If branding is the heart; emotional connection is the heartbeat

by Lee Garcia of Bravi Brains

Have you ever wondered why we like the things we like? Or why you're drawn towards the same brands and ideas as other people? Studies from the Harvard Business School show that emotionally connected customers are more than twice as valuable as highly satisfied customers. So yes, the customer journey is important, yes your sales funnel is vital, but what are you doing about tapping into your audiences’ feelings?

First of all, consumers are completely unreliable. We know that consumers don't understand why they think the way they think. In fact, we know that decision-making is not driven by thinking at all.

Marketers have always chased the holy grail of consumer thinking, which is driven by feelings or what we simply call emotional connections.

It is those emotional connections that drive more people to pay extra for MALDON salt when they know SAXA will do. At the end of the day, salt is salt.

Emotional connections are why CHANEL can sell a handbag for £3000 while SARA cannot sell the same one for £70. It is obvious to us that a product is made in a factory but the best-kept secret in this new world of marketing is that a brand is created in people's hearts. So if your brand isn't thinking with its heart it’s time to think again.

Think holistically or risk the lot.

The future of your brand is in its heartbeat and thousands of touchpoints reaching your audience. For every action you take, your consumer has a reaction and it is these emotional connections that matter and must be monitored. At every turn.

Gone are the days when a brand relied on its logo, its key messages and its siloes of activity. No matter how many programmes or pillars a company invests in, the name and its credibility can fall apart over a tweet.

How to manage feelings - unveil the unspoken

Harvard Business School researched hundreds of brands in dozens of categories, and the results were not a surprise.

• Move beyond customer satisfaction - although this might upset many readers, satisfaction is now a standard measurement. Connecting beyond just the metric of satisfaction is the new normal.

• Play your part - understand your brand’s role in consumers’ fundamental motivations and how you fulfil them. This is the hard part and requires significant and consistent monitoring and decoding over time.

• Know the unknown - here is where every brand wishes they were and so few are. To be able to monitor, decode, measure and translate consumers’ deep and often unspoken emotional needs is the holy grail of brand communications.

Decoding ‘emotional motivators’

In order to identify where any brand sits on the emotional connection scale, it is imperative that there is a fundamental understanding of the competitive landscape. This ecosystem is where the brand will thrive or die.

For some, this is as simple as the language and content you use to speak to your audience. The vital element that must exist at the heart of any marketing strategy is the why and what of the brand’s appeal and how it aims to connect with any given consumer.

Brave brands are the ones who decode and measure based on perceptions, leading to dozens of “emotional motivators” which ultimately connect with a broader customer base.

A desire to feel a sense of belonging, to succeed in life, or to feel secure. These are just a few examples of human needs that brands should tap into in order to optimise the end-to-end customer experience – every aspect of how customers interact with the company’s brand, products, promotions, and service offerings, on and offline.

What kind of car do you own? What kind of purse do you carry? What is your favourite brand of clothing? And more importantly, why? Could you explain to your friend over a coffee why you buy these products or brands? Probably not. But there is a science behind the unspoken connection.

What metric matters?

Ordinarily, monitoring emotional connections can be complex and the most common and old-fashioned way is to use consumer panels to determine emotional reaction or even use Net Promoter Score (NPS) with the aim of quantifying real feelings towards brands and content.

To really decode consumer emotional connections we must consider how brands fulfil their emotional needs and how this interaction happens unconsciously.

Using behavioural economics studies combined with Carl Jung and Maslow’s Research to Understand the Collective Unconscious Needs, we achieved an original algorithm to quantify and measure consumer-generated data in real-time, giving us what consumers think and feel about your brand as soon as your campaign goes live.

The final part of the puzzle often missing is translating the data back to the strategy. Sponsorships, TV adverts and brand partnerships use their data during the planning process but fail to deliver that all-important ROI because they don’t circle back to evolve and improve their next campaign.

Cases of data-driven strategic campaigns that fail are common and the mistake is clear, brands fail to understand consumers’ emotional needs and how to use them to create content and products that fulfil those deepest desires.

Fundamentally, the industry has an opportunity to change. There is data available to marketers that will allow them to maximize their campaign and deliver an ROI much more efficiently.

Over the last five years, we have devised a science and a set of algorithms that track your audience in order to do just that. We are able to understand how you are emotionally connecting to your audience, translate those “emotional motivators” into actionable insights that help build more meaningful relationships. By applying this process we help you to achieve your objectives: whether it’s repositioning your brand, reinforcing your message or simply bringing your brand story to life in an impactful way.

This means that we are now able to understand how you are emotionally connecting to your audience, translate those “emotional motivators” into actionable insights that help build more meaningful relationships. By applying this process we are able to help you to achieve your objectives: whether it’s repositioning your brand, reinforcing your message or simply bringing your story to life.