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Connecting at a Deeper Level
If building your client or customer base is a prime objective of your brand strategy, tailor your strategy to boost your brand's emotional appeal over its rational appeal.
Artists have been telling us this in a roundabout sort of way for centuries. When the mind and the heart do battle, reason is almost always vanquished by emotion, even when choosing the heart means the destruction of both.
Gallup Organization research suggests that all satisfaction is not created equal. Emotionally satisfied customers spend more than rationally satisfied customers. In a July 2005 Harvard Business Review article (Manage Your Human Sigma), neurological research suggests that customers with intense levels of emotional attachment to a specific company or organization also demonstrated significantly more activity in those areas of the brain that are related to emotion – when customers are thinking about that organization or company.
Emotional attachment and self-reported share of spending are also strongly correlated. In brand terms, this means that those customers who are giving your organization a bigger share of their wallet are probably doing so as a result of emotional attachment.
In message terms, this is profound. So many organizations make their case for value in rational terms alone. They dismiss or minimize the importance of emotional appeals or emotional bonds. Their language and their tone are sterile, clinical, business-like, and logical. And they wonder why they're passed over.
Obviously, the choice is not one or the other. Overt emotional appeals or messages that are without substance can easily seem manipulative or pandering. They insult the customer's intelligence.
Clearly, savvy brand strategy builds on both rational and emotional equities. In my experience, buiding emotional equities is much more difficult than building rational equities. One can always find reasons where genuine emotional connections are like fugitive mists. Better and more nuanced research and development are required to develop emotional appeals. Authenticity as a brand value becomes superordinate in its importance. And finally, there is no substitute for telling a great story.
When all is said and done, that's what a great brand becomes: a great story. You just want to keep reading or listening.
Posted on July 6, 2006 09:05 AM | Permalink
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