Marketing is a multidimensional process, which is considered as a fundamental for the economic development of any business. As such, marketing is present from the conceptualization of a business idea to each stage of the business development strategy. One of the most important parts of this development is emotional branding.
Emotional branding is the process of creating, designing and executing a branding strategy, based on specific positive emotions. Usually, when we refer to positive emotions, we think of love, happiness, and joy. But are these the only positive emotions?
Positive emotions, according to psychologists, can range from joy, happiness, kindness to pride, serenity, interest, satisfaction, to awe, relief, inspiration, euphoria, and optimism. These core values can be combined with dozens of other emotions, characteristics, and attributes to create an emotional brand.
Coca-Cola.
This was a test. It’s more likely that just by reading the brand name of “Coca-Cola”, your mind displayed a can of Coca-Cola, or at least you “saw” that classic red color. The emotional branding of Coca-Cola is focused on one emotion: happiness. Every strategy is based on happiness, and the brand aims to express this feeling with every action and move they make.
But why is emotional branding so important? And why is emotional branding the best way to go forward with your start-up, your e-commerce site, or the company you work for?
Pros and Cons of Emotional Branding
As with every marketing decision and strategy, emotional branding has its pros and cons, and we need to calculate every detail before deciding our way forward.
The advantages of emotional branding:
- Emotional branding offers your company what you need to be different and stand out from the rest of your competition.
- You genuinely connect with your audience, creating a common, authentic, and original mutual understanding.
- Knowing that you co-exist on a common basis, you can create better, personalized, and targeted marketing campaigns.
- Your campaigns will be more specific, target-oriented, and have a higher ROI than any other average marketing campaign.
The disadvantages of emotional branding:
- Emotional branding is a complicated, multifaceted process, which can be tricky and challenging for anyone.
- It is hard to determine a positive emotion that you want to include in your branding, and even if you do, this might not be the right one for you.
- Creation of discrepancies between your brand identity and the customers’ needs.
- Knowing that your brand doesn’t offer what they want, customers will be dissatisfied and leave negative reviews.
8 Reasons To Engage In Emotional Branding
1. Conceptualizes Every Strategy
By creating an emotional brand, it will provide a concept for every piece and bit of your marketing projects. Whether you wish to work on the general product design, designing your newsletter templates, or your customer satisfaction strategy, emotional branding can be included in these efforts.
Emotional branding for marketing strategies is the same as adding extra virgin olive oil to salads; it elevates everything and makes your actions appeal to a larger audience.
2. Helps With Usability
A key value of usability and user infrastructure is directness. By having an emotional brand, you know which emotions have to be directed to your audience through their visit to any of your accounts.
You should check the way that your website interacts with your target audience and run a website analysis to analyze the experience. Use common people to see how they interact with your website, how they react, and evaluate their emotions in the end.
3. Works Better With Storytelling
Another important marketing technique is storytelling; it is based on an emotional narrative that connects the story of the brand, product, or service with the audience by connecting experiences and backgrounds.
If storytelling and emotional branding get connected properly, then you will see your key marketing metrics improve and increase your sales. Human beings are natural storytellers and they always love a good story.
4. Perfects Your Product Design
Designing a product is not only about exclusive features, a good ratio of price and quality, and general characteristics. The best way to make the perfect product design is to connect it with emotional branding. But what does that mean exactly?
Let’s take for example, probably the role model of emotional branding, Apple. It has an emotional branding strategy that goes far beyond any other company. Apple has some of the most loyal customers because it provides each individual with a unique connection with the product purchased. How? By allowing you to say “Hey Siri” to your MacBook Air and replying only to you because it recognizes your voice.
5. Differentiates Your Social Media Use
Based on the different social media accounts your company owns, emotional branding gives you the opportunity to emotionally target different audiences on each social medium.
A very good example of that is how the NBA has utilized TikTok to connect with Millenials, an untapped audience, and connect with them.
So, emotional branding allowed the NBA, through emotional branding, to remain loyal to its brand identity and the way it emotionally connects with its fans.
6. Creates A Dialogue Of Experiences
As your audience creates more and more experiences with your product or brand, then people have more things to share with you and their friends.
As friends will be influenced by such experiences, experiment with what your brand offers, and gain similar experiences. Once this is completed, a greater dialogue of people and experiences will be formed with your brand being in the center of that.
Your audience will be your best brand ambassador, as positive peer-review is one of the greatest assets for a company working on its marketing actions.
7. Improves Special Marketing Campaigns
With the rapid increase of e-commerce, digitalization, and e-shops, marketing campaigns are always adapting to new occasions, situations, and events.
Emotional branding of your company will give you everything you wish for when creating, forming, and executing a new marketing campaign.
Either you wish to promote your products or services for the upcoming Christmas period, or you wish to engage in flattening the curve of the coronavirus pandemic, emotional branding will give you the right answer on what to do and how to do it.
8. Gives A Greater Purpose
Companies cannot run on solely targeting profit or just an emotional connection with their audience.
If you run a qualitative research study on social trends, especially for the younger generations, then you will see that having a greater purpose is a must.
What you should do is connect your customer loyalty program by providing a part of your profits to a greater purpose.
For example, if you run a restaurant business and wish to further engage younger audiences, then you can contribute by providing food to homeless shelters. Doing so will make your customers feel that by choosing your restaurant, rather than one of your competitors, they indirectly benefit marginalized social groups.
Final Thoughts About Emotional Branding
Emotional branding is like a labyrinth; the journey is scary, sometimes dark, but once you get to the center, then you will find your uniqueness, your authenticity, and what makes you better than your competitors.
By identifying unique ways of communication with your customers, their needs and expectations, their desires and ways of thinking, then you can provide extra value to your brand and products.
All these will give you the right tools to aim for long-term success, rather than temporarily increasing your sales and conversions.
What are your thoughts? How have you implemented emotional branding?
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