In this digital age, standing out is top of everyone’s mind. But it’s nearly impossible to come up with marketing tactics or creative ads that will rise above your competitors. Even then, digital is so oversaturated and the attention span of those scrolling through ads is so brief that coming up with best-of-the-best marketing is a ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ kind of game.
What if attention-grabbing ads or marketing work wasn’t the most important thing? Yes, getting people to take notice is the first step toward good marketing and it’s valuable and necessary. If a company hangs its hat solely on marketing this way, they’re going to miss the most important aspect of any customer