Why Your Product Alone Won’t Build a Loyal Customer Base (And What Will).

It’s easy to fall in love with a product. I’ve been there with my own business, Kilter - obsessing over material, how we’re shooting it and packaging it.

Product is how your brand comes to life and how the consumer experiences your vision.

But what many businesses are guilty, regardless of size, of is neglecting is how the brand lives beyond the product.

With my experience in Marketing and establishing my own brand, I’ve learned something that’s shaped how I approach marketing strategy for every business I work with:

If you don’t build brand love at a foundational level, product love will only ever be half as effective.

I’m at Shoptalk Europe, and the lessons learned from Weleda’s CEO Tina Müller have stayed with me. When she took over the 100 year old brand, she didn’t just focus on innovation or cost-saving or performance marketing. She started with the brand.

Weleda has always made exceptional products. But Müller understood that wasn’t enough. She reframed the business under Swiss Natural Science, a bold repositioning that honoured its heritage while making it relevant for today’s conscious consumer. And then she laid out four strategic pillars with brand at the core.

What followed was a masterclass in modern brand building:

• Digital-first talent hired in-house, not outsourced

• A shift in audience strategy to attract younger consumers through TikTok, social-first content, and owned channels

• User-generated content amplified with paid after it had proven cultural resonance

• Relentless focus on premiumisation, never touching product quality for the sake of margin

As a result, they even had Bella Hadid, Drew Barrymore and Victoria Beckham posting about their products and not because of a PR budget, but because the brand meant something.

That’s the difference between a good product and a loved brand.

Weleda’s board made a powerful choice: cost of goods was forbidden from being reduced. (That’s how sacred product quality is. They’d rather be out of stock than compromise ingredient quality to buy in their healing plants).

Because brand trust, once broken, can’t be rebuilt with a discount. And true brand love doesn’t scale from product alone. It comes from purpose, clarity, and consistency.

In our rush to launch, scale, and sell, it’s tempting to treat brand as the fluff (the bit we’ll “get to later.”)

But the brands that win - the ones that feel timeless and magnetic, even in a noisy market - they do the deep brand work first. They understand that a great product is only as strong as the story, trust, and meaning wrapped around it.

I think that’s the opportunity for modern founders and marketers.

Don’t just build a product people want. Build a brand they want to be part of.

And to do that, you need to build a brand first.