‘The Chemistry of Brand Affinity’

Brand affinity may sometimes be defined as a stronger version of brand awareness and preference, where it becomes a muddied connector throughout the marketing funnel: someone knows your brand, then they like your brand, then they buy your brand. However, when I think about affinity, I think less about marketing and more about chemistry. There is the overly complicated scientific kind (which goes over my head as someone who struggled through organic chemistry in high school), and then there is the more “intro-to-chemistry everyday idea” of affinity: that some things naturally have a stronger attraction to one another than others. Some elements possess high affinity, bond easily, and hold together, while others may come into contact but never connect. Just because things are proximal does not mean they have affinity; you can place two elements beside one another and still create no meaningful bond between them.

People are no different, considering we are, after all, made of the same elements found in a chemistry lab. When we say we have an affinity for someone, we mean enjoying spending time with them, understanding them, trusting them, and seeing parts of ourselves reflected in them; something deeper than the fact that we simply “like” them. We may not be mirrors sharing every opinion or personality trait, but there is alignment in values, worldview, humor, aspirations, or sensibilities where a genuine connection forms, which is never one-sided. When you have affinity between two people, it is not two “mes” but a new “we” that manifests and creates a desire to stay connected, and a preference that persists even with 8 billion other people on the planet (and counting). Strong brands possess the ability to create a similar kind of connection, where there is a difference between being likeable and creating affinity. Just as we can meet someone and immediately find them charming or interesting without necessarily forming a deeper connection, it is relatively easy to create a likeable brand: a good product, beautiful design, a clever campaign, or simply saying the right thing at the right moment can all generate positive feelings, which are important. However, affinity is about building a relationship that goes beyond what we like about a brand to what we feel we share with it, which we believe begins with two things: identity and experience.

Identity

First, a brand needs a clear sense-of-self for someone to want to form a relationship with it; not knowing what you sell, but knowing who you are. A strong brand is not only an expert in what it makes and how, but what it represents, how it sees the world, what is important, and why any of that might matter to someone beyond what a product can offer. There needs to be an identifying, defining, and revealing of something for the world to relate to. This could be a worldview. A sensibility. A recognizable way of behaving. Something that allows a person to think: I understand what this is, and there is something about it that feels relevant to who I am.

Having an identity also means accepting that not everyone will feel that way. In today’s world where brands are available to and can reach almost anyone, there is a temptation to become broadly agreeable to everyone. For some businesses and products whose strength comes from being useful, trusted, and relevant to as many people as possible, mass appeal is precisely the point, however, that ambition is different from building a brand around affinity. On the other hand, having something to say does not necessarily mean being polarizing, provocative, or anti-something; it means having enough specificity to stand for something. Polishing until every surface is silky smooth may make a brand easier for more people to like, but in removing the texture, you also remove what gives people something to hold onto. The clearer the sense-of-self, the more opportunity people have to recognize what they genuinely share with it.

However, identity alone does not create affinity. A person can tell you who they are endlessly, but a relationship only really forms once you experience who they are, and the same applies to brands. At some point, you have to talk the talk and walk the walk.

Experience

The next layer in building affinity comes when identity becomes lived experience: through the spaces a brand creates, the communities it participates in, the culture it contributes to, and the role it chooses to play in people’s everyday lives. In addition, each experience also needs to reinforce the one that came before it, and the one that comes next. What a brand puts out into the world in one moment cannot point in one direction while what it does next points in another. Each interaction must gradually strengthen a consistent understanding of who the brand is. Strong brands build experiences that do not simply accumulate; they compound.

However, consistency does not mean constancy. Building experiences that create affinity also requires being selective about when, where, and how a brand chooses to show up. In an environment saturated with advertising, content, and constant demand for attention, where visibility can easily be mistaken for connection, this is even more crucial. Being the last thing someone saw is not the same as being something they remember.

So, what is the payoff of all of this? Why invest in building affinity in the first place?

We believe the value of affinity is in what it can become: emotional loyalty. There are, of course, many reasons we remain loyal to brands. Convenience, financial incentives, and functional superiority can all keep us coming back, each with tangible, and sometimes more immediate, commercial value. However, they are also conditional when something easier, cheaper, or technically better can always come along. Affinity creates a pathway to emotional loyalty, one rooted not only in what a brand does for us, but in the connection and trust we build with it, changing the nature of the next decision. Much like how we do not ask a close friend to re-prove their judgment every time they recommend a restaurant or book, a brand with genuine affinity does not always have to start from zero in winning people over when asking someone to try something new. A customer may be more willing to explore another product, enter a new category with the brand, or follow it somewhere unexpected because the relationship has already done some of the groundwork. Even more, that trust also travels outward. People advocate, bringing the brand into conversations and recommending it to others with a credibility that a brand cannot manufacture for itself.

Which brings us back to chemistry. I may not be able to explain exactly why sodium and chlorine work so well together, but I do know that the end result is delicious salt. The point is, not every element will bond with every other element simply because you force them close together. What they are matters: their individual properties determine what they are capable of bonding with, while the right conditions allow that bond to actually form. In the case of brands, identity determines what there is to connect with, and experience creates the conditions for that connection to deepen. The strongest brands are not merely the ones people notice, or even like. They know who they are, create the right environment for connection, and give the people with whom there is genuine affinity something worth forming a bond with. Again and again.