« Reinventing Local Culture | Main | I'm Grateful »
Emotional Brand Dimensions
If you want to understand brand, observe a child. When you give a young child a teddy bear, in just a few minutes, she will tell you its name, what it likes to eat, when it goes to sleep, and how it’s feeling. The child projects humanness and personality onto the bear. A child can’t love just dacron fur, cotton, rubber or nylon. She loves that part of the bear that lives in her imagination. Her affection is not about the bear, it’s about her need to love & relate in meaningful ways in her world.
As people, we have a profound need to relate to beings, not to things. We animate the inanimate. This is why people name their cars & boats. Products, services & organizations are like people. They are not loved because they are important; they are important because they are loved.
It seems simplistic, but effective branding relies on finding, making & keeping a place in the lives of living, breathing human beings. Engines of this enterprise, among others. are empathy & affection. If you, your company, your product or service seems cold or impersonal, your brand’s days are numbered.
Effective branding recognizes & honors this impulse. It does not trade on it, or manipulate from it, but rather seeks to clarify & vivify the brand promise & experience. The most effective branding is grounded in emotional truth. It respects & honors the audience for whom the brand is created.
Savvy marketers understand that there is a difference between satisfying instrumental needs -– how products & experiences function to meet practical objectives – & satisfying intrinsic needs – those spiritual & emotional cravings & desires that populate the emotional, aspirational landscape.
A bigger difference lives in the results: satisfying instrumental needs builds satisfaction ; that is certainly important. Satisfying intrinsic needs builds bonds of loyalty & affection. As long as these bonds are authentically nourished, they are immensely powerful. Manipulate people emotionally, however, and the experience is read as betrayal. Be real.
Posted on November 8, 2005 05:58 AM | Permalink
Bookmark with: 
del.icio.us, 
StumbleUpon, 
digg