Emotional Branding: Maximizing Appeal Of Your Brand

By M. Isi Eromosele

Emotional Branding is a strong branding philosophy as well as a best practice standard. The philosophy is based on the premise that emotions are always involved when people establish and build connections with brands. Emotional branding is about people, emotions and relationships.

The philosophy of emotional branding is infinite because it is based on a universal principle that states: people’s emotions come first, communication medium second. Marketers realize that emotions are important. But they’re not quite sure why or what to do about it.

Consumers make buying decisions based in part on their feelings and emotions about particular brands. And marketers have long recognized the fact that emotions play a key role when consumers are talking about or purchasing products in categories as disparate as those represented by brands like Lexus, Sony and Hermes.

Emotional Connections: Long-Term Links

The result of strong consumer emotional attachment to brands is long-term loyalty to that brand.  To reap the enhanced financial benefits that can result from customer loyalty, marketers need to enthusiastically pursue strategies intended to keep customers coming back.

Indeed, marketers must move beyond customer retention, which is merely a behavior, to generating customer commitment, delight, and even evangelism, all of which represent enduring psychological bonds that link a customer to a company.

There are four critically important emotional states of consumer emotional attachments to brands. Together, these states represent the strength of the emotional connection existing between a customer and a brand:

Confidence in the brand’s promise | Belief in its Integrity | Pride in being a customer and Passion for the brand.

Analysis of responses to the individual items in this set of feelings has revealed that customers develop emotional attachment to a brand in a cumulative way, with confidence as the foundation of a brand relationship and passion as the pinnacle.

Here are the definitions of the four components:

• Confidence reflects the belief that the company can be trusted, always and everywhere, to keep the promises that it makes.
• Integrity reflects the belief that the company will always treat its customers fairly and can always be counted on to stand behind its products and resolve any problems that might occur.
• Pride reflects the degree to which consumers feel appreciated by the company and are proud of their personal association with the brand.
• Passion reflects the belief that the brand is essentially irreplaceable and represents a seemingly perfect fit with the customer’s personal needs.

 Consumers’ emotional connections with brands have a specific and fairly simple structure, regardless of the nature of the particular emotions involved. The structure begins at the foundation of the customer relationship with Confidence, then proceeds through Integrity to Pride to and at the pinnacle of the relationship, Passion about the product, service or brand.

Emotional connections are not merely warm and fuzzy, nor are they simply interesting to contemplate. They have powerful financial consequences for marketers, ranging from share-of wallet to frequency and amount of repeat business. Fully engaged customers spend more and return more frequently than those who are disengaged.

Retailers that have taken action to enhance their customer engagement by capitalizing on the engagement-building skills of their own customer-facing employees have been rewarded with double-digit increases in both sales and profit, both in the United States and around the world.

Emotional brand connections are universally important, and managing those emotional bonds pays off handsomely.

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance

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