Brand Love

February has finally arrived, a month-long celebration as a time of romance – a time to remember and appreciate our loved ones. And what better way to mark Valentine’s Day than to launch our new brand tracking metric – Brand Love! Available to all new and existing Vision One clients to delve deeper into the consumer-brand relationship; how deep is your (brand) love?

Why Valentine’s Day is the perfect time to think about Brand Love!

Valentine’s Day isn’t just about romance — it’s a major spending moment, and the numbers continue to climb. So there’s no better time for businesses to be thinking about Brand Love

Brands that invest in strong market research have a clear advantage, understanding not just what people buy, but when and why. One of the biggest retail moments is still “Red Saturday” — typically the weekend before Valentine’s Day — when couples actively purchase gifts, book restaurants, and plan experiences.

Spending remains significant, with millions of people celebrating through dinners, gifts, and shared experiences. Data suggests Brits spend over £90m on Valentine’s Day. And it’s not just couples driving this — singles are also contributing to the Valentine’s economy, often spending heavily on dating throughout the year.

What’s interesting is the behaviour behind the spend. Consumers are more selective, balancing emotional intent with value. Many are willing to spend, but expect the experience — whether it’s a gift, a meal, or a date — to feel worthwhile.

Valentine’s Day highlights a broader trend: emotional occasions continue to drive real commercial impact. For brands, understanding these moments — and the behaviours behind them — is where the real opportunity lies.

Love Through The Ages (A Brief History Of Brand Love)

Introduced by Shimp and Madden (1988), Brand Love has gained a lot of interest from market researchers in recent years, and for good reason!

Brand love concerns the formation of emotional bonds in Consumer-Brand Relationships (CBRs), the kind that both parties might have with other people! Interestingly, Brand Love is related to the consumer’s emotional attachment to the brand, which is characterised by a strong positive emotional experience related to the brand, leading to the brand dominating the cognition of the consumer, causing them to interact more with the brand, and reinforcing the CBR (Nawaz et al., 2020).

Such relationships appear to be essential components of brand success, closely linked to brand equity and positively associated with consumer purchase behaviour and loyalty, particularly in competitive markets!

Researchers have suggested that, for a consumer to truly feel love for a brand, the brand becomes integrated into the consumer’s sense of self (Ahuvia, 1993). This certainly explains why consumers are so loyal to the brands they love!

The takeaway: To be successful in competitive markets today, every brand should focus on developing and maintaining successful long-term CBRs, and Brand Love is the perfect metric for measuring this.

BrandVision, the Brand Wheel and Brand Love

Given Brand Love’s importance, this metric now makes up one of our eight key metrics in Brand Equity wheel, BrandVision’s benchmark for Equity measurement, combining the best practices from Psychological Research, Marketing Research, Behavioural Economic Theory and System 1 Thinking.

Each metric allows us to identify a brand’s strengths and weaknesses and to generate an overall Brand Equity score that can be tracked over time. BrandVision gives our clients the essential tools to understand how their brand sits alongside competitors, giving you the insights you need to better understand and develop your brand to help it grow and flourish!

In the wheel, Brand Love sits alongside Emotion under our ‘Delight’ theme, and a score is generated by evaluating Love on three powerful facets: Relevance, Need and Trust.

The Brand Wheel

Chocolate Case Study

In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, we conducted research on chocolate gift box brands using our powerful strategic brand tracking system, BrandVision.

The Market

The act of gifting chocolate has been around since the Aztecs and the Mayans, but it wasn’t until 1853 that the first chocolate box was created by Richard Cadbury, the Son of the founder of Cadbury. The chocolate box has been a time-honoured symbol of love and appreciation and is regularly bought and received by lovers worldwide on Valentine’s Day. In the U.S., an annual $36 million is spent on chocolate gifting on Valentine’s Day. Each year, Valentine’s Day spending increases dramatically due to inflation, with 2023 set to be the highest Valentine’s Day spending on record.

Heroes, Lindt and Celebrations came out as the brands most loved among the consumers that we spoke to, including most trusted, most needed and most ‘for them’. Although Guylian performed well, it received less Brand Love compared to it’s competitor brands.

When we asked consumers whether they would consider purchasing from each of these brands, Celebrations was the frontrunner, with 63% of the sample agreeing, closely followed by Heroes and Lindt, with 60% agreeing. In line with their Brand Love score, only 40% agreed that they would consider purchasing from Guylian.

Similarly, when we asked consumers which chocolate gift box brands they had purchased from in the last 12 months, Celebrations was purchased in 48% of the sample (the highest amount), with Heroes (43%) and Lindt (37%) slightly less, and Guylian was purchased by only 18% of the sample.

The take-home: Brand Love is an excellent predictor of brand success and strongly predicts brand consideration and purchase! Contact us today to measure your Brand Love, see how you sit amongst your competitors, and learn how to become a best-loved brand.