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What's the last thing you'd expect to see at a business event? A live lion, perhaps? A Coca-Cola vending machine torn apart by a machine gun? Or maybe a sexy girl-band strutting its stuff to risqué R&B tunes?

All of these things have featured in the speaking engagements of Kevin Roberts, the marketing guru and worldwide head of Saatchi & Saatchi. The first two are the stuff of legend on the business speaking circuit. The third was the surprise finale when Roberts addressed a 300-strong audience of the London Business Forum.

"I like things that are dangerous," Roberts said early in his presentation. He was standing on stage at Fabric, one of London's top night clubs, surveying the main dance floor where our seats had been arranged. The large room was vaulted with red-brick arches, bathed in magenta light and redolent with incense for the occasion. Situated as it was next to the meat market at Smithfields, it felt as if it could have been an illegal abattoir or Bacchanalian wine cellar in centuries past.

"This is a fantastic venue [because] it feels one of the more dangerous venues I've ever been in," Roberts said. "You can just feel the throb this would have on a Saturday night."

The word "feel" was probably used more than any other over the following hour. Why? Because, according to Roberts and his "Lovemarks" theory, the best marketing campaigns in the world today are those that make an emotional connection with consumers. "The role of great marketing is simply this: to create loyalty beyond reason," he argued. "The only way to get premiums back into brands and marketing [is] to inject them all with love and take them beyond simple product benefit, attribute and functional stuff."

Roberts used a video clip, projected onto large screens behind him, to illustrate this point - it was a sentimental TV commercial for a New Zealand telecoms company that showed two children meeting for the first time under difficult circumstances, and making friends by talking. He would use dozens of similar clips before the event was over (not to mention the live performance mentioned above), which made it both easy and enjoyable to memorise the issues raised.

"It's not enough now to be irreplaceable; what you've got to become is irresistible." This was another of Roberts's early, emphatic statements. "Whatever category you're in, you're surrounded by parity players, own-label players, value players. Dandruff shampoos get rid of dandruff man, there's no longer any news in the claim."

A lovemark brand, by contrast, is one that elicits an emotional response from its customers, as well as providing them with the material benefits they expect. "The Harley Davidson [motorcycle] has nothing to do with motorbikes and everything to do with adventure, freedom," he said by way of example. "Throw the route map into the trash, [be like] Marlon Brando or Hunter S. Thompson. The cheapest Harley is more profitable than the most expensive Suzuki because it is a lovemark."

The power in the consumer goods industries used to be with the brands, then it shifted to the big retailers, he said. "Now we've seen the power shift to you and me, the consumer. We have absolute power, we will consume media, ideas, content, brands, messages, news, whenever we want, however we want. And we will not be dictated to by brands or by retailers... Most of the value propositions in store and on TV are transactional based, and consumers are just not responding to them. They're looking for intimacy, empathy that we really know them as people."

He argued that consumers are powered by emotion, not by their rational selves. "Reason leads to conclusions, emotion leads to action," he said, quoting neurologist Donald Calne. "And if you're in marketing and business the whole point is to drive action. We don't want to drive awareness or generally good feelings or that kind of crap. We want to drive a purchase." To this end, he added, Saatchi & Saatchi was recently commissioned by Toyota to reposition it from the most respected car brand in the world to the most loved.

So how can companies go about turning their brands into lovemarks? Can it ever be through a methodical approach? Or if emotion is so crucial, must it be more intuitive?

Most of the money spent on market research and the testing of marketing strategies is, Roberts acknowledged, completely wasted. "Just show the consumer the ad and say: do you want to see it again?" he suggested. "If she wants to see it again, you're engaging her, you've got a prayer. Obviously mass-marketing is dead, there is no mass-marketing model. Everyone now believes themselves to be a market of one and we've got to connect with him or her on those terms. I do believe all advertising within five years will be interactive."

Similarly, he argued, the term "return on investment" or ROI is "old-school thinking. What you really need to be measuring is 'return on involvement'. How involved are consumers? How engaged are consumers? How do they feel about your brand?"

One of the few bits of conventional marketing practice used by Roberts during his presentation was the good old quadrant diagram - in this case, with love along its x-axis and respect along its y-axis. "We did this survey of American presidents since the war and plotted where they were on this graph," he said. "Who [do you think] was the only US president since the war to be a lovemark?"

Most of the audience got the right answer: Kennedy. "Reagan was to many but not to all," Roberts said. "So where was Bill Clinton? Bottom-right. Low respect, high love, as you could imagine. And where was Hillary Clinton? Top-left, high respect, low love. If you had put the two of them together you'd have had a good president but since they don't speak to each other it's very difficult."

The "high respect, low love" zone is, he explained, where most brands sit, and where "the action has been over the past 30 years". To survive in the future, you need to move to the top-right. In other words, you must become a lovemark.

Although TV will remain the predominant medium for advertising, it will have to work harder to capture and keep the attention of consumers, Roberts said. For example, it must try to evoke smell, touch and taste as well as sight and sound. At Saatchi & Saatchi, the collective noun for this effort is "sisomo", he explained. "In the next 12 months or so you're going to see a creative revolution in terms of content across the screens. Sisomo is where you bring together technology, marketing and creativity."

The most successful brands of the future will be those that are "creative connectors", he continued. In their marketing, they will forge connections between a variety of media to get their message across, through conventional advertising, entertainment crossovers, games, ringtones, in-store TV and so on. At the same time, they will need to connect ideas of their own to create compelling new products and services: "Think about Starbucks," Roberts said. "It's home and work, it's coffee and music, it will be coffee and movies."

Another case study he cited was Toyota, not only for its hybrid range - a creative connection of gas and electricity - but also for the way it has connected numerous basic customer needs to improve new vehicle packages. For example, a new model of its Camry saloon was recently introduced in the US with 74 "meaningful consumer improvements".

"They reduce the price by a $1,000, they increase the dealer margin by $800, they increase their own profit by close to $1,000, they give you a hybrid engine, they give you an extra 20 miles to the gallon," Roberts said. "That's what consumers demand. They want to eat really well, pig out, and stay slim. They want everything... Lovemarks really understand that, they understand complexity."

Saatchi & Saatchi is trying to forge creative connections in youth marketing via a "global urban youth culture unit" known as GUM. "Want your own brand-embedded hip-hop game, band, TV show, film script, nightclub experience?" Roberts asked. "We can do all that." And to prove the point, he introduced "The Honeyshot", an R&B band comprised of four gorgeous young women, who proceeded to dance and sing their way through a couple of tracks on stage.

What they were marketing wasn't clear, but their performance was met with thunderous applause. As Roberts regained the stage, he sheepishly admitted that when he first heard the band sing a capella at a GUM planning meeting, it was only a few moments before "another million dollars bit the dust". And as if to atone for this conspicuous capitalism, he gave an apparently heartfelt answer to the following question: "What is the role of business?"

"I'm very clear on that: the role of business is to make the world a better place for everyone," he said. "And only we can, because we're the only 'ism' that creates jobs, self-esteem, choices and so on. Capitalism. What we need to do of course is move from the current brand of capitalism currently practised around the world, which is very exclusive, and move to an inclusive brand of capitalism that brings in Africa, that brings in Hispanics, that brings in lower income consumers and so on."

Roberts concluded the event with another quote, this time from philosopher Daniel Dennett: "The secret of happiness is to find something bigger than yourself and then devote your life to it."