The reality is a good brands tells customers what they want. But how do you know if your brand is compelling enough?
There is strong evidence to show that companies who invest in their brand are more likely to deliver long term sustainable growth. Strong brand equity in the form of mental availability builds long term memory structures and also improves the effectiveness of short-term performance marketing.
But then there is the issue of consumers’ relationships with brands. Many brands rush to build retention and loyalty BUT do customers really care about brands? Do they really want a “relationship” with a brand?
Brand is the heart of any business. It's the ultimate differentiator for success. But how do you know if your brand is emotionally connecting to your customers? Unless you have very obsessive brand enthusiasts covered head to toe in your products, you don’t.
Building brand loyalty goes deeper than just extrinsic rewards. There are the occasional obsessive brand enthusiasts who are a tiny minority and are generally economically unimportant. They typically just want brands to operate in the background, offering up something worthwhile when the time is right. We need to know if bombardment across digital channels and incessant web tracking builds or hinders the brand relationship.
A customer chooses a particular brand so they don’t have to think about it! They don't have to spend endless hours trying to find the right brand, at the right price and in the right place. It’s a heuristic - a mental shortcut. It’s less hassle. The human condition is all about saving time, money and effort. When people want something, they have to have it with little or no effort at the snap of a finger.
A consumer might say they choose brand A over brand B because they perceive it to be “better”. But what is better? Unconsciously, customers are buying into a brand because the odds of it being “bad” are lower than they might be with another brand. They feel safer, more secure and more willing to spend their hard-earned cash on your business.
Once your brand is considered by people, purchase decisions are about goal motivation - moving from current state to desired state. This mix of emotions and motivations is key to understanding how to effectively sell to your customers.
Building a brand is difficult and expensive. Style, personality, and assets are key signals which drive association and attribution. So how do you get it right the first time? What’s the key to brand engagement?
Emotion.
Emotion matters more than messaging in branding
Emotion isn’t easy to build but it's vital to keep your brand alive. Remember those memory structures!
Brand equity is heavily driven by emotional connections. Trust is the key: a “brand” is inherently less risky to a customer if they have built trust.
Customers invest in a recognisable brand. They get an unconscious signal that the business is here for the longer term and is unlikely to rip you off. Why wouldn’t a brand rip their customers off? Because their reputation relies on it. They have too much to lose.
Trust is invoked through emotional traction. What your customers feel. And how does this translate into what they think of your brand? Do customers feel passionate about it? Why? Does your bright red logo make them feel too excited or anxious?
Two things actually matter: the brand promise and brand performance. What a brand says and what it does. The brand is the experience and the experience is the brand. Delivering on the brand promise is best measured by customer experience (CX). When the CX is poor, the brand promise has failed and you are consistently failing to deliver on key touchpoints of the customer journey. When the brand promise doesn’t align with brand performance, trust is lost, and potentially so is the customer.
Conclusion:
Your brand MUST engage emotionally to have real value. Top of funnel brand building is the foundation for deep engagement throughout customer journeys and on-going emotional acknowledgment leverages the brand through content and digital experiences. But how do you know if yours does? How can you measure it?
Pomegranate has pioneered a new Emotional ignition testing framework, which allows brands to evaluate their customers’ true feelings and perceptions about the brand. This is about applying far deeper validation than NPS and CSAT, this is about getting closer to understanding your customers’ motivations, behaviours and feelings. Our Brand Diagnostics provides analysis of your brand, from overall brand health, equity, packaging, awareness, voice and elasticity.
How do we do this?
By combining our testing methodology with our range of physiological and neuroscience technologies, we can see your customers’ true feelings. Using measures such as EEG, heart rate variability, galvanic skin response and eye tracking, we gain a reliable set of qualitative insights into your brand meaning and associations. From this we can create powerful messaging platforms to emotionally resonate with your target audience.
Every brand knows what they are doing and how they are doing it, but many struggle with the “why”. Why are you creating this product or service? Why do your customers need it? And why do your customers' feel the way they do towards your brand? Let Ei tell you why.
Book a free 1-1 consultation where we can tell you more about brand diagnostics and how Emotional Ignition can help your brand.
