Using Emotional Branding - Basic Tips For Small Businesses

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Marketing has taken on many forms: social media, print, and email. So what’s next? Emotional branding. This facet of brand and marketing is not new, but it’s a smart way to stand out from the crowd. While many companies are inundating their customers with spam and Facebook ads, emotional marketing lets you show your customer you actually care.

A Gary Larson Classic

To do this, you create a bond with your loyal customers to evoke a personal and emotional reaction. Through personalized marketing, you can connect on a level many companies seem to miss. With customers so closely tied to the success of your brand, it’s important that you are showing your best side to them. While that may currently be the goal of your marketing plan, connecting emotionally is very different.

You and Emotional Branding

Created by Marc Gobé over 15 years ago, emotional marketing focuses on why and how brands and people should connect emotionally. To do this you put the needs of your customer before profit. With customers so heavily involved in their favorite brands, it’s important that you make a human connection. Impersonal connections do not evoke your customer’s emotions; rather they perpetuate your role as a detached corporation – far from something your customer can relate to.

By Roy Lichtenstein

Why It’s Necessary

Creating loyal customers is an integral part of any branding or business plan. If customers are more than just satisfied with a product and feel happy with it, they’re likely purchase it again.

Creating an emotion connection, however, takes that a step further. According to Themarketingsite.com, 80% of purchasing influences are emotional. Whether from you or an influential friend, has more weight than intellectual decision-making.

Callous Cat is doing it wrong

Take a Stab at It

Gmail’s new campaign takes the ordinary and makes it extraordinary; old friends connecting, parents and children staying in touch, viewers feel that. Bing Originals, Bing’s new campaign, is bringing celebrities down to the level of the consumer; winning, falling, healing.

People bond with these brands because they understand what it feels like to succeed, or be held back by unfortunate circumstances.

If this isn’t emotional branding, I don’t know what is

Companies successful with emotional branding include Coke, Apple, Pepsi, and Revlon. Think of how attached you feel to one soda versus the other, one makeup product versus the generic. Some brands have successfully connected with you on an emotional level, though you may not even recognize it.

Here’s how you can do it too.

Emotion: decide what emotion to target with your audience; trust, confidence, familiarity? Make this clear.
Connect: How do you connect yourself, and this emotion, to them? You want them to say, “I only buy ____.” To do this, assess your customers’ needs, wants, life status, etc.
Fluidity: Keep this clear in every facet of your marketing campaign; online, on tv, in your product packaging.

Emotional attachment trumps any other form of connection. Breaking up with someone is a whole lot harder when you’ve emotionally invested in them and vice versa. You want to be that person they just can’t leave. If you can become that person, brand, or company, then you can be sure to have customers going to end with you.