Selling Is Not a Discount Mechanism. It Is a Meaning System.

Why Most Brands Misunderstand the Nature of Demand and What Lovebrands Actually Do Differently

Across industries, the same pattern repeats: companies believe sales can be engineered through price cuts, flash promotions, and artificially created urgency. The question driving these tactics is always the same: “How do we get more customers, faster?”

The uncomfortable truth: no brand achieves sustainable growth through price manipulation. Discounts shift demand, they do not create it.

This misconception persists because many companies still treat selling as a purely transactional event. Yet decades of research in brand science and behavioral economics consistently show that markets reward meaning, not markdowns.

Scholars such as Byron Sharp, Jenni Romaniuk, Douglas Holt, Jonah Berger, Daniel Kahneman, and Erving Goffman have demonstrated this across contexts. Brands grow not by simply lowering friction at checkout but by elevating perceived relevance, identity, and cultural resonance.

Still, many companies behave as if their only real leverage is price elasticity rather than value creation on the psychological and cultural level. It is a strategic misalignment and an expensive one.

The Structural Error: Brands Act Like Retailers Instead of Cultural Actors

Discounts are a short term tactic that often undermines long term brand equity. Behavioral science is clear: people do not buy products, they buy signals, stories, and identity frameworks.

Several research pillars support this:

• Holt shows that iconic brands succeed because they resolve cultural tensions.
• Berger demonstrates that socially meaningful and provocative content drives significantly higher sharing than purely promotional messaging.
• Romaniuk and Sharp provide empirical evidence that distinctive brand assets dramatically increase mental availability.
• Kahneman and Tversky show that cognitive load shapes decision making more strongly than product features alone.

Discounts appear in none of these core models of long term brand building. They can accelerate transactions, but they simultaneously erode meaning if used as the primary growth tool. Brands win by shaping cultural interpretation, not by shaving off percentages.

Brands That Win Give More Than They Take

Strong brands invert the default logic. Instead of asking, “How can we extract more attention or revenue?” they ask a different question:

What value can we create in the cultural, emotional, or symbolic space before the transaction even happens?

This act of giving is not altruism. It is strategy.

Meaning is an economic engine. Identity is a competitive moat. Emotion is a demand accelerator.

This is why some brands achieve disproportionate market share with comparatively smaller budgets. They are not operating on the level of commodities alone. They are operating on the level of cultural capital.

A concrete case study makes this principle visible in practice.

Fritz-Kola: A Case Study in Cultural Capitalization

Fritz-Kola is more than a beverage brand. It is a meaning architecture that rewrote the competitive rules of its category.

1. The Functional Entry Point: “Vielviel Koffein”

The product positioning is deliberately simple: Fritz-Kola promises “a lot of caffeine.” This creates an immediate, rational entry point in a crowded category. It explains why the product is relevant on a functional level, but not why the brand is culturally resonant.

The real differentiation takes place elsewhere.

2. The Actual USP: Cultural Embedding and Identity Encoding

Fritz-Kola aligned early with the visual and ideological codes of St. Pauli: raw, urban, resistant, independent. This is a textbook example of what cultural branding theory describes as embedding a brand in a specific cultural context.

The brand positioned itself as a counter narrative to the polished corporate aesthetic of global beverage giants. In doing so, it offered a new identity script to its audience:

• David vs. Goliath
• Subculture vs. mainstream
• Unfiltered attitude vs. corporate neutrality

The brand was not selling caffeine anymore. It was selling cultural belonging.

3. Communication as a Performative Act

Fritz-Kola did not merely state a viewpoint, it performed one.

Political commentary, provocative outdoor executions, loud and unapologetic visual language: these elements were not random creative choices. They were identity rituals, consistently repeating who this brand is and who it is not.

Frame theory helps explain this: brands set the interpretative frame for how their messages should be understood. Fritz-Kola did not ask for permission to be political. It simply acted politically and let the audience interpret the product through that lens.

4. The Economic Effect: Meaning Density as a Price Lever

Consumers do not buy Fritz-Kola solely for its functional benefits. Many other beverages could deliver a similar physiological effect.

They buy Fritz-Kola because participating in its story signals something about who they are, what they stand against, and what kind of world they want to live in.

The product is a commodity. The brand is capital.

This distinction explains why some brands become lovebrands while others remain interchangeable.

Why Brands That Deliver Meaning Do Not Need to “Sell”

Strong brands do not push. They pull.

Research across psychology, sociology, and marketing shows four core functions of branding that discounts can never replicate:

1. Cognitive Efficiency

Brands reduce cognitive load. They simplify decision making by offering clear, recognizable choices. Discounts do not simplify choices; they temporarily alter perceived value.

2. Social Signaling

Brands communicate identity and group belonging. They serve as markers of taste, worldview, and status. Promotions do not create status; narratives and symbolism do.

3. Emotional Resonance

Emotion drives decisions more reliably than rational argumentation. Meaningful brands embed themselves in emotional memory. Discounts tend to trigger impulse, not deep attachment.

4. Narrative Coherence

Humans integrate brands into personal stories. A brand that offers a clear, consistent story can occupy a stable place in that narrative. Transactions without meaning cannot achieve this.

A brand rich in meaning no longer has to fight for attention through permanent promotions. It becomes the default choice, not the discounted one.

What This Means for Modern Brand Strategy

Any brand that is serious about growth must move from transactional thinking to meaning based thinking.

A meaning driven brand:

• Communicates consistently across cultural and emotional layers, not just product features.
• Signals identity instead of pushing a long list of attributes.
• Builds distinctive brand assets that strengthen memory structures.
• Expresses a recognizable worldview instead of generic category claims.
• Gives people a narrative they can join instead of an offer that expires on Sunday night.

Discount driven brands optimize for the next sale. Meaning driven brands optimize for the next decade.

Brands That Give Value Become Valuable

Evidence across psychology, sociology, and marketing science points in the same direction: brands that generate cultural, emotional, and symbolic value outperform those that rely primarily on price tactics.

These brands achieve:

• Higher willingness to pay
• Stronger repeat purchase behavior
• More powerful word of mouth
• Greater mental availability at the moment of choice
• Significantly stronger long term brand equity

Brands that merely sell become replaceable. Brands that create meaning become inevitable.

The strategic imperative is clear: stop trying to sell more and start creating more significance. Brands that give meaning become valuable. Brands that only take attention eventually disappear.