What would it take for YOU to be one of the Top 100 most Loved Brands in the World?

Anybody that runs a company wants to be believe that consumers LOVE their brand – after all we love our brands, don't we? While that's a great goal, it's a lot harder than it looks to create a strong emotional connection with your customer base.

Apco Worldwide, a public relations firm recently fielded a global survey. Here's the list of the Top 100 Most Loved Brands. According to Apco's press release, here's what it takes to rank as a loved brand:

APCO's proprietary Emotional Linking model served as the basis for evaluating the companies by measuring consumers' emotional attachment to brands along eight dimensions, providing companies with a roadmap to understanding consumer expectations in an actionable way. Technology companies were the largest industry represented in the top 10 with Apple coming in at ninth on the list.

The best brands are those that build a strong, enduring emotional attachment with consumers," said Bryan Dumont, president, APCO Insight. "In addition to acting as a highly predictive tool for consumers' purchase choices, the Emotional Linking model has proven to be an excellent way to help companies retool their campaigns to build stronger emotional attachments between their key audiences and their brands.

The rankings are the result of a decade-long research project including a global survey of more than 600 of the world's largest corporate brands among more than 70,000 individuals in 15 key markets around the world. The Emotional Linking model identified eight emotions that are critical to effective brand communication. These eight critical emotions are: Understanding, Approachability, Relevance, Admiration, Curiosity, Identification, Empowerment and Pride.

This methodology is very interesting and seems to have found a way to quantify emotional connections to brands. So what can real estate brands learn from this research about how to create stronger brand loyalty and connections to their customers?