovation and meaning creation, we’ll build the distinctive systems that generate durable advantage.

The brands defining the next decade are being built right now—not by optimizing distinctive assets or maximizing mental availability, but by creating emotional surplus through worldview-driven systems that generate a compounding advantage.

The Wright Brothers didn’t deny gravity. They designed around it. They understood that lift comes from creating the right conditions, not accepting the wrong constraints.

The question isn’t whether you believe in brand love. The question is whether you have the courage to build for it while your competitors optimize for clicks.

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