When was the last time you felt inspired by your electric utility company? Chances are good that you don’t think much about electricity at all unless your power goes out. If you’re like a lot of people I know, you feel a stronger attachment to your morning latte than you do to the electricity that powers your home.

When I helped launch an alternative power company called Green Mountain Energy, I had to confront that unhappy fact. As the executive vice president, chief marketing officer, and founder of Green Mountain, I had to make people feel passionate about what may be the most boring product on the face of the Earth. I felt confident that I could get lots of people to like the idea of "green" energy—produced from wind, sun, and water—but, unless people were passionate, they wouldn’t focus on the issue long enough to go to the trouble of switching power companies.

So, I knew I had to do a lot more than just tout the environmental benefits of green electricity. I had to tug at people’s emotions, making them feel guilty every time they flicked on a light switch. And I did, with considerable success. While many competitors dwarf Green Mountain in size, in the states that have deregulated electricity, almost half of the people who have switched carriers switched to Green Mountain.

I used three principles that seem to be applicable to the vast group of companies that—while perhaps blessed with interesting products—still struggle to find loyal customers in a world filled with more and more noise more and more choices. I’m not suggesting you try to generate "stickiness," to pick a buzzword. I’m talking about ways to form lasting emotional bonds with your customers. I call this "storm-proof" branding.

Fortunately, whether you sell kilowatt hours or fast cars, there are ways to build passion about your brand. Here is how I’d start:

DETERMINE WHO YOUR BEST CUSTOMERS AND PROSPECTS ARE. This isn’t rocket science. In the case of Green Mountain, all it took was a little common sense and a bit of research to find that there was a cohesive group of "granola" types (like me) who are passionate about the environment. Still, many companies make the mistake of trying to be too many things to too many people. You can’t make people passionate if you dilute your message or your audience.

FIGURE OUR WHAT YOUR CUSTOMERS ARE BUYING. Chances are, it’s different than what you think you’re selling.

This may be the hardest of the three principles to follow. It takes considerable research to get inside customers’ heads, and those doing the research are often blinded by the fact that they have so much invested in their products. But, if companies don’t figure out what customers care about, they’ll waste the time and money they spend on advertising—and just about everything else.

A detergent company may think it’s selling cleaner clothes, even though customers are buying an emotion—the feeling that they’re taking good care of their families. Deodorant companies may be tempted to think they’re selling a chemical, even though consumers are buying confidence. Financial-services companies may focus on how their IRA or their service differs from competitors’, when their clients are buying the security of knowing that they will have money down the road.

Most of the time, you’ll find that you’re selling an emotion, not a product—and companies with successful brands understand that. Volvo knows that it sells safety. Mercedes sells prestige. Starbucks sells a sensory experience—the smell of the coffee, the music, the decor, even the energy of the baristas serving you. Buying a Starbucks coffee is an event meant to transport you to an Italian cafe, even if you can’t bring yourself to adopt the lingo and use the word "grande" when you order a large coffee. You don’t have to spend much time at Starbucks before you find that other java joints don’t measure up.

The idea of selling an emotion often applies even in the business-to-business world, where commerce is supposed to be more rational. For decades, IBM dominated the high-tech world because it sold job security. Its customers, corporate CIOs, knew that they were most likely to be fired if a computer system blew up on them. So IBM made sure both that its systems were ultrareliable and that, to use an IBM expression, the company "filled the skies with blue suits" to swarm over any problem and solve it quickly.

If you aren’t just selling an emotion but are also selling a mission—one you can express in a single sentence—that’s all the more powerful. Everyone wants to matter.

At Green Mountain, we decided we weren’t selling power. We were selling a reduction in eco-guilt. We were giving customers peace of mind. They knew that they were changing the way electricity is made, every time they paid their electric bills. We picked something meaningful and showed that we stood for an idea that customers could be passionate about.

CREATE WAYS TO BOND WITH YOUR CUSTOMERS. This means building associations in your customers’ heads that bring your brand to life. You have to do this both where your customers work and play and make your brand the most vibrant, compelling thing they have ever seen.

This is hard, too, because, to do it right, you have to let your hair down and be wildly creative.

When we tried this approach at Green Mountain, we decided to launch the brand with "Know Your Power Festivals," which evolved into rock concerts for green energy and sometimes drew more than 50,000 people. The concerts were headlined by James Taylor, Kenny Loggins, and Shawn Colvin. Taylor, who had never endorsed a product from the stage in his life, and Loggins exhorted people to switch to Green Mountain. More than 5,000 people stood up and switched on the spot at one event.

These events allowed us to bring the brand to life in ways not possible with traditional marketing spending. In the process, we learned that the emotional power of music is huge.

We also gave our loyalty program a compelling twist. Green Mountain customers earn "eco-credits," not for using more of our product, but for using less. It was like frequent-flier miles in reverse. As customers cut their use of electricity, they could redeem credits for a variety of eco-products, even including solar panels, which could let our customers eventually use none of our product.

The key to the success of these tactics was the creation of sensory experiences that let our customers bond emotionally with our brand and its dream even though the product was blatantly intangible.

This notion—creating emotional links with a person’s true passion for your brand—is one of the most powerful, yet least used, marketing weapons available.

Hartley is chief executive of Green Planet Partners, a Vermont-based consulting firm that focuses on branding and strategic marketing. He can be reached at khlmj@aol.com.