BRANDS STATUS: LOVEMARK OR NOT?

We have seen in the above street interview videos that customers have a great knowledge of Nespresso and Malongo brands. They are willing to talk with enthusiasm about them, to define brands’ universe and they give a very positive feedback on these two brands.

However, if have a marketing approach and a deeper look on the brands image and positioning: which positioning status have these brands?

Are Nespresso and Malongo what Kevin Roberts (Saatchi & Saatchi CEO) called Commodity, Fad or Lovemark?

The "Lovemark Profiler" is going to provide us with a response! The survey lets the user evaluate by "Yes/No" question his level of Respect, Mystery, Sensuality, Intimacity, for each brand. You can find the survey on the facebook page: IAL Saatchi&Saatchi.

This is how we get the brands positioning! But we decided to do another test in order to confirm these first responses.

Let’s now try the more specific “Lovemarker survey”! 

We have surveyed people on-line from November 25 to December 7, 2013.

If you are interesting about results on this survey, you can find it under the following link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/115UYVfLz-_QGjxbIOXIqI3j5Dkm6MASIiu1rHY7gFBI/viewform

But in order to be easier for you, we have make a summary of the results!

What are they?

Nespresso Respect Points Mean: 20,7

Malongo Respect Points Mean: 12,9

So from these results, what can we conclude? It seems neither Malongo nor Nespresso are lovemarks regarding this Lovemarker survey!

Nespresso is very close to get its 25 points required to be a lovemark….but doesn’t reach the result! What make this brand “lost” its points?

Results show that Nespresso is loosing a lot of points on criteria based on “Trust” notion and in particular for the “sustainability” point. Interviews we conducted and analyses tend to explain this result by the fact that customers don’t believe or are not aware of the environmental involvment of Nespresso… Are we thus close to say that the popular and sexy George Clooney is a liar?

Nevertheless, because Nespresso is very close to its 25 points, we decided to focus in survey responses regarding the 3 characteristics of lovemarks : Mystery, Sensuality and Intimacy.

What are results on these criteria?

Nespresso Love Points Mean: 20,7 + 18,4 = 49,1

The result is thus above of the minimum requiered for a brand to be call “Lovemark”! We think that Nespresso should be considered as a Lovemark.

And what about Malongo?

Roberts' five recommendations on how to evolve a Brand into a Lovemark:

1.       Increase Emotion about the product

2.      Add Mystery, Sensuality and Intimacy

3.      Think in Paradoxes and exploit them.

4.      Replace Command and Control with Unleash and Inspire

5.      Make the World a Better Place

Based on street-interviews (video to be watched in the previous article), we can see that Malongo is very close to each of these recommendations. People surveyed are talking with enthusiasm about emotions, feelings, intimacy, senses and environmental involvement when they describe Malongo.

PDD

References:

Roberts, Kevin (2005). Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands

Elliott and Percy. Strategic Brand Management

http://saatchi.com/en-us/purpose/lovemarks/

http://www.lovemarks.com/?pollresult=true

Street-interview (watch video in the previous article)