It stands to reason that marketing is the heart of any form of business. A business that creates a product cannot exist without a good deal of thought that is given to projecting certain concepts. In general, those concepts revolve around creating a desire for that product. While a case can be made for demonstrating that a product will serve a certain function – there is far more complexity involve when it comes to dealing with the concept of competitors. The primary key to this type of effective business strategy is known as emotional branding.
The concept of emotional branding has to do with the development of a brand that, on some level, elicits an emotional reaction. Of course, in advertising, we’re referring to positive emotions. When you ask someone from the general public to name positive emotions, they will usually name; love, joy and being happy. However, there’s a lot more to accessing positive emotions than reaching for these basic feelings.
This is where psychology comes into play. With the aid of psychology, we can also take into consideration:
– Relief
– Satisfaction
– Pride
– Serenity
– Optimism
– Euphoria
– Other related emotions
When combined with the basic emotions of love, joy and happiness, the additional nuances created by these other emotional states can be molded into an emotional brand. The amount of consideration and strategy that has been involved in creating emotional brands is staggering. This becomes apparent when you see a product’s logo and instantly form a positive image in your mind. This situation occurs more often than what most people realize.
When it comes to a business start-up – or even a re-branding effort, emotional branding will play an ever-increasing role in business. Here are some reasons why.
1. Emotional branding pervades every business strategy
It doesn’t matter if you are engaged in designing your actual product, customer responses or advertising copy, emotional branding can play a part in it.
When it comes to marketing, emotional branding adds a distinctive “flavor” to your efforts. Through the efforts, you are, in turn, reaching a wider audience.
2. Emotional branding influences user experience
Your emotional brand will play a key role in the actual experience that your users encounter when they view your advertising. You can also obtain valuable information through website analysis that will tell you how visitors are reacting to your brand.
3. It allows your company to use the power of storytelling
Telling a story is an exceptionally powerful tool when it comes to marketing. This will give you the opportunity to elicit an emotional response from your audience that you can connect to your brand. This is where your audience can be made to identify with a story’s protagonist.
You can gauge the results of your emotional branding efforts with your storytelling by seeing a relatively quick improvement in your marketing results. This relates to storytelling and the natural human attraction to this form of communication.
4. Creates an evolution in product design
Currently, we have the technology for voice activation. Here, we can see examples of personalization in which a product (such as Apple’s Siri) can respond directly to its user. It’s been predicted that, in the future, more and more products will be directly connected to their individual users and will even respond to the user’s name.
5. Different types of social media can be targeted individually
This will allow companies to build a loyal fan base composed of different target audiences. For example, a company might have an emotional connection to Millennials on Twitter. While, on Facebook, a completely different target metric might be addressed.
6. Emotional branding will allow your audiences to relate your product to their experiences
As these experiences proliferate, they will be shared with relatives and friends. At that point, these experiences will be shared with you, as well. This will created an “emotional experience database” that can be used to help your advertising evolve.
Eventually, your brand will have a virtual life of its own – complete with a wealth of experiences that can be accessed by your users. As such, your brand will be seen as a “friend”, since more and more people will be able to find something that they can relate to.
7. You can adapt your various marketing campaigns far more easily
You may be addressing concerns related to the coronavirus pandemic or reaching out to those who wish to feel nostalgic at holiday time. Once your emotional branding has evolved to a certain point, you will have an entire catalog of branded responses that will fit every occasion.
One additional thought about Emotional Branding
It’s important to understand that emotional branding is a very complex endeavor. Consider companies like Coca-Cola and Microsoft. The time, manpower, money and effort spent on their emotional branding is huge.
However, it doesn’t take their level of resources to begin your own emotional branding efforts. In addition, experts predict that emotional branding will eventually become second nature to marketing professionals. This has to do with the massive amount of input that occurs in social media, from those who will interact with your product and your company.