Why do I say that branding is emotive?
The feeling (emotion) that I’m referring to, when it comes to emotive branding, is that which our customers feel. It’s the product or service we sell and how our customer is emotionally attached to that product or service.
Our customers develop emotions towards our brand, that’s NO secret!
It can be because we show it to be fun, we offer security, we aim for social approval, etc.
Therefore, it would be fair to say that our brands have life, and just as in life we grow, so our brand grows as well and this all happens over time.
Like personality and appearance, the first thing that people see about our brand is its personality and as the business owner our personality as well as the appearance of our brand is always front and centre. 100% on display, if you will.
Emotional branding teaches us to create a lasting impact on our users. Our brand personalities form charismatic attitudes that triggers positive emotional response towards our brand.
For our brand to remain current, we need to keep a close eye on competitive products and or services. Simply because our brands are susceptible to external factors like trends and current events, so it is all about longevity.
As business owners, therefore brand managers, we use our personalities and our branding to build valuable and long-lasting relationships with the people who gravitate towards us.
By positively managing our brand management, we inspire a positive brand perception.
Our brand is what our audience both thinks and FEELS about our company as well as our product or service. It’s up to us to define what we want the market to think and feel and it’s up to us to make the market adopt this exact view as well.
I keep saying, to everyone who will listen, that our brand isn’t just a logo or company name. It’s the very core of who we are and what we say as well as HOW we say what we say.
I think I am safe to say that it is the culmination of every experience every person has had with working with us.
So just how exactly do we build emotional branding?
For me it would be to:
- Capture attention
- Encourage our customers to purchase from us
- Developing a relationship
- Developing customer loyalty
- Making our brand part of our customer’s life, and
- Benefiting from word-of-mouth business that comes from loyal customers – this is so much more powerful than paid advertisements
Let’s look at your favorite brand. How does that brand make you feel?
When your brand first appeared on the market, how did they capture your attention? They captured your attention by being consistent, by communicating their brand promise and by knowing exactly how they want you to perceive them.
Three questions that we need to ask ourselves about our brands are:
- Do we follow through on our promise to our customers?
- Do we deliver 100% customer orientated experiences?
- Do we at all times behave with integrity?
Taking this into consideration, we can safely say that brand management is so much more than just marketing.
It’s about success.
Successful brand management, therefore emotive brand management, can obviously boost brand awareness by building loyalty with our customers and influencing their buying decisions as well as their loyalty. Allowing us to charge a premium rate as well, ultimately possibly even, increasing our sales.
Successfully playing on our customer’s emotions should not include fear or frustration. These are the two emotions, in my opinion, to avoid AT ALL COST, unless they are part of your marketing strategy depending on your product or service.
The strongest emotions to harness in our content, my suggestion, would be surprise as well as anticipation.
Logic and emotion are not opposed forces. They both potentially appeal to our audience and can be leveraged to increase the value of the content that we put out on social media. For example, our content could be logically appealing because it offers new information or just even a unique viewpoint on a specific topic and therefore an emotional appeal.
Logical appeal makes our audience trust us, it makes them value us and it makes them respect the fact that our content is, well … valuable. Emotional appeal makes our audience / clients / customers share, respond to, as well as engage more with our content.
Both are necessary for a strong and well-balanced ongoing content strategy.
Let’s face it, people love to be surprised!
Surprise is useful because it makes what we put out on social media more interesting and engaging. When we are surprised, we share our sense of surprise with others. And that is why putting out content with a surprising twist should be used more frequently than any other kind.
So, want your content to be shared and appreciated by a wider audience simply; use surprise as the leading emotion.
The other leading emotion that I referred to above as well is anticipation.
Anticipation makes people want to dig deeper into who we are and what we do, and it also encourages loyalty. To do this we need to tease out information gradually from them and this we do by putting out engaging and interesting content.
I want to also share with you 12 ways we have on how you can legally protect your brand:
- Protect your web content
- Set up Google alerts
- Use IP protection
- Create a distinctive mark
- Register your trademark
- Get a patent
- Create an employee handbook
- Trademark your brand
- Monitor your brand and competitors
- Create legal divisions
- Protect your brand in China
- Think globally, not locally
I must also just add: register your domain name. You really don’t need to fork out oodles of money to design a website. A simple landing page with your registered domain name with a relevant call to action will suffice to start off with.
Use your brand every opportunity you can get, just so people get to recognize your brand with your name. Of course, if you’ve gone through the trouble to legally protect your brand and there’s some sort of infringement: deal with it immediately!
Conclusion
I hope you found this as interesting to read as I found researching and writing it.
Let me know if there is anything you need help with the creation of branded visual content for your social media – after all, that is what I’m good at, putting your brand out there. Showing your personality on your social networking platform.
If you’re new to design and want to start using Canva as your platform for design, you can sign up here and use the Pro features (the same I use for my designs) for 30 days absolutely free of charge.
Here are the differences between pro & free (just saying)
If you want to go ahead and try your hand at design and need some guidance, you can download my free guide to the perfect social media design here. If you need a little more help, I can assist you using Zoom – which we’ll record so you can keep referring back to our session. This link here will get us connected for an hour to walk you through your challenges.
If there is anything else, I can help with, you can always just send me an email, or even connect with me on LinkedIn (as that’s where I’m most active) and engage with me there.
All the best
Stephanie
