What exactly is emotion in branding?
When we’re talking about emotion in branding what we mean is having an emotional connection with your customers. Does this mean declaring undying love for every client and sending out a bumper pack of valentine’s cards in February? Whilst that may be a nice gesture no, there are other emotions apart from just the ideal of romantic love. We consider customers to be emotionally connected to a brand when it aligns with their motivations and helps them fulfill deep conscious and unconscious desires. There’s quite a lot of meaning in that statement so let’s unpack it a bit.
What are emotional motivations?
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is a well known psychological motivational theory that depicts a model of human needs. It is usually laid out as a pyramid where needs lower down in the hierarchy/pyramid need to be satisfied before the individual can satisfy the needs higher up.
As we can see the bottom tier consists of the most basic physiological needs for food, water, shelter and sleep. As you move up the pyramid your needs become less tangible and more intangible emotional needs. For most of us in the western world our basic needs are met, so we are looking to fulfill our more psychological and ultimately self actualising needs.
Think about any luxury products using the framework of the Maslow hierarchy of needs and you start to see why these products are desirable. The Ferrari or Porsche becomes about showing prestige; buying a luxury brand watch becomes a status symbol.
Let’s say you make ice cream. You could argue that your product fills one of our basic needs for food. Would you have much success selling your ice cream purely based on the fact that it satiates hunger? Not really no. Why? Because there are many other foods that are more nutritious and filling if all you’re looking to do is satisfy the basic need of hunger. So lets move up the hierarchy a little. Maybe your ice cream is perfect for sharing with family and friends. Maybe you’re creating luxury ice cream desserts that are ideal to take to a dinner party. So now you’re starting to move into the need for love and belonging or the need for esteem and prestige. Build your brand strategy around tapping into these psychological emotional needs and you’re much more likely to have success.
What are deep conscious and unconscious desires?
Conscious desires don’t need too much of an explanation. It’s something that you want and you know why you want it. You desire good insurance cover because you’re looking to reduce risk and maintain a future level of financial security.
Unconscious desires get a bit more tricky – this is when you want something but you don’t entirely know why you want it. Or… you think you know why you want it but there are underlying motivations and desires that you’re not even consciously aware of having. Hmmm??
To try and explain this a bit better lets sidetrack a little and look at sports brands and more specifically sports teams as brands. Think of the passion that sports fans have for their team, it is arguably the strongest emotional connection any brand can have. But ask a sports fan why they are so invested in that team and they may struggle to get to the root of what it is that inspires such strong emotions in them. Some may describe the feeling of belonging to a group and the many friendships made along the way. They may tell you about being brought up supporting a team from childhood so they have great feelings of nostalgia which takes them back to an age when they felt safe and looked after.
But it can go even further than this and be a contributing factor to a person’s own self esteem. You become so involved in your team (ie brand) that it becomes part of you and it’s almost a mirror of your own self esteem. If you’re a sports fan you’ll know there is nothing quite like that feeling of your team winning. You didn’t do anything to contribute to the success but it feels like you personally won the Championship. In that moment you feel like you have realised your potential. Realising your potential would be the self actualisation tier of Maslow’s pyramid.¹
This is what we mean by unconscious desires. You didn’t deliberately start out supporting your team because you wanted to be self actualised on the Maslow hierarchy of needs. But an unconscious motivation within you has been realised and strengthened the emotional connection between you and that brand.
But why is emotion important in branding?
If we continue with the sports analogy it’s not difficult to see why you want customers that are emotionally connected to your brand. They will keep coming back to you, they will only work with you, they will recommend you to others and the bottom line – they will spend more money with you.
A study has even shown that it’s worth more to a company to turn their already “highly satisfied” customers into “fully connected” customers than to turn “dissatisfied” customers into “highly satisfied”. The emotionally connected customers are on average 52% more valuable than those who are just highly satisfied. But the highly satisfied are only 18% more valuable than the dissatisfied customers.
In brief – you create a loyalty loop that keeps your customers coming back for more. And most of you will know that in business it’s a lot more profitable to keep the same customers than to be constantly looking for new ones.
So how do I get emotion into my branding strategy?
Start by looking at the hierarchy of needs and think about what makes your product or service special. Which emotional need or motivation are you fulfilling for your clients? The higher up the hierarchy you can go the more chance you have of a strong emotional connection between you and your customers.
At first glance it might not always be obvious, you may think your product is too ordinary or mundane to be fulfilling any psychological human needs but you’d be surprised. Let’s say you make shelving units. Pretty run of the mill stuff but your shelving units can help people get control over their own environment. Feeling like you’re in control of a situation is a deep human need and lack of control can contribute to real feelings of anxiety and lack of confidence. So now when you’re thinking about how to sell your shelving units you don’t so much focus on the technical specifications but on the various ways that they help people to sort out and take control of their homes or offices.
By doing this you are bringing emotion into your brand strategy and encouraging a deeper connection that will ultimately result in higher profits for your business.
¹ For more discussion on sports and branding listen to our Fresh Business Thinking / Life in the Brand Lane podcast where Ron and Fin chat with Archie Paton
Emotion is the third of our 7 Es of Brand proprietary framework that we use to help you create your own winning brand strategy.
Pinpointing the exact emotional and motivational needs that your customers have isn’t always easy so if you would like some help with your brand strategy check out our services page to see what we can do with you.
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