I found these articles which are talking about
emotional branding. I think it can be interesting for our group and the project
we have for Wiklund. Indeed, it can help us to find how to create passion
around a brand. Perhaps the question we have to wonder is how to create a tribe
around Wiklund and the value of the department store.
“Customers
define themselves through brands they use. The branded clothes they wear, the
cars they drive, the drinks they consume, university they attended, favourite
spots to hang out, and so on.”
Nyimpini Mabunda, Smirnoff Vodka Marketing
Manager:
Emotional Branding In
a Changing Marketplace
Emotional branding helps to create intrinsic
relationships between brands and consumers. This helps companies to be
differentiated from their competitors.
Brands have to try to create connections with
their customers on a personal level. A company engaged in emotional branding
puts the needs of its customers ahead of the product it is selling.
Thus, a company has to:
-
decide which emotion it wants to target in its audience: defining the target
audience’s core emotional need,
-
encourage customers to reach the desires emotionally bonded state: what the
customers want, need and aspire,
-
create consistent communications centered on customers’ emotional needs.
Five Tips for Effective “Emotional Branding”
Main information of the article
When a company is selling products or services,
it is selling a way to improve people’s lives. To do that effectively, it has
to make them feel (not just think) that the company is the right answer to
their problem.
Feeling is what emotional branding is about and
the feeling does not even need to be directly connected to the brand.
What does a company need to launch an emotional
branding campaign?
1.
Shift its focus: a company has to approach its audience as individual
people and know who are its customers, what they want.
Companies have to think about people, rather
than consumers; about experience rather than products; about dialogue rather
than information delivery.
2. Create material so emotionally
compelling that it is eminently shareable: sharing is the best
advertising out there because it is heartfelt but also free.
3. Learn about the emotional hot
buttons that get people to purchase:
Barry Feig
defines 16 hot buttons that drive consumer behavior and shows marketers and
salespeople how to identify and push the hot buttons that will get consumers to
prefer and purchase their products over a competitor's. These “hot buttons
marketing” are:
- Desire for control - I’m better than you - Excitement of discovery
- Revaluing - Family
values -
Desire to belong
- Fun is its own reward - Poverty of time - Desire to get the
best
- Self-achievement - Sex/Love/Romance - Reinventing oneself
- Make me smarter - Nurturing response - Power/Dominance/Influence
- Wish fulfillment
4. Tell a story:
storytelling made emotional connections. We have to create a story to make our
customers feel what we want them to feel. It is the best way to make sure that
consumers will keep thinking of us and our brands.
5. Leave the consumers with a strong
feeling, happy or sad: it is not
about what information about its brand a company wants to leave its audience
with. It is what feeling a company wants to leave them with.
Companies
do not have to make a direct link between their product and the feeling they
want associated with it. They only have to link them in their prospects' and
customers' minds.
I think it can be useful to try to find how it is possible for Wiklund to
create an emotional attachment to what it is selling and thus, a real bond
between the company and its customers. Maybe Wiklund should “sell” itself to
the customers as a real brand.
Sources:
Emma Britto
