The importance of emotional connection in branding

Alisha Shibli

Feb 21, 2019

Emotions are the driving force behind most buying decisions. Small Business Administration says, “creating strong emotions — either positive or negative — can help build a bond between your customers and your business”--a goal almost all businesses are chasing. Positive emotions are crucial for a good end-to-end experience. That’s what creates loyal customers, and a loyal customer is more likely to recommend your brand compared to a one-time shopper.

Brand intimacy is when a brand is trying to connect with its customers on an emotional level. And this directly affects the growth of your business. Brand intimacy encourages bonds that are reciprocal and fuelled by emotions, which is why a good end-to-end experience is crucial. To build a strong connection the user must interact with your brand multiple times.

Brand intimacy in business goes beyond your branding. It is a promise you make to your customers that is a sum of many factors: it’s what you sell, how well you sell it, how you project your company’s image, the level of customer service you provide, how your customers perceive you and how you interact with them in return.

The reputation of your brand will depend on the emotional connection that you create with your audience and your customers. And this is done best when you include an emotional touch in every aspect of your brand communication—from artwork and logos to the slogan, to various advertising forms and social media.

Developing an emotional branding strategy

Emotional branding doesn’t happen on its own. It needs to be a strategic part of your marketing plan—one that needs to be factored in at the beginning of your business strategy. Your branding is something that follows the customer from Attention to Action in the AIDA model Your emotional message should be a part of every aspect of your business strategy—from traditional advertising to your online communication and the way your staff engages with your customers.

The five stages of emotional branding

When it comes to emotional branding, you need to know what you’re trying to achieve. Simple local radio ads or a social media campaign are just as effective as campaigns with million-dollar budgets and celebrities. It all comes down to what your end goal is, how memorable you want your brand to be, and what emotions you wish to feed your users.
Listed below are five stages of emotional branding to better explain how it is done using the example of an eCommerce website that sells snack boxes.

1. Capture attention

The first step is to get your fundamentals right. Who are you targeting? What emotions might this target audience respond to? How do you nurture their interest in your brand?

For example, when it comes to online business, there are thousands of messages flooding the user every moment. In a marketplace so crowded and noisy, the best way to stand out is to be different yet relevant. In this case, one of the ways to capture attention is through the domain name of your website. Consider these two examples:

• www.healthysnackboxesstore.com

• www.healthysnack.store

Which one of these was easier to read and more likely to stand out? The first one is a long clunky, complicated URL while the second one almost reads like a sentence. By using new domain extensions such as .TECH, STORE, .PRESS, .ONLINE, .SPACE, .SITE, etc you can get a domain name that aptly brands your business (in this case, .STORE signifies eCommerce) and makes your web address unique in the sea of competitors.

2. Encourage purchases

This is vital for a business to survive and prosper. After you have captured their attention how do you engage a potential customer and encourage them to spend their money with you? One of the ways is to understand the emotions that drive their everyday decisions. For example, once they come to your website what does the design and messaging communicate to them?

In the case of our snack box website, a design that is light and colorful and a message that is tasty and positive can encourage the user to not look at healthy eating as a chore but more like something to look forward to.

3. Develop a relationship

This is where you tell the customer that they’ve made the right decision choosing to do business with you. Your website design and functionality can play an important role. The way you display your products, the details that you add, the user experience you create, the after-sales support you provide, etc all add up to the users’ experience and help build trust in your brand.
4.Develop customer loyalty
Turning a one-off purchase into a weekly or monthly buy helps build brand loyalty and increases the lifetime value of that customer to your business. In the example, as a snack box eCommerce store, you can get your customers to join a bi-weekly/monthly subscription, give them incentives or loyalty benefits, up-sell or cross-sell your products, etc.

5.Gain from word-of-mouth business
Word-of-mouth is like free advertising. As a business, the way you invest in your image through advertising, you need to invest in customer support as well since it has a direct impact on the customer ’s emotional memory and your overall image. Word-of-mouth comes from either a wonderful experience or a really bad one and this entirely depends on your product experience and your customer support.

How can you build your emotional brand?

A brand that has a positive emotional connection with its customer base is one that delivers. Apart from strong messaging and building expectation of their customers, they also have solid products that give customers value for their money and brilliant customer support for that extra value add.

One of the ways to understand this is to conduct a customer survey on a regular basis about the various verticals of your business. It can help you unlock your customer’s emotions (towards your brand). This insight can help you build a brand that would appeal to them even more. However, to do this you need to ask the right questions and know how to interpret the answers. It helps to reach out to an expert to do this the best way possible.

In conclusion

Today, more than ever, brands have the power to deeply connect with their customer base. Through social media campaigns, website, etc businesses can make a focused effort to engage their users in a meaningful way. You have to tell them what they like about you, why they connect with you and why you are someone they can trust and grow with. More importantly, you need to start doing that now.
Post by Alisha Shibli

Alisha is a Content Marketing Specialist at Radix, the registry behind some of the most successful new domain extensions, including .STORE and .TECH. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.

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