Taking the Guesswork Out of Emotional Branding
It’s widely accepted that emotions drive purchase decisions, and that forging a deep-seated emotional connection with your customers is the key to creating an enduring and profitable brand.
How do you feel toward the brands you interact with every day?
Nostalgic, the way that McDonald’s fries still remind you of your childhood…
Safe, the way you trust your financial planning firm to secure your legacy…
Cool, the way your nephew feels wearing a new pair of Air Jordans (and not some other shoes)…
When a consumer feels an emotional connection to your brand, they’re not only more likely to make purchases from you; but they also develop a sense of loyalty, trust, and familiarity, potentially leading to a lifetime of brand loyalty.
As this 2015 Harvard Business Review article states, “When companies connect with customers’ emotions, the payoff can be huge.” They then point to a number of examples across various industries to support this point.
We’re not here to tell you any different. Emotions are what make us human, and we’ve seen the proof in our own work with dozens of brands across many diverse industry verticals.
This same article goes on to posit that “building emotional connections is often more guesswork than science,” which we disagree with entirely!
Where Predictive Branding takes a different approach—consumer emotions can be quantified, tested, AND predicted.
This requires a major shift in thinking—where most marketers think of “emotions” and “data” as diametrically opposed, we have developed a framework that integrates these components seamlessly.
Our analytical process weaves together a deep understanding of how emotions influence purchasing decisions, a sophisticated testing and analysis model, and the creativity required to turn all this data into a powerful brand message.
We previously developed a brand strategy for a leading service provider to small businesses. During our work with them, we were able to quantitatively test 95 different emotional, functional, and product benefits to determine which of those factors had the greatest impact on purchase decisions.
The winner—by a landslide—was an emotional benefit that spoke to how the company made their clients feel:
“They're helping me ensure my business feels legitimate and credible.”
In other words, their brand makes customers feel validated, legitimized, and real—like the kind of business owner they truly want to be.
On its own, this single customer benefit represented 30% of the customer purchase motivation and was 2X more motivating than the next most powerful brand benefit.
By the way, this was a B2B brand—where buyers are presumed to be hyper-rational!
We had similar result in a global repositioning project for a fast food leader who wanted to emphasize their healthier menu options. Once again, after testing 120 potential positioning elements, we found the 2nd most important benefit (after price to value) was emotional.
“I feel less stressed because I’ve made a better choice about what I’m eating.”
In both cases, you can see how powerful and motivating emotions can be—each of these sentiments became the backbones of successful repositioning efforts.
Many marketers today treat the emotional side of their brand as instinctual, qualitative, subjective, and somewhat untameable. They know emotions matter but they haven’t been able to clearly identify which emotions resonate with consumers while remaining authentic to their brands.
We’ve been able to take the guesswork out of this process, using our predictive modeling approach to apply analytical rigor to emotional ideas.
Until now, there haven’t been any tools that allow brands to isolate and amplify the emotional drivers for their brand. Observing this gap, we built one.
The Predictive Branding framework starts with a comprehensive list of emotional benefits based on our work with dozens of B2C and B2B brands.
We dig deep on our clients’ businesses and customize these benefits based on the emotional territory they feel their brand plays in—we welcome lots of different hypotheses in this process!
We are then able to quantitatively test and predictively model, testing all of the emotional benefits side-by-side with functional and product benefits, so that we can determine the most effective and important benefits of the brand.
In the end, we’re able to offer marketers assurance that the emotional benefits we identify for them are true to their brand, motivate consumers to act, and fit into a larger brand framework that includes more rational benefits.
To learn more about our predictive models, or inquire about working with us, contact us by clicking here. You can also stay connected by join our mailing list on the link here.