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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.

Is Your Brand Working to Positive or Negative Energy?

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Strategies for addressing the energy of your business in good times and bad:

We came across this interesting insight by John P. Kotter in his post entitled “To Create Healthy Urgency, Focus on a Big Opportunity” on the Harvard Business Review blog.

“There are two basic kinds of energy in organizations.

  1. Energy triggered by a big opportunity, can create momentum in the right direction and sustain it over time.
  2. Energy based on fear or anxiety, might overcome complacency for a time, but it does not build any momentum or maintain it. Instead it can create a panic, with all the obvious negative consequences — stressing people out and eventually draining an organization of the very energy leaders wanted to generate.”

Many of our clients are burdened by problems and issues that are holding their business and brand back. Declining sales, unclear vision, an under performing workforce, lack of differentiation in the marketplace, the list goes on and on.

Continue reading “Is Your Brand Working to Positive or Negative Energy?”

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.

The Next Wave of Brand Strategy

Posted on by Jerry Holtaway

The role of brand strategy

What makes your brand unique? How does it stand out in your category? What “significance” gets people flocking to your brand? What “stickiness” keeps people coming back to your brand?

We wouldn’t be surprised if these questions keep you awake at night. After all, it’s clearly getting harder for brands to differentiate themselves. Categories are becoming commoditized as competitors mimic each other in both products and communications. Brand advantages based on innovation are short-lived as others rapidly copy technology, benefits, and promises.

Add to these challenges the myopic view that prevails within most enterprises. Within a company there tends to be beliefs that the world revolves around their brand, that their brand is truly unique, and that to make obvious and superficial claims is sufficient.

What’s a brand owner to do?

The first step is to move beyond the obvious and traditional modes of branding, and to embrace the new wave of branding that is based on deep, emotional, and differentiating brand connections.

This means stepping out of your usual and familiar approach to brand strategy. It means putting human needs at the center of your brand’s universe. It means shifting from promoting your outputs, to embodying the meaningful impact of the personal, social, and environmental outcomes your brand generates.

This is not business-as-usual. But it is necessary business.

This is certainly a different way of thinking about, planning, and executing brand strategy. Mindful and purposeful leadership is required. Organizational flexibility and patience are necessary. Individual persistence and fortitude are required.

The next wave of brand strategy will bring its own challenges to the business world. But at the same time it will deliver what every brand wants and needs: a meaningful difference that generates business by resonating deeply in the hearts and minds of all the people vital to your brand’s success.

Surf’s up! Get ready to ride the wave!

Looking for a more in-depth view of how to engage in this new wave of brand strategy? Download our white paper on Transforming your brand.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy firm.

Five Key Differences Between Emotional and Emotive Brands

Posted on by Jerry Holtaway

It’s not too hard to spot an emotional brand. It uses emotions tactically to either make people laugh or to gently tug at their heartstrings. These brands typically only do this through their advertising.

Emotive brands are far more rare. These are brands that forge meaningful – and valuable – emotional connections through everything they do.

So while someone may happily buy a brand based on its emotional advertising, they are likely to be left bemused when dealing with the emotional brand’s crass customer service people.

The resulting brand dissonance will, no doubt, prompt them to turn to alternative brands. On the other hand, buyers of emotive brands have a seamless emotional experience in every aspect of the customer experience.

This is because the use of emotion is a highly considered brand strategy for emotive brands.

Emotive brands engage their entire organizations so that every brand moment evokes a similar set of feelings – feelings that bond the customer (and the employees) to the brand.

The resulting brand harmony will keep them coming back to the brand (and telling others all about it).

From a brand management point of view, this is the difference between:

  1. Cynically using people’s emotions, and credibly and authentically bonding with them through shared values, attitudes, and behavior
  2. Giving people a 30 second emotional kick, and getting people to care more for you forever
  3. Doing predictable stuff, and intelligently opposing the expected
  4. Being viewed cynically, and being embraced with respect
  5. Focusing on short-term opportunism, and embracing long-term value creation

Ultimately, it’s the difference between settling for meaningless marketing and striving for meaningful connections.

It’s a choice every brand can make.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

Emotional is Not Necessarily Emotive

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

If you haven’t already heard the buzz about the new Johnson & Johnson ad campaign, you will. And after May 10, it will find its way to a page or screen near you. Thirty million bucks buys a lot of exposure.

What caught our attention is the emotive premise of the campaign, which is called “For All You Love.” With a name like that, you can guess it’s going straight for your heartstrings. The teaser image on the J&J home page suggests we’ll see lots of loving parents applying Band-Aids® and baby soap.

Continue reading “Emotional is Not Necessarily Emotive”

Insensitive Use of Personal Data Can Seem Downright Creepy

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Brands need to think carefully about how they leverage new levels of customer information when handing iPads to front-line service people. Using data and behavior-driven information, while a powerful way to forge connections, can easily go awry.

I wasn’t too surprised when I read this in Michael Schrage’s HBR piece, “When digital marketing gets too creepy”.

“The digital marketer who effectively runs Qantas Airlines’ highly regarded – and very successful – loyalty program has an unusual iPad problem. Flight attendants on Australia’s flagship carrier can now get up-to-the-minute data on the airline’s most elite and valued frequent flyers displayed on their onboard tablets. The information is useful, helpful, and the app was a digital innovation actually sought by Qantas staff.”

“The unhappy catch? Too many flight attendants sounded like they were reading from a script when using this information with these valued customers. They couldn’t smoothly incorporate the customized data to authentically connect with their frequent flyers. Instead of making their best customers feel special, the data-driven app too often creeped them out.”

Don’t creep people out!

Leave that to the NSA, et al.

Employ empathetic, purposeful, and emotional approaches when moving into more intense data-driven marketing.

Empathy

Step out of your corporate shoes, and walk (or fly) a mile or two in those of your customers. Understand their desire for meaningful connections, yet wariness about over-familiarity, invasiveness, and “big brother” knowledge.

Purpose

Establish a purposeful intent to your digital marketing strategy – get all front-line people to understand what you’re trying to achieve, and what you’re trying to avoid.

Emotion

Orientate front-line people (and indeed the data you provide them) around delivering messages built on customer patterns, behavior, preferences, etc. in ways that are designed to evoke specific emotions that turn your data insights into welcome, friendly, and meaningful moments between your caring brand and the customer seeking care.

Soon data will prevail in virtually all customer relationships

To once again quote Michael Schrage:

“Before the decade’s end, even minimum wage customer service personnel will have real-time access to remarkable amounts of personal data of customers walking into Starbucks, McDonalds, Walmarts, and/or Walgreens. Should customer experience be better defined by employees who enjoy greater familiarity or a studied distance? Who owns the answer to that vital human capital and customer care concern?”

The more customer data an enterprise has, the more that kind of accountability matters.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy firm.

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Meaningful Brands evoke “Of Course” Moments

Posted on by Jerry Holtaway

Meaningful brands make people feel good.

We came across a reference to Christian Lindholm, of the design firm Fjord, and his “of-course principle of design”.

“Most companies, he said, are looking to ‘wow’ with their products, when in reality what they should be looking for is an ‘of course’ reaction from their users.”

We’re not opposed to brands creating a “wow” sensation, at least when there is a genuine reason to make people feel that way.

Continue reading “Meaningful Brands evoke “Of Course” Moments”