“We human beings are biologically loving beings as a feature of our evolutionary history. This means two things: the first is that love has been the central emotion preserved in the evolutionary history that gave rise to us since some five to six million years ago; the second is that we become ill when we are deprived of love as the fundamental emotion in which our relational existence with others and with ourselves takes place. As such, the biology of love is central to the preservation of our human existence and identity.” Maturana, Humberto. 1999. Transformation in Coexistence. Ediciones Dolmen. Santiago de Chile. P. 46.
Maturana is the first scientist who, from his perspective as a biologist, explains love and its implications in human beings. He proposes it as a biological relational phenomenon, consisting of the behaviors or the kind of behaviors through which the other emerges as a legitimate other in the proximity of coexistence. This, understanding that the legitimacy of the other is constituted in behaviors or operations that respect and accept his existence as it is, without effort and as a phenomenon of the mere coexistence. It is essentially the acceptance that others have as much right to exist as we do, and that they do not need to justify their presence in our life, it is to accept them as they are, because they exist and deserve to be happy in their “ink”.
What is interesting is that Maturana, as does Lovemark, also talks about emotions and how these are what really define our relationships, which in turn together with language constitute the raw material from which we create our reality. Language and emotions merge in what we call conversations, which constitute culture and with which we create our own reality.
What we learn rationally, says Maturana, we use according to our way of living: “But the way of living that one lives is determined by emotionality, by the emotional psychic space that one learned to live as a child” (p. 54 of the same book).
Understanding love as an element of our essential human nature implies a commitment. But to involve it in business is an even stronger commitment. It requires that we courageously assume that we do not work for consumers, but for people. That it is not about transactions, but relationships. That we must also love through our brands, giving the best of ourselves, with the commitment to awaken the senses of those who place their trust in us, with the concern to be an integral, full experience. But also a commitment to achieve it by loving the environment, taking care of the earth and contributing to make it a better place for us, our children, their children and their children’s children to live in.
Lovemark is therefore more than a philosophy of communication, it is the daughter of this whole movement of awareness that surrounds our planet; it is a commitment that those of us who believe in their proposal and those who believe in us as their partners to take their brands in this direction embark on. Moving away from the superficial and utilitarian discourse, to immerse ourselves in a real transformation that changes the way in which human beings produce goods, services and messages.
NOTE: Who is Humberto Maturana and why do I give him so much importance?
Maturana studied Medicine at the University of Chile. In 1954 he moved to University College London to study anatomy and neurophysiology, thanks to a scholarship from the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1958 he received his PhD in Biology from Harvard University.
Subsequently, he recorded for the first time the activity of a directional cell of a sensory organ, together with scientist Jerome Lettvin of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a result of this research, they were nominated for the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology.
Together with Francisco Varela, he developed the notion of autopoiesis in 1970, one of the fundamental concepts of Systems Theory, which would reach an extensive application through the works of Niklas Luhmann. He is considered one of the founders of the doctrine of radical constructivism, an epistemological theory that considers neuronal activity as a self-regulating system and rejects the traditional theory of objective truth as a form of knowledge, proposing “objectivity in brackets” as a more specific way of explaining the learning of living beings.