Vince Hudson

ABOUT THE BOOK

Apply the proven principles of brand management to finding and keeping love.

One hundred years ago, people quite literally married the girl or boy next door. Proximity, familiarity, and shared community were more influential in courtship than true love and compatibility. But in the digital era, dating has changed dramatically. Apps have created an illusion of abundance and expanded reach, but real connection feels harder to find. We are experiencing relationship disruption on an unprecedented scale: Loneliness is at an all-time high; people are dating less, delaying marriage, and struggling to form meaningful connections; and traditional dating norms have been upended, leaving singles overwhelmed by choices and confused about expectations and evolving gender roles.

Modern dating is a marketplace—one where attraction, perception, and positioning matter just as much as compatibility. Yet, most people approach dating with no real strategy, leading to frustration, mismatches, disappointment, and wasted time. How might things change if you could apply the proven principles of brand management to your love life? Successful brands don’t rely on chance; they analyze and optimize, using strategy, positioning, and loyalty-building techniques to win in competitive markets.

Authored by Vince Hudson, a marketing veteran who led multi-billion-dollar brands at companies like Procter & Gamble and increased performance at Meta (parent company of Facebook and Instagram), and with a foreword by the esteemed psychologist and relationship expert, Dr. Brenda Wade, founder of Love & Relationship Global Training Programs, Date Like a Brand provides a roadmap to navigate this new landscape.

Hudson has spent his career mastering the principles of consumer attraction and retention. Here he applies that specific expertise to the dating world, providing a clear, actionable plan to help you find your best match (or, just as importantly, your perfect match find you.) Just as businesses adjust to changing consumer behavior, daters must rethink their approach to relationships. This book will help you adopt a deliberate approach to finding and keeping love, using proven branding expertise as a guide.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Vince Hudson is a 30+ year veteran in brand management and marketing, with a distinguished career at Procter & Gamble, where he spearheaded the launches of Crest WhiteStrips, Prilosec, and led COVERGIRL to unprecedented success. While working at American Express, Samsung, Diageo, Viacom, and Meta, he mastered the psychology of why people choose, trust, and stay loyal to brands. Recognized as one of Ad Age’s “Top 40 Marketers Under 40,” Hudson has applied his expertise and insights in consumer psychology and strategic marketing to Date Like a Brand, providing a fresh, data-driven perspective on love and relationships. He lives in North Bergen County, New Jersey, with his wife of fifteen years and their three daughters.

TALKING POINTS

• The specific challenges of modern dating
• What most singles get wrong about the process of dating
• Cultural changes that are causing unprecedented “relationship disruption”
• Dating as a marketplace, single daters as brands (the parallels between business and relationships)
• The need for a deliberate plan for finding and keeping love
• How strategy, positioning, and loyalty-building techniques apply to dating
• How to calculate your brand’s 4-dimensional “Dating Value Proposition” (DVP)
• How to prioritize what you want in an ideal mate (“Partner Brand”) beyond “everything”
• The “Dating Chips Game”: A provocative interactive web tool to design your relationship strategy
• The 6Ps of Relationship Success