Kelly takes a wild ride with University of Michigan professor of marketing, Aaron Ahuvia, to discuss his new book “The Things We Love: How Our Passions Connect Us and Make Us Who We Are.”

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What led you to study the love of things?

“I thought, well, I've studied the psychology of love, in order to do this work. I spent years reading about the psychology of love. And it hit me, I can just turn this on its head, and I can say what about when people love brands or people love objects or products or activities and all these different things. So that that's how I got into doing this research, because I already had a big investment in the expertise on the psychology of love and I wanted to apply it in a in a new way.”

You cite some research around our love of dogs and how that love is different if you have a little dog versus a big dog.

“So, I’ve got little dogs. I love our little dogs. The truth is not for everybody out there, but for a lot of people, if you are a fan of big dogs your relationship is kind of modeled on a friendship relationship. You see the dog as a sort of a friend. Whereas people who've got little dogs tend to see the dogs as children and they have a kind of a parent child relationship.”

You also pose the question as to why we have male and female shampoo, but we don’t have male and female laundry detergent.  

“Shampoo that really touches your body directly people see it as connected to their identity. And they want a shampoo that fits with and expresses their identity. And for a lot of people, gender is part of that - they want a shampoo that fits with their gender identity. Whereas laundry detergent that doesn't touch our body in the same direct way we don't see it as being part of our identity and we don't really care if it matches our gender identity.”

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