Emotional Branding: What Is it Exactly?
Emotional branding is an advertising strategy that aims to establish an emotional connection with consumers. In other words, its goal is to strengthen the existing bond between a company and its clients through emotion instead of reason. This strategy seeks to humanize products.
When people use the word branding, they’re usually referring to the process of building a brand. It’s everything related to the process from coming up with its name to creating its corresponding logo. These factors directly and indirectly affect its value and the consumers’ behavior.
Having a strong corporate identity and a good position in the market allows companies to have a stable and secure source of income. In addition, it can help them outperform their competition and stay relevant.
What’s this advertising strategy all about?
Emotional branding uses a series of strategies and resources in order to connect with the consumers’ emotions. In fact, if you think about your buying decisions, you’ll realize that they’ve all been determined by your emotions to some extent.
Those who rely on emotional branding truly believe that what sells are the emotions attached to products. For them, the sensations and feelings that their brand produces in the consumers is the most important thing. For this reason, its goal is for products to sink into the heart of target audiences.
Now, when it comes to creating a brand’s image, it’s essential to add emotion to the marketing plan. This is the main goal of emotional branding. In this regard, it’s crucial to keep in mind that consumers want to satisfy their needs and feel good.
Keys to implementing emotional branding
- See the customer as a real person instead of just a buyer. Many famous brands, such as Apple or The Coca-Cola Company, focus on empathy. This means that they try to connect with the consumer to boost fidelity.
- Prioritize product experience. Remember that you want your product to make consumers feel good. Additionally, people’s opinions on social networks are crucial because users rely more on other people’s opinions rather than on corporate information.
- Take advantage of the potential of a good story. Many times, brands are built on stories with a strong narrative and visual and emotional components. Thus, don’t be afraid to use storytelling as a fundamental component in your emotional marketing strategy. There are numerous multimedia tools you can use for this, such as Storify, Slidestory, Storybird, and Apester, among others.
- Don’t be a sucker for indifference. Try to make sure everyone remembers your marketing campaign. That way, the sensations and values that your product transmits will remain in the mind of consumers for a long time.
Brands that use emotional branding
Dove’s most recent campaign is a great example of emotional branding. They created a self-esteem advertisement called Real Beauty. With this campaign, the company did much more than spread the word about their products on a digital platform.
The Real Beauty Sketches video has more than 180 million views to date. This campaign helped millions of women who felt pressured by high beauty standards to feel better about themselves.
On the other hand, Apple also resorts to emotional branding. In addition to Apple’s designs and excellent features, its success is closely related to its empathy-based communication and the intimate connection they’ve managed to build with their consumers.
Starbucks is another great example. This company is extremely popular and worldwide-accepted in spite of its prices due to the fact that they focus on inspiring and nurturing the human spirit.
In short, all these brands have invested a lot of time and money into the development of advertising campaigns based on emotional branding. Not to mention that their marketing teams are composed of brilliant people who know just how to get to the core of people’s emotions. This, in fact, is how they’ve positioned themselves as some of the leading companies in their corresponding sectors.