Intro

Love Is sells gum but it showed us an ordinary moment can be extraordinary. The product is a medium quality gum wrapped in a rectangular paper. The wrapper is a comic and an one linear:

Sharing a pizza in front of the TV

Someone to scratch an itch you cannot reach.

Someone to just do nothing with.

Unwrap it, read it, pass it to your sister. Those where the ultimate collectibles. It was a ritual. The randomness pulled you in. You never knew what you’d see, but somehow, you always felt connected. You were collecting the mundane things that formed the fabric of your happy life. Gum is forgettable, but they make it emotionally indispensable.

Philosophy and Gum

Love Is turned a commodity into something unforgettable. They might not have even realised how social constructs and collective imagination contributed to their success.

Take an idea, give it a name, spread it, and suddenly it exists not as reality, but as something real enough to shape how people live. This is the essence of collective imagination.

Some of these concepts stick around for eternity like money. Some fade in a span of several years, like a generational joke. But they have one thing in common. They exist in the minds of people, at a specific time. They are not reality, nor are they fiction. They exist somewhere in between that we call them intersubjective reality. This separates us from other species.

We created gods to dominate the world, money to trade, and love Is to sell gum at first, but it turned out to be a social reality. The product itself was an actual reality, a tangible material. However we buy Love Is to invoke something, the emotions.

Emotions are social realities, one lines from Love Is talk about things we all feel, but don't talk about them:

The first kiss, is it different than the second? The eleventh ? Of course not, practically, but we assign a weight to it. Do you remember yours?

Sharing a pizza in front of the TV, nothing special about eating food, and watching TV, but why sharing makes it special ?

Someone to just do nothing with, we waste hours, days even years of our lives, but why doing it with someone else is meaningful to us ?

What we know is, we develop emotional concepts in our life span, the one-liners from Love Is make us simulate those emotions, and oddly enough, that act of simulation in our brain, regulates how our body feels.

Love Is didn’t talk about extraordinary moments few had experienced. It captured the small universal ones like watching TV, the first kiss, having a baby. Simple things. Things we all do, but never stopped to label as love.

Their success was not to squeeze profit margins out of each unit, but to point people to ordinary things, and hand them a rosy tinted glass to see, what they have is extraordinary. What they have is universal.

You, Others and George Orwell

Love Is was a huge success in the Soviet Union, Iran, and Turkey. I have even seen nostalgic posts in Dutch, likely from the Netherlands or Belgium. Collectibles from 1990s are being sold on eBay and second-hand markets.

Those nations spend billions on propaganda, even architecture to make people think the same, unite against the enemy. However a product did the trick more successfully. Find something everyone agrees on. If it was that easy.

You wouldn’t meet a stranger’s eyes in front of a propaganda poster. But over a piece of gum? Suddenly, you were talking. Suddenly, you were real.

You are in love. I see how tiny rituals build lifelong loyalty.

Brand strategists call it differentiation. But saying the word doesn’t make it happen. Love Is… is one of the most human-centered designs ever created.

Tiny rituals beat empires. They used two concepts to create something unforgettable:

1. Randomness – The thrill of the unknown, the anticipation of discovery.

2. Universal feelings – The warmth of recognition, the comfort of familiarity.

It’s a contradiction, and contradiction is what moves us. Too much randomness? Blind dates. Too much familiarity? Boy next door. Love Is… balanced both, creating a literal emotional rollercoaster.

How to Design for Emotional Engagement

Eating in the dark . You don’t know what you’ll get, but you recognize the flavours.

Shuffle mode on playlists . You surrender control, but land on something familiar.

Cracking open an egg and getting a double yolk. A tiny surprise that feels like luck is on your side

Two concepts. Now design for delight.

Conclusion

Empires, They made concrete to last.

Love Is… created softness.

And it lasted longer.

Love Is packaged the ultimate intangible, emotion, into something you could hold in your hands. It turned ordinary moments into something memorable. The next time you share a pizza in front of the TV, it It’ll be love.