Hosted by David Blyth of eatbigfish Africa (represented by Delta Victor Bravo), in partnership with the Association for Communication & Advertising (ACA) and the Marketing Association of South Africa (MASA), the session brought together three people to discuss this: Ziphindiwe Ngcobo, Executive - Marketing at Isuzu Motors South Africa; Nuala Harris-Morele Managing Director of Kantar; and Leigh-Anne Acquisto, founder of Liquorish Ink.
Love is the opening act
In a category as high-involvement as ‘bakkies’, some might expect brand love to decide the sale. Ngcobo’s experience says otherwise. Brands are respected, yet buyers often choose alternatives, because of their experience along the decision journey. “Brand love is a ticket to the game,” she said. “It’s the on-ramp to the highway but on the highway there are a lot of exits.”
Equity deteriorates through that journey. Will it withstand the finance application? The waiting list? The colour that isn’t available? “Your product can be amazing, your brand can be phenomenal, but you still might lose the sale.” With buying cycles running over two to three years, building love is really building a sales pipeline.
Can you love a brand you haven’t experienced?
Acquisto questioned whether love can ever be built before the experience. Brands build awareness at the top of the funnel and it converts into something deeper over time, through the experience. “I don’t know if people can fall in love with a brand they haven’t experienced yet.” Her husband has driven the same bakkie brand for ten years, and shifting him is a very difficult conversation because that attachment was built on delivery. While the emotional positioning resonates with him; the 60-minute service resonates even more.
Blyth agreed that the upfront version sounds more like affinity plus good target marketing: being present at the right category entry points, in the right moments, speaking the customer’s language. Love, if it exists at all, attaches to the experience. Ngcobo didn’t disagree. At Isuzu, brand love is understood to come after the fact; in aftersales, parts availability and the dealership experience. That is where advocacy is built, and where the relationship starts to look like a marriage rather than a first date.
Habit, loyalty, love – name the behaviour
Harris-Morele pushed the argument further: most brands are not loved, they are chosen and being chosen repeatedly is the most valuable commercial outcome, not a lesser one. “We believe loyalty is dead. It never was a thing,” she said of Kantar’s view. Pockets of love do exist, mostly in identity-led categories where the brand is a form of self-expression. The majority of categories turn on what made you choose a brand in the first place, and what would make you return again and again.
Her definitions gave the debate its sharpest edge. “Habit is: I buy it because it’s easy, familiar, available. Loyalty is: I choose it because it’s earned a role in my life. Love is: I’d be so mad if you took it away from me.” DStv holds all three - habitual subscribers, loyal subscribers, and those who only subscribe for the sport and who love the brand for only that reason. These segments exist in very different proportions, with those who love the brand usually the smallest. Call the behaviours what they really are, she argued, so that you can measure them properly.
Meaningfully different, not just distinctive
Blyth brought Byron Sharp’s How Brands Grow into the room: the Ehrenberg-Bass view that brands grow by increasing penetration and being mentally and physically available, and that repeat purchase boils down to habit and availability helped along by distinctive assets. Harris-Morele agreed on the fundamentals – if your brand doesn’t come to mind, you’re not in the consideration set – but Kantar’s framework parts ways on distinctiveness. Predisposition is built by being meaningfully different, and distinctiveness is only a part of difference.
Capitec was her case in point: it made banking simpler and more accessible in a market of very big incumbents and, as Blyth added, easy to buy. Acquisto agreed, noting the bank delivered a fundamentally better product – “not 10% better, 80% better”. And it aimed its offering at a clearly defined market, backed by a simple, memorable and emotive brand. Blyth offered a working summary of the three constructs: relevance answers “why should I care?”, distinctiveness answers “can I recognise you quickly?”, and differentiation answers “why should I choose you over another acceptable option?” Distinctive assets – the symbols, the colours – work as heuristics: shortcuts that trigger the emotional memory a brand has already built.
Experience does the heavy lifting
One data point reframed the whole discussion. In Kantar’s numbers, Harris-Morele said, exposure to communication contributes roughly a quarter of brand impact; the remaining three-quarters comes from brand experience. Advertising matters – it shapes expectations and reinforces associations – but experience determines whether those associations are believed and retained. Acquisto saw this play out at global trading platform IG: a strategy process that was exploring emotional connection kept landing on the same answer. What sophisticated traders want is speed and accuracy – the functional delivery of the product and the experience of using it.
Experience also decides how much forgiveness a brand earns. When the DStv Delicious Festival went wrong and was oversold, leading to long queues and consumer frustration, the backlash was loud. When the Two Oceans Marathon hit unforeseeable weather issues and had to cancel on the morning of the event, where runners had flown in from around the world to participate, the reception was far more positive. This can largely be put down to how the brand responded. How a brand shows up when things go wrong carries more weight than anything it says in its advertising.
Loyal to the reward, not the brand
South African brands spend billions on loyalty programmes, and Blyth asked whether they build genuine preference or simply subsidise convenience. Harris-Morele’s problem starts with the name. Most are reward or reinforcement programmes, not loyalty programmes. They are powerful tools, but participation should never be confused with love. “You may be loyal to the reward, not to the brand.”
Acquisto offered Discovery as the exception that proves the point. Designed as a behavioural system rather than a points scheme, it changes what she does not just where she spends. The risk sits at the other end of the spectrum: ecosystem lock-in. Her attempt to cancel Apple Music, only to find family device features tied to it, changed how she feels about the brand, not enough to leave given years of positive experiences, but enough to want to de-register. Nobody, she noted, wants to be locked into anything.
Should marketers ban the word?
Blyth closed by asking whether “love” should be banned from marketing conversations or simply understood better. Ngcobo’s advice: keep building emotional connection, but don’t stop there: build the top of the funnel, harvest at the bottom, and be ready in the moment when customers are ready to buy. Acquisto’s advice: customers don’t fall in love early; they trust brands that feel safe and consistently deliver and so “a brand is insurance against regret”. Harris-Morele saw no need to abandon emotion, only to be honest about what it does: “Brands don’t need to be loved by everyone. They need to be remembered by more people, chosen more often, and trusted enough to make future demand possible.” That, she said, is a sharper commercial ambition and one worth stating in the language CFOs and CEOs appreciate. DM
About the series
This was the third session of “We’re Picking Fights”, Season 3 of the Daily Maverick Marketing Masterclass, hosted by eatbigfish Africa (represented by Delta Victor Bravo) in partnership with the Association for Communication & Advertising (ACA) and the Marketing Association of South Africa (MASA). Six fault lines, one platform for tough debate. The series runs as a one-hour webinar every second Thursday from 11 June to 20 August 2026. The next episode asks whether selling can be inherently harmful – Marketing’s Moral Blind Spot – and takes place on 23 July. To view the series, visit Daily Maverick Events.