Vom Stream ins Regal: Wie das ikonische Quadrat die Musik wieder anfassbar macht

23.04.2026

There is a tactile longing that long had no place in the purely digital music world: browsing through crates of records, the weight of a CD in your hand, flipping through a cover booklet. That Apple Music, together with Ritter Sport, is now turning square bars into small milestones of music history is more than a collaboration – it is a deliberate counterpoint to the fleetingness of the digital and an expression of genuine customer understanding in consumers’ everyday lives.

Ritter Sport deliberately uses the emotionality of music as part of a smart brand strategy to counter interchangeability in the supermarket. At the same time, Apple makes the leap back into physical tangibility. This combination shows how modern customer understanding works in practice: it is no longer just about products but about meaning. This is exactly where the foundation emerges for an emotional customer experience that stays in memory.

This principle is taken up by keynote speaker and Love Brand expert Thomas Daamen in his talk “Together – From Zero to Love Brand.” In his talk he shows how a well-thought-out brand strategy and deep customer understanding must work together to create a strong emotional customer experience. For him, the collaboration is a prime example of how brand strategy works today – namely when it recognizes longings and translates them into real experiences.

At the center stands the emotional customer experience as the decisive lever on the way to a Love Brand. In a world of growing arbitrariness, it is precisely this emotional customer experience that decides whether brands remain interchangeable or build a real connection. A consistent brand strategy based on genuine customer understanding is the prerequisite for this.

The collaboration makes this tangible: when reaching for the shelf evokes memories of browsing in record stores and the enjoyment merges with a personal soundtrack, an emotional customer experience emerges that is hard to copy rationally. It is exactly such moments that turn brands into Love Brands.

“Today brands have to create small, happiness-inducing anchors in everyday life to stay in people’s relevant set for the long term,” says Daamen. “Successful brand strategy therefore always means deliberately designing the emotional customer experience – based on deep customer understanding and with the clear goal of becoming a Love Brand.”

Photo credit: Pauline W.
This article also appeared on openPR .

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About Thomas Daamen

Thomas Daamen is a keynote speaker from Munich and a Marketing Director with more than 20 years of experience in marketing and sales, including several years in a leading role for Aperol. He speaks at annual kickoffs, sales conferences, leadership events and customer events about how to understand customers, decide boldly and win teams over for a brand – told through Love Brands.

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