I spent eleven minutes in the toothpaste aisle of the Fred Meyer on Hawthorne last Saturday, not shopping, just standing there pretending to read an ingredient panel. Four people came through while I lurked. Nobody deliberated. Nobody compared. Each one reached for the same box they reached for last time, dropped it in the cart, and kept moving toward the eggs.
The brief on my desk that week described those four people as being in a relationship with the brand.
Not a habit. A relationship. There was a slide about emotional territory, a slide about brand love, and a segment in the appendix named The Devoted.
They were not devoted. They were out of toothpaste.
Most strategies fail in market because they were built on a level of customer attention that does not exist outside the room where the strategy was written.
I've watched this from inside brand strategy rooms and I understand how it happens. We spend six weeks with a category. We read the transcripts, we learn the shelf, we start dreaming about sunscreen. Then we assume the shopper has done a fraction of that, when what she has done is nothing. She has an errand, a toddler in the cart, and about four seconds before she has decided.
What replaces relationship language is less romantic and considerably more useful. One, availability. Being findable at the moment of the errand beats being loved in the abstract, which is why Bounty and Tillamook win aisles that no one has feelings about. Two, distinctiveness. Not a positioning statement, a set of physical properties the eye can catch at speed: the Salt & Straw script, the Oatly carton that looks like a ransom note, the shape of a Stumptown bag. Three, low friction. Every step you add between intent and purchase costs you more volume than any amount of purpose-driven storytelling will win back.
Affection exists. It is real for maybe two brands a person can name, and even then it is doing less work than the marketing team believes. Patagonia has genuine devotees and still competes on whether the jacket is in stock in the right size in October.
They were not devoted. They were out of toothpaste.
So when a brief tells me the objective is deepening the customer relationship, I ask what behavior that means on a Saturday in an aisle. Usually the honest answer is buy it again, and buy it without thinking. That is a smaller ambition and a much better plan.
Truffles ignores me on principle. Barnaby has a relationship with the sound of the drawer where the treats live. He does not love me. He has a habit, an errand, and roughly four seconds of attention, and I have never once mistaken it for affection.