What THAT Viral Super Bowl Ad Can Teach Us About The Key To Business Success

It’s one of the big questions: what is the key to success in business? There are many different answers, but for me, there’s a core principle that it all comes down to… and it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot this week, thanks to one of our franchise owners.

A few days ago, Kim Rood, who owns a very successful WOW 1 DAY PAINTING franchise in Toronto, posted about an ad that played during this year’s Super Bowl, and how it resonated with him from a business perspective.

The ad? A promo for Google Assistant - a virtual helper that can perform day-to-day tasks, like creating shopping lists or photo albums, to streamline your life.

The commercial sees an unseen man remembering the love of his life, “Loretta”, and asking Google to save his favourite memories of her - photos, songs… the way she used to say “tickled pink”, or even that she snorted when she laughed. 

It’s an emotional heavyweight of an ad (try and watch without welling up!) and it hit me for the same reason it hit Kim - because it’s a first-class reminder how the power of emotion can connect you to a brand.

It’s not your product or service, and it’s not balance sheets or turning a profit - success isn’t really about what you’re selling at all — it’s about how you sell it. 

Your brand — including your values, mission, personality and beliefs, as much as your logo and brand name — is the foundation of your relationship with your customers. And it’s a simple fact that people would rather buy from a brand they relate to on an emotional level. 

The stronger the emotional bond you can make with your customers, the higher the chance that they’ll be customers for life. And lifetime customers are twice as valuable in the long run than transactional ones.

Let’s face it: junk removal is a mundane chore for most people. The same can be said for cleaning your gutters or painting your living room. But at O2E Brands we’ve been able to create real, long lasting relationships with the customers that use our home services brands. How? By making sure that everything about our business centers around an exceptional customer experience.

A brand is like a magic potion. You have to find all the secret ingredients and follow the steps to create a recipe that works. Get one small detail wrong and the potion just might blow up in your face — but as you refine the recipe and learn from your mistakes, eventually you end up with a winning combination.

So if you could brew up a big batch of your brand and bottle it, what would it look like? What would it feel like? More importantly, how would it make your customers feel?

 Simon Sinek, Michael Gerber, Jeff Bezos and Tony Robbins have all said it, in one form or another: people don’t buy things, they buy feelings. If you can figure out the secret sauce that inspires an emotional connection with your customers, that’s when the magic happens.