I've Got A Feeling

Customers respond to your brand based on how it makes them feel.

I’ve been working with many businesses, in a hugely diverse range of industries, on how to engage their customers via social media marketing.

One of the starting points in the workshops I run includes a question:

“What do your customers want?”

Every one of the fabulous business people I’ve worked with can rattle off a list of the attributes of their products. But that doesn’t really answer the question does it? That list is often what the business thinks the customer wants, and it seldom taps in to the real core of the matter.

An example:

House sales: Estate agents will tell me their customers want a property…and while a “residential property” might be the official name for it and a potential buyer could very well ask for a “house”, what the buyer really wants is a home. Home is warm, comfortable, a haven, and a lot easier to market and connect with than a “house”.

I think this is one of the cruxes of the marketing conundrum these days (or perhaps it’s always has been?)

As clever as we’ve become with our Cookies, Kaggle, Scizzle, Digg and the plethora of other fascinating research tools available to us, at the end of the day, consumers are still (irritatingly :-) unpredictably) human. And that means that in order to connect with them effectively, our brands need to be “human” too.

These two little nuggets of information get right down to the core of it:

“fMRI neuro-imagery shows that when evaluating brands, consumers primarily use emotions (personal feelings and experiences) rather than information (brand attributes, features, and facts).”

“Studies show that positive emotions toward a brand have far greater influence on consumer loyalty than trust and other judgments which are based on a brand’s attributes.”

– How Emotions Influence What We Buy : Peter Noel Murray PHD

So it turns out that getting into the messy human bits, when marketing to customers, is how brands form those long term relationships with the people who buy their products.

My favourite quote which sums up this topic is:

 “What you make people feel is as important as what you make!”- BMW

You see people will feel something about your brand, whether you’re consciously guiding the process or not. (Even apathy is a feeling.)

So the question to ponder is simply this:

“What does your brand make people feel?