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Tag: Feelings

Could Your Brand Ever Command as Much Loyalty as a Sports Team?

Posted on by Dann Wilkens

Sports Fan Loyalty

Brand Loyalty – a strong feeling of support or allegiance.

At least once a year, my good friend wears the 40 year-old T-shirt of his favorite sports team. It’s too small. It’s faded and threadbare in places. It’s garish color looks terrible on him. It has a hole in the shoulder. But he loves it. It represents something that matters to him. His team.

40 years ago they won an NBA championship. Who knew at the time that it would take 40 years to get another chance? Over the decades, even though the team had highs and low, he still held out the hope that they could be great again. And he is so proud of his team right now.

The amazing thing is how attached we become to our teams. How does this happen? How is it that we become a dyed-in-the-wool Badger, or an Old Blue, or a fan for life?

Wouldn’t it be great if your brand could earn such unswerving loyalty?

To find out, let’s break down how it happens with sports teams.

Geography – When you live in a town, it’s hard to escape noticing the local team. Brands that have a consistent presence over time get noticed. And when a rival team invades your town, when it’s us against them, you automatically line up on the side of the locals, even if you’re just a casual, fair-weather fan.

Parents – You grew up listening to games on the radio with your dad. You grew up watching games on TV with your mom. Their deep feelings for the team became your deep feelings. Your brand loyalties were embedded early on through osmosis by the people you respect the most.

Friends – It’s contagious. If your friends are huge fans, it’s hard not to get caught up in their excitement. The example of their engagement, commitment and strong emotions rubs off on you. After all, it feels good to be part of the team, especially if it’s with your friends.

The Monday morning coffee break – “Hey, that was some game on Saturday, right?” When people talk about the team on Monday morning, you want to join in. You want to have a point of view. So you get pulled into the conversation, and into fan-hood, without really trying.

Creating Meaningful Connections

So what can a brand that doesn’t hit home runs or shoot three-pointers do to inspire a loyal following? It’s not so different from sports. It’s really simple. It is all about creating meaningful brand connections, as often as possible, to inspire people to go out of their way to support the brand.

Done consistently, that’s how a brand can hit a home run.

  • Geography is like community. If your brand pays close attention to your community and respects their needs and wishes, it will create consistent, meaningful experiences and stick in their minds and connect to their hearts.
  • Parents are like thought-leaders. When a brand leads from a purposeful belief, it can connect with people who share the same ideals. When your brand truly matters, people change the way they think and feel about your brand and you create a long-lasting relationship that can withstand the test of time. Some even call it loyalty.
  • Friends are like word of mouth. A positive word from someone you know is the strongest endorsement. If your brand behaves with emotional integrity and respects each individual customer every time in every brand experience, it can earn the kind of loyalty that friends share with their friends.
  • The Monday morning coffee break is like a conversation with a group of informed colleagues. If your brand performs consistently well with everyone it encounters, the weight of public opinion will be on your side, even when people are from different levels or walks of life.

Brand Loyalty

Brand loyalty has always come by emotional engagement. Creating meaningful connections and differentiation is where loyalty happens.

Your brand may not inspire fans to get tattoos or wear 40 year-old T-shirts. But it can form a strong emotional connection with people by learning what matters to them, by understanding their feelings and by behaving in a way that shows that you care about them.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco Bay Area-based brand strategy firm with an emotive approach to branding.

Stronger Brand Building: Why Emotions Matter

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Our brains encode emotional memories more forcibly than other data.

Looking for the keys to stronger brand building? Want people to remember your brand in deeper and more enduring ways? Wish they would act more deliberately on your brand’s behalf? According to brain science, emotion is the key.

I’ve long been preaching the idea that brands should generate a specific emotional aura as part of their every day brand experiences. I have urged them to evoke these selected positive emotions across the many interactions they have with people.

My thinking has been that by evoking emotions within the brand’s experiences, you are building the foundation for more positive and beneficial relationships with all the people that matter to your brand.

Furthermore, I’ve always sensed that emotion is the force behind our more enduring life memories. I’ve translated that thought in the branding context to mean that a strong, emotionally based connection will last longer. As such, these emotions are at hand during subsequent interactions with the brand – you might say “the pump is primed”.

