Emotions are powerful drivers of human behavior, preferences, and loyalty. They can also help you create a brand that stands out from the crowd and connects with your target audience. In this article, you will learn how to use emotions to craft a compelling brand story, identity, and voice that resonate with your customers and differentiate you from your competitors.
Emotions are not only subjective feelings, but also cognitive processes that influence how people perceive, remember, and evaluate brands. According to neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, emotions are essential for decision making, as they help people weigh the pros and cons of different options. Therefore, if you want your brand to be chosen over others, you need to appeal to your customers' emotions and make them feel something positive, meaningful, and relevant.
Emotions are not only crucial for decision-making, but they're also a key part of how we recall information. We remember more about how situations made us feel than specific details and facts. Our aim when branding is to have a positive influence on our audience's perception of the business, product or service. And feelings play a huge role in helping people remember you in a favourable light. If you can make them feel something, they're more likely to remember your brand and act positively when they next encounter it. If you think back to a time you had excellent customer service, for example, you can remember the encounter in more detail than one of the hundreds of times you got average service.
The first step to using emotions for branding is to identify your brand's emotional core, or the main emotion that you want your customers to associate with your brand. This emotion should reflect your brand's purpose, values, and personality, as well as your customers' needs, desires, and aspirations. For example, if your brand's purpose is to inspire creativity, your emotional core could be joy, curiosity, or wonder. To find your brand's emotional core, you can use tools such as the Plutchik's wheel of emotions, the Brand Archetypes framework, or the Brand Personality Spectrum.
A single, strong emotion is the best way to build an emotional core - and using archetypes is a good place to start. As they are common tropes in the shared human experience, it is easy to attribute emotions to them, which you can use to begin identifying the emotional core of your own brand. The 'Hero' for example naturally creates a vision of courage or mastery, while the 'Innocent' has a more pure, joyful feeling associated with it. While these are a great starting point, it's important to go deeper and understand why these emotions are important to your brand. Think about how your customers may be feeling when they first encounter your brand and what change you want to see in them when you show them the solutions.
Once you have identified your brand's emotional core, you need to tell your brand's emotional story, or the narrative that explains how your brand delivers on its promise and fulfills its customers' emotional needs. Your brand story should have a clear beginning, middle, and end, as well as a protagonist, a conflict, and a resolution. Your protagonist should be your customer, not your brand, and your conflict should be the problem or challenge that your customer faces. Your resolution should be how your brand helps your customer overcome the conflict and achieve their desired outcome.
Your brand's emotional identity is the visual and verbal expression of your brand's emotional core and story. It includes elements such as your logo, colors, fonts, images, icons, shapes, and symbols that convey your brand's emotion and personality. To design your brand's emotional identity, you need to use the principles of color psychology, typography, imagery, and symbolism to create a consistent and coherent visual language that evokes the right emotion in your customers. For example, if your brand's emotion is excitement, you could use bright colors, bold fonts, dynamic images, and exclamation marks.
The main thing to do is research! This is the scientific part of designing, utilising colour theory and shape psychology. Careful application of colour, fonts, shapes icons and more creates a distinct identity that people will begin to recognise. You can use these to build emotion into every aspect of the brand's identity. Build from a single, strong feeling to begin with is a great way to start, adding layers and complexity as you go to build a more unique identity. It's all too 'over design' and create confusion, so starting with the strongest emotion and building on this ensures you keep a clear, constant emotional message throughout the brand's visual identity. Additionally, test ideas and get feedback on how they make people feel.
Your brand's emotional voice is the tone and style of your brand's written and spoken communication. It includes aspects such as your vocabulary, grammar, syntax, punctuation, and humor that reflect your brand's emotion and personality. To communicate your brand's emotional voice, you need to use the principles of copywriting, storytelling, and rhetoric to create a distinctive and engaging voice that speaks to your customers' emotions and values. For example, if your brand's emotion is trust, you could use simple words, clear sentences, factual statements, and questions.
Learn from Disney's success! To make your brand stand out, consistently evoke a specific emotion in your customers, just like Disney brings joy and wonder to its audience, akin to a child in a magical world. Use your brand's emotional voice in all communication, employing tone, style, and vocabulary that reflect your brand's personality. If trust is your brand's heart, use simple, clear language. This approach not only makes your brand memorable and cherished but also fosters lasting customer loyalty, much like a beloved childhood toy.
The final step to using emotions for branding is to measure your brand's emotional impact, or the degree to which your brand elicits the desired emotion in your customers and influences their behavior and loyalty. To measure your brand's emotional impact, you need to use methods such as surveys, interviews, focus groups, sentiment analysis, and emotional analytics to collect and analyze data on your customers' emotional responses, satisfaction, retention, and advocacy. For example, if your brand's emotion is love, you could measure your brand's emotional impact by asking your customers how likely they are to recommend your brand to others, or how often they use your brand's products or services.