A brand has evolved to be more than a logo or tag line. It’s the deep connection that is developed over time between the customer and the brand. A brand should evoke feelings of loyalty and passion to its customers. It should give the customer a sense of belonging to a bigger part of the whole while at the same time feeling he is a significant part of the brand. It should create brand evangelists that actively recruit others to join this community of brand believers. In short, a brand is the committed relationship between the customer and the brand.
People are no longer choosing to do business just because that is who they always did business with. It takes something deeper, more meaningful. Scott Bedbury, the brain behind Nike’s “Just Do It” campaign and chief marketing officer for Starbucks from 1998-2002, points out in an interview with Tom Peters (2002) that the words, “Just do it”, were only spoken one time in 200 commercials that were run during the life of the campaign. He says they were able to reach deeper into the human psyche. The words spoke to the deeper emotions of the individuals. He uses Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs to drive home his point. He says the old brand world focused on the bottom of the pyramid where the primary needs for food and shelter exist. Brands have to reach beyond the fact that they have a good product; they’ve got to reach the deeper emotions of the consumer. Bedbury says, “These emotional needs include more powerful, more subtle, more complex motivations like yearning to belong, needing to feel connected, hoping to transcend, desiring to experience joy and fulfillment” (p. 14).
Humans are not always rational and therefore a company can’t rely on the fact that theirs may be the better product. If it doesn’t make the consumer part of the larger whole they may not choose to switch.  If humans made all decisions based on reason, there would be a lot more healthy people and the fast food chains would be out of business. This is why a brand has to meet the consumer on the emotional level. Emotions drive motivation. A near death car accident will be more likely to cause an individual to wear his seatbelt. The emotional feeling of recognizing iPod’s white headphones and thinking that the customer and the person he sees have at least something in common and are part of a larger community might be why people keep choosing the iPod over other MP3 players.

What needs are you meeting that make people keep choosing your church?