Speaking your heart out or wearing your heart on your sleeve may not be the coolest kid on the block when you think of brand building. However, emotions play a strategically irreplaceable role in developing a brand organically and creating a lasting relationship with the customer. In the digital age, where the consumers have easy access to a plethora of information and a constantly diminishing attention span, cutting through the brouhaha is more critical than ever. This is where developing an emotional connect with customers can help a brand stand head and shoulders from the rest as our brains are programmed to connect with the most relatable and compelling stories.
How emotions help a brand evolve?
Once upon a time… remember when Coca Cola revamped its brand communication in an endeavour to touch the hearts of millions and launched the ‘Taste the Feeling’ campaign? Or skim through any automobile company branding and unearth the emphasis on comfort and happiness over and above horsepower? These are a few examples of emotional branding strategies adopted by brands. Humans are emotional beings. There is sufficient research done to confidently deduce that when consumers purchase a brand, they use their emotional intelligence rather than rational evaluation of the facts and figures of the brand. Therefore, connecting emotionally with consumers is the best way to ease the consumer decision making process from need recognition to purchase decision and eventually to a favourable post purchase behavior . As a consequence, a brand with more emotional intelligence is bound to boost engagement and ROI. Emotions mark the beginning and the end of a relationship between the customers and a brand. It is the factor that determines brand loyalty. Emotional branding can also help a business to increase awareness about the brand and enhance its performance. In short, marketing efforts that appeal to the raw emotions of humans and can develop a connect with them on a subliminal level are guaranteed to pay off.
What do emotions mean for a brand in the era of digital transformation?
The digital age has made it easier for brands to drive customers consumption behaviour on a deeper personal level. You have to be where your customers are with bells and whistles at their various emotional touchpoints. When you design a brand campaign to elicit a million-dollar smile from the customers, chances of resonating with the customer are much higher. This is now much easier with social media and mobile phones that allow the brands to connect with consumers on a constant basis, in realtime and show them the real flesh and bones behind the brand, fostering an environment where emotional connections can flourish. Digitisation has made it easy for brands to humanize and personalize conversations and deliver a tailor-made message to the audience hitting all the right notes emotionally. At the same time, digital platforms have created a stage where consumers can interact with the brand directly.
Modern marketing and emotional branding?
Modern marketers have an arsenal of digital tools at their disposal to focus on the key emotions of the target audience and send a strong message about the brand. These tools also allow a brand to use emotive technology – a marriage between emotions and digital technology- to humanise marketing efforts. This emotion recognition technology is burgeoning at a rapid pace and is expected reach a whopping worth of $65 billion by the year 2023. Thanks to this technology brands and businesses will now have the opportunity to gather unprecedented emotional insights through this technology and use it to influence the decision-making of their customers on an emotional level, thereby bringing brands and consumers closer than ever before.
P.S – The article was originally published by me on ET brand Equity