Finally, I’ve long assumed that there is a compound effect, as subsequent interactions reinforce and increase the strength of the emotional connection.

The brain science that explains why emotion matters in brand building.

In his great book on empathy, Wired to Care, author Dev Patnaik explains how this connection works within our brains:

“The limbic system draws together many different elements of the brain to form an overall structure for handling emotional information…the amygdala is devoted to processing our emotions and those of other people. The hippocampus is essential in the formation of long-term memories. Together, the two regions serve to help us form long-term emotional connections with other people.

As it turns out, the more emotionally charged an event is, the more vivid it feels to our amygdala, which then helps our hippocampus to hold on to the event for the long term. That’s why our most emotional memories are also our most vivid ones. Our brains literally encode them more forcibly than they do with other data.”

How do you want your brand to feel to people?

There is a vast range of positive emotions that a brand can adopt as its own. For some brands, these can be very ambitious (e.g. fired-up) or very subdued (e.g. understood).

In our work, we’ve identified over 301 positive emotions. And for every brand we’ve consulted, there has always been a natural selection of four emotions that, when blended with the brand’s products, people, heritage, and ethos, have created something that is truly unique, clearly differentiates the brand, fosters meaningful brand building.

Which specific positive emotions would transform the way your brand reaches out to people, and the reasons that people happily respond back to your brand?

Download our white paper on Transforming Your Brand Into an Emotive Brand

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy firm.

Emotion is Key to Driving Brand Loyalty

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Brand Loyalty is deeply tied to emotional significance between people and brands. We all have products we use with little thought or consideration. In fact, truth be told, we have little feeling for most of the products we use every day. Indeed, if we were unable to find one of the meaningless brands we regularly buy, we would be more than happy to settle for another brand. After all, as far as we are concerned, very little separates one from the other.

For some, there is no alternative

Continue reading “Emotion is Key to Driving Brand Loyalty”

The Role and Impact of Brand Purpose

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Brand Purpose

I recently reread an older HBR blog post by Graham Kenny that details the difference between the increasingly popular idea of brand purpose and the traditional corporate drivers of vision, mission, and values.

His conclusion echoes our beliefs about the role and impact of a company purpose:

“If you’re crafting a purpose statement, my advice is this: To inspire your staff to do good work for you, find a way to express the organization’s impact on the lives of customers, clients, students, patients – whomever you’re trying to serve. Make them feel it.”

Mr. Kenny’s closing statement, “make them feel it”, goes to the heart of what it is to be meaningful as a company or brand. Meaningful ideas take the impact that you have on people beyond the cognitive level. Meaning goes much deeper by touching our universal, innate, and deeply-held aspiration to do good and worthy things in our lives.

Brand Purpose changes the way people think, feel, and act

The feelings that flow from meaningful connections are profound, yet they often operate below the surface of consciousness. As such, people may not be readily able to talk about these feelings, but there’s no question that meaning resonates within us all, and has the power to change the way we think, feel, and act.

A strong and compelling purpose helps employees better understand, work to, and feel personally accountable for the company’s vision, mission, and values. Think of purpose as the energy that will make those elements work more efficiently.

Purpose leads to significant business outcomes

Energizing your workplace through purpose has further benefits:

– Purpose-led leaders and managers work with greater passion and in a more aligned and coordinated fashion.

– Engaged and motivated employees work with greater levels of collaboration, self-initiative, and innovation.

– Customer relationships prosper from more energized and purposeful interactions with the brand and its people.

– Sales, marketing, and advertising becomes more effective as they align more to the many outcomes that flow from the brand as it actively pursues its purpose.

Why wait?

Why forego the beneficial energy that a purpose can bring to your company or brand? Why miss this opportunity to matter more to your employees? Why not use a purpose to elevate your brand above the competition by focusing on meaningful outcomes?

Purposeless is no longer an option for brands seeking to thrive and prevail.

For more information about how to transform your brand for the 21st century, please download our white paper.

Download White Paper

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy firm.