What Consumer Love Is, How to Understand It, and Why It Matters

This summer, I made the questionable choice of giving “workation” another go. So, while re-reading Carver’s "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love"—somewhere between a beach and building a new insights tool—I started thinking about “consumer love.”
How it’s become the be-all, end-all metric of product development. How we, as entrepreneurs, marketers, and innovators, desperarely seek it. But much like in Carver’s novel, when we talk about consumer love, what are we really chasing? And more importantly—how do we ensure it’s genuine?
The Love Trap: Why “Good Enough” Never Is
The “love trap” is as old as business itself. A team pours its heart and soul into a new product. A focus group showers it with praise—sometimes, one glowing session is all it takes. The product hits the market, and... it flops.
What happened?
Early attraction and validation feel good. They’re like a warm hug for your ego. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: they’re the bare minimum. They’re not love. And worse, they’re mostly misleading.
I blame lazy focus groups for this kind of professional heartbreak. They reinforce surface-level attractions and confirm existing biases, rather than challenging them. They seduce teams with the illusion of consumer love, when they’re at their most vulnerable and desperate for it.
Here’s how to avoid this trap:
Actively Look for the Red Flags: Seek out the naysayers. Bring in skeptics, develop negative personas, and design research that actively seeks out critical feedback. Find the experts who have failed at developing something similar before you, and listen to their cautionary tales. The red flags are there, if you want to see them.
Raise the Bar: To truly move the commercial needle, you need creative testing results that blow past the usual benchmarks. A 20% performance boost? That’s not love. That’s not even like. As Jack Welch put it, “If you don’t have a competitive advantage, don’t compete.”
Look for Proof, Not Signs: Signs of consumer interest are often wishful thinking disguised as data. A Consumer Love Proof, rooted in tangible behavior, offers a much more solid foundation for success. (See more on “Love Proofs” below)
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