Discover Emotional Insights to Spark Brand Desire

How do people want to feel?

If you are responsible for running a business or brand, I believe that is the most fundamental question you should always have in the forefront of your mind.

Maya Angelou famously said, “people will forget what you said, and what you did, but they won't forget how you made them feel.” Behavioral scientists will tell you we instinctively gravitate toward that which makes us feel good, and we instinctively gravitate away from that which makes us feel bad. Forrester Research says that emotion, how a brand experience makes us feel, is the largest driver of loyalty.

However, despite good intentions, so many brand leaders are unaware of, undervaluing or ignoring the power of emotional insights. They are inadvertently limiting the effectiveness of their brand development efforts and their ability to attract and retain customers.

The Challenge with Traditional Brand Strategy

Most businesses and brand leaders are still relying on traditional brand strategy, which is well past its prime. Traditional brand strategy is full of details that brand leaders want to tell people, rooted in persuasion era approaches, from a time when advertising was the dominant way people learned about brands. Today, brands can’t hide bad experiences behind good advertising and customers have many choices for most anything they want.

Traditional creative briefs have sections for the unique selling proposition, proof points and reasons to believe, all language steering marketers toward selling. Brand development is often guided by internal stakeholders with strong opinions, a lot of confirmation bias and a lack of understanding of what matters most to the people who the brand is for. Traditional brand strategy is perpetuated by and over-reliance on macro trends, supposed best practices and the gut instincts of many involved.

Further exacerbating these challenges is how so many brand leaders are fixated on articulating their brand’s “why,” without nearly as much regard for understanding their “who.” While the question of “What’s our why?” may be a good leadership principle, when it is misapplied as a brand strategy framework, it’s incomplete. This leads to a half-baked brand strategy that often lacks deep customer understanding and brand relevance.

Today, people are going about their day, actively skipping ads whenever possible, scrolling past your brand in the feed or deflecting an onslaught of spam email sales pitches. They are consciously or subconsciously ignoring anything that doesn’t stand out as relevant to them. They’re busy, distracted and focused on their own life and business. They’re seeking happiness, less stress, the ability to overcome challenges and looking for ways to be more successful at whatever they are trying to achieve. The last thing people want is to be interrupted by irrelevant brand messages or set back by poor customer experiences.

If you're still reliant on traditional brand strategy, here are three things that you should consider:

1. Traditional Brand Strategy is Broken,
2. People Care About Their Own Motivations,
3. Most Brand Leaders Don’t Know the Real Reasons Why Customers Choose Their Brand

What’s often missing is an outside-in perspective and deep emotional insights to answer, "What does the customer truly care about?".

Emotional Insights - Your Greatest Competitive Advantage

Emotional Insights are a deep understanding of the underlying emotions driving our decisions and behavior, our motivations. We most often find that the reasons people choose and stick with specific brands, products and services, are rooted in emotional benefits brand leaders had not considered. While most brand leaders tend to focus brand messaging on the product features and benefits they believe are most important, when talking with a brand’s customers, other reasons emerge that are most often less tangible emotional benefits. Time and again I’m reminded of just how powerful a role emotion plays in our judgements and behaviors.

Think about a brand that you’ve made a consistent part of your life. How does it make you feel? At some point, it caught your attention, then it sparked your desire and you started using it. Now, you not only like it, but you would rather not live without it. As a result of these feelings, it’s most likely a brand that you go out of your way for, one you tell other people about and one you forgive for any rare frustrating experience.

Thanks to how the brand communicates, the experiences it delivers and most importantly, the way it makes you feel, this brand has earned your interest, engagement, desire and repeated business. This doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because the brand leader took the time to understand and address the emotional motivations of customers.

When a brand makes you feel this way, you’re experiencing, what I call, Limbic Sparks.

A New Way Forward for Brand Leadership

The antidote for traditional brand strategy is an approach relying on emotional insights to fuel how a brand connects with the people who it's for. Limbic Sparks Brand Strategy is the non-traditional brand strategy approach putting emotional insight at the center of how brands attract and retain customers. It's rooted in behavioral science understanding and deep curiosity.

Limbic Sparks Brand Strategy is a modern-day approach. It prioritizes discovery of the emotional motivations driving customer behavior, as a critical input to developing brand strategy, marketing and customer experiences. It’s about finding the relevant intersection of “why” and “who” to create Limbic Sparks.

Limbic Sparks Brand Strategy includes three steps that will help you spark brand desire:

· Focus – Discovering the Shared Emotional Motivation that your brand has in common with the people it’s for.

This phase of insights discovery is distinctly different from traditional band strategy, because it prioritizes deep curiosity about what matters most to customers, and it helps you identify the Shared Emotional Motivation.

· Connect – Strengthening connections with customers by standing for the emotional benefits they care about the most.

This phase of brand strategy development is different in that it uses the Shared Emotional Motivation to get to a Brand Idea. This idea must be a compelling brand benefit and invitation. While so many brands are talking about themselves, attempting to lure customers in with "we" statements and a litany of product and service details, a Limbic Sparks Brand Idea invites people in to experience the emotional benefits we’ve discovered they are seeking and/or would appreciate.

One example is a brand helping supply chain managers with a software solution that vastly improves precision in inventory planning. By understanding customer motivations, we evolved their Brand Idea and orientation for all brand communications, from: “We put you at the center of supply chain success.” to “Be Supply Chain Invincible.” This is backed up by other emotional benefits their customers want to feel.

· Evolve – Creating evolved Brand Expression & Experiences to address how people want to feel.

This phase is about activating the brand strategy through brand expression which consists of messaging, visual identityand sonic identity, and brand experiences across all touch points. It prioritizes considering how people want to feel during every interaction and leads to customers feeling like the brand was designed with them in mind.

A Shift in Perspective and Approach: Limbic Sparks Mindset

No matter where you are in your career, or the lifecycle of your brand, you will embrace a Limbic Sparks Mindset to better understand and address how people want to feel and set your brand apart. Whether you're doing the work yourself or guiding your team, you’ll be able to put this emotion-centric mindset into practice every day, even when a big brand evolution is not underway.

The thing to keep in mind is when you’re making people’s lives better and helping them feel the way they want to feel, you’ll ignite their interest and spark ongoing desire for your brand.

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