Is Love Just a Marketing Strategy?

Love is possibly the strongest human emotion, so it's not surprising that corporate America has frequently embraced it as a marketing strategy. With much money to be made, marketers have appropriated the emotion as a device by which to package their own stories.

One of the more egregious examples took place in the freewheeling days of the early 1970s, when Southwest Airlines set out to shake up the airlines industry with its marketing campaign steeped in love (and sex). The new Texas-based commuter airline had chosen “The Somebody Else Up There Who Loves You” as its slogan, backing up that promise by hiring “shapely,” especially friendly “hostesses” and ticket agents to attract the attention of passengers — primarily businessmen. “Other airlines may meet our price but remember, you can’t buy love,” the airline said in its advertising, not something consumers were used to hearing. Seeing a drop in its business, Southwest’s main competitor, Braniff, responded by offering its passengers a host of perks, including free beer on its flights.

Southwest decided to pull out all the stops in making consumers feel like they were loved. The airline began calling their ticket kiosks “love machines,” and had its flight attendants deliver safety information in an unusually intimate way. “Hi, I’m Suzanne, and we’re so glad to have you on our love flight,” passengers traveling from Dallas to Houston heard, and they were told to put on their seat belts as “we don’t want anything happening to you because we love you.” Right after takeoff, a complimentary beverage called “love punch” was offered to passengers by the attendants who had shed their uniforms to reveal, as the New York Times described it, “tanned legs in tangerine hot pants.” Dispensing of a bourbon- or scotch-based “love potion” came next, with most passengers not surprisingly finding their short flight to be highly enjoyable. “We loved having you,” the stewardesses (who wore necklaces featuring a heart) told passengers as they deboarded, with many a businessmen looking forward to their return trip.

While we have thankfully progressed from such goings-on, love remains a potent marketing strategy. Recognizing the semiotic power of love, quite a few contemporary marketers have in fact seized the emotion in their selling of products and services to consumers (much like the concept of happiness). Gap, for example, has a brand of loungewear and underwear branded simply as Love, the comfortable bras and undies said to be “worn by women who inspire us.” Subaru has thoroughly wrapped its corporate branding around love, finding it to be a compelling point of difference in the highly competitive automobile category. The company even makes a “Love Promise” to consumers, which it defines as “our vision to show love and respect to all people at every interaction with Subaru.”

Is this corporatization of love a good or bad thing? A reasonable argument can be made that marketers’ appropriation of love has diluted its power and the role it plays in people’s lives. In her 2003 Against Love, Laura Kipnis was highly critical of the employment of love as a selling tool, thinking it degraded the emotion and reduced it to just another consumable good. “In commodity culture,” she wrote, “it [love] conforms to the role of a cheap commodity, spit out at the end of the assembly line in cookie-cutter forms, marketed to bored and alienated producer-consumers as an all-purpose salve to emptiness.”

Love appears to be spreading as a brand strategy, however, as more marketers realize that it is perhaps the ultimate emotional experience.