What Makes a Brand Meaningful?

This is a huge question for strategists. In fact, I'd wager to guess agency workers spend loads of time, energy and money researching this question on behalf of their clients in order to create work that resonates powerfully with consumers. I've recently thought about this question from the perspective of a consumer: what makes a brand meaningful to me? Is it whether or not it has a strong presence in my life, like Apple. Or what about a brand that makes me happy when I interact with it, like Cocacola?

I've settled on this simple, but refined definition of meaningfulness: a meaningful brand connects consumers and fulfills an emotional need. A brand that links its consumer to a person or product and provides some kind of emotional utility is a meaningful brand. To illustrate this, I'd like to jump into an example in my own life when I came to the realization that a brand was meaningful to me. Bear with me -- I love storytelling, but promise I'll get to the point.

I was at a friend’s house, waiting, while she finished getting ready. She was sitting at her desk finishing her makeup and I was in the chair next to her. We were chatting.

All of the sudden, the smell hit me — pushing me back through time until I was strapped into the carseat in the back of my mom’s sedan, watching her apply her lipstick in the rearview mirror.

“What lipstick is that?” I asked my friend as she traced the edge of her smile.

“Something by YSL, I think. Do you like the color?”

“Yeah”, I said thoughtlessly, I was too busy coming to the realization that YSL has played, and will always play, a meaningful role in my life.

I own none of their products, beauty or otherwise, but the brand connects me to my mom in a powerful way.

It really is pretty bizarre; whenever I catch a whiff of YSL lipstick, or anything that smells remotely like it, I think of my mom, applying her makeup in the car while she drove me to school (dangerous, I know, but she was a single, working, mother-of-two so cut her some slack). As the editor of a food, wine, art, home and style magazine, she was a bit of a makeup snob: and her choice of lipstick has always been YSL.

My mom is still here with me, and I’ve told her all about this. When we’re together and she pulls her makeup bag out of her purse, we laugh. But I know when she’s gone that YSL will always make me think of her, just as it did when I watched her from my carseat in the rearview mirror: my hero.