Your Brand-Consumer Relationships Are Conditional

Building and maintaining healthy relationships is one of the toughest things you’ll ever have to do. It requires a meaningful investment of time, energy, and effort to understand what makes the other party tick and then the willingness to adjust and adapt as they change and evolve. This applies to all relationships… even the brand-consumer relationship.

One of the biggest challenges that brands face today is building meaningful relationships with millennials.

Brands often make some of the same mistakes that people make in relationships. They focus more on what they want out of it, and not enough on what they can contribute.

The formula of providing a product or service for a consumer’s dollar is no longer the winning formula even if you believe your product or service is of the highest quality. That is a very transactional approach. Millennials seek relationships that are more transformational than transactional.

You also can’t force a relationship or be the only active participant in a relationship. One of the primary conditions of any successful relationship is that both parties have to choose to be in that relationship. They both have to be active participants.

In order for brands to build and maintain meaningful relationships with millennials, they have to create the conditions in which millennials want to be in a relationship with them. There is no getting around the fact that relationships are conditional and understanding those conditions is vital.

Even in personal and more intimate relationships where people profess their unconditional love for one another, the terms of the actual relationship still has conditions. I will still love you even when you mess up, but I wont be in a meaningful relationship with you if you continue to mess up. The love is unconditional, but the relationship has conditions.

Millennials have too many options today to settle for anything less than a mutually beneficial relationship with the brands they choose. Having a quality product or service is expected. That’s simply a basic point of entry into the relationship. It doesn’t end there, that’s where it starts to even be in the consideration set.

Brands that are winning with millennials are the ones that are building meaningful and transformational relationships and not just transactional. They are taking the time to understand what matters to this audience and more importantly why it matters. They realize that no matter how much this generation may love a specific brand, the relationship still has conditions.

The brands that are winning with millennials are the ones that willingly enter into conditional relationships and understand those conditions. And more importantly are pursuing ways to meet those conditions.

Below are three conditions for brands to consider for building meaningful relationships with millennials:

1. You cant force a relationship; both parties have to be willing participants


2. The relationship cannot simply be transactional, it has to be transformational


3. Consider your contribution to the relationship as much as your expectation from it

Your Brand-Consumer Relationships Are Conditional