The age when people were comfortable dealing with faceless companies is long gone. Today, they are looking to connect with brands on a personal level. When brands build real connections with their customers, it helps them increase their trust and brand loyalty.
However, the real challenge is how these businesses can build customer loyalty. One of the ways in which they can do that is through emotional branding. This article will guide you on using emotional branding to connect with customers and build their loyalty.
What Is Emotional Branding?
Emotional branding is the process through which businesses position their brands to appeal to their customers’ emotions. This is different from emotional marketing, as branding entails much more than marketing. It touches on other things like the logo, customer service, and more.
When businesses emotionally brand themselves, they become more relatable, build credibility, and enable you to stand out from the competition. Brands can achieve that by creating branding content that appeals to customers’ emotional stage, egos, aspirations, and needs.
Emotional Branding vs. Emotional Advertising
Emotional advertising is a scenario where businesses use emotions in a specific campaign, contributing to their overall business’s emotional branding strategy. In most cases, brands often create an emotional ad responding to an event. An example of an emotional branding was after the 2018 travel ban, Air Bnb created a campaign known as Let’s Keep Traveling Forward.
The Three Pillars Of Emotional Branding
Just like in marketing, emotional branding can be categorized into three groups depending on the use of rhetoric. These are:
Ethos( shows trust and credibility)
You probably have seen marketing messages saying, “Three out of four doctors recommend Sensodyne.” This is a classic case of the use of ethos in emotional advertisement. In simple terms, ethos refers to someone’s guiding beliefs. Ethos in emotional branding cna be used in different ways, such as:
- Quoting of experts
- Customer testimonials on a website
- Case studies and much more.
You can build trust and credibility by appealing to ethos in emotional branding. It helps to establish your brand as an authority in your niche.
Pathos
While it works great, brands should be careful to ensure that their customers don’t feel like they are being manipulated. Pathos uses the following to convince a customer to make a buying decision:
- creates a sense of urgency
- FOMO(fear of missing out)
- Sense of belonging
These strategies are used by many businesses, such as clothing stores, shopping malls, and even nonprofit organizations.
Logos
This relies mainly on the other two pillars. Instead of focusing on a product’s facts, statistics, or features, you should tell your customers what the product can do for them. You can then connect your argument with their logic.
While you don’t have to apply all three situations in every marketing campaign, it can be helpful to keep them in mind.
Why Should You Do Emotional Branding?
Here are some of the reasons to consider emotional branding:
- Stand out from the competition
- Positive brand recognition
- Brand loyalty. This can translate into better brand retention and improve customer lifetime value.
- Improved targeting. This can result in increased ROI.
How To Use Emotional Branding To Connect With Customers
To connect with your customers emotionally, here are the steps you need to follow:
Understand the Maslow hierarchy of needs theory
This theory illustrates the different types of needs that drive a human. It states that the basic needs of a human are physiological beings. After that, they work their way up the pyramid for their emotional needs, such as self-esteem and self-actualization.
When doing emotional branding, you must determine the emotions likely to appeal to your target customers. You can then use them in your marketing messages while considering the value proposition that fits in the pyramid.
Another theory you should consider is the Vance Packard theory, which states eight hidden consumer needs. These are:
- Emotional security
- Ego gratification
- Sense of roots
- Feeling of power
- Reassurance of their worth
- Creative outlet
- Immortality
Your goal should be to determine the emotions relevant to your customers and try to meet them.
Understand your customers
For the best emotional branding, you need to understand your current customers: This includes their needs, preferences, expectations, desires, and emotional responses. You should understand:
- The reason behind a customer making a purchase
- Needs, dreams, pain points, and general desires of a customer
- Beliefs and values, likes and dislikes
- Challenges customers face in the buying journey
- Graphical and textual content that customers respond to
You should put Marc Gobe’s commandment on brand building in place. This states that for brands to build customer loyalty, they should respect and value them. The brand should sell products that meet the customer’s values, hopes, and desires. The product should integrate into the customer’s lifestyle, creating a lifestyle that appeals to their particular aesthetics.
Build a positive image
Brands should also strive to inspire customer loyalty, likability, and trust:
- Understanding the changing needs of their customers
- Enabling emotional fulfillment by creating products and services that meet the customer’s needs.
- Improving their lives
Understand the basics of emotional branding
A business should understand the basics of emotional marketing, branding, and advertisement for the best results. These include:
- Brand values, visions, and missions
- How the brand is represented visually
- The psychology behind certain emotions
- Neuroscience
- Color psychology
You should know the various tracking tools that will help you determine if your campaigns are working. This will enable you to use data for your marketing campaign.
Leverage on visuals and colors
A key instrument in emotional branding, such as fear-based marketing, is color psychology. You should have a color palette that your customers should associate your brand with. Since different colors have different meanings, you can also use colors to evoke certain emotions.
The visuals you use, such as logos, fonts, illustrations, images, typefaces, and icons, will affect how people perceive a brand. This is because they also have an emotional meaning and influence how people perceive a brand on a subconscious level.
Use powerful storytelling
A story is quite compelling in drawing people’s interest. Therefore, you should also use a story to evoke a feeling of emotions and inspiration in your customers and prospects. It enables you to reach a larger audience and is easily shareable and relatable.
Storytelling can make it easier for people to understand your message and relate to your brand. The story can be in any part of your brand, from the company, product, or logotype.
Create a highly personalized experience.
Ensure that you personalize your customer experience through:
- Customized experience in different channels
- Understanding search intent and creating content tailored to the customer’s needs
- Customized graphics and visuals
- Use of a language that customers can relate with
Elicit emotions
When using emotion marketing, you must show how your product will meet a customer’s needs. Depending on your audience’s current needs, you should use tools to convince your customers that your products are the right solution and will leave them feeling great.
Join a noble cause
Studies indicate that customers will likely buy and stick to a brand contributing to a noble cause. This is why it is common to see brands running ads showing their contribution towards a better community. You can also use a similar approach.
Start a community
People love being part of a community. Making your customers feel valued is one way of building brand loyalty.
Carry out emotional branding
You can use several ways to do the actual emotional branding. These are:
- Capturing customers attention
- Convince your first-time customers to buy
- Interact with your customers in a positive way
- Build customer loyalty
- Start transparent and healthy communication with your prospects
- Encourage your loyal customers to make a buying decision
- Run reward programs and retention campaigns
- Make your brand part of customers’ lives
Final Thoughts
Emotional branding requires a consistent and well-planned campaign that will capture customers emotionally. This should be followed by measuring the effectiveness of your campaign. If you aren’t sure where to start with emotional branding, our guide will help you do that.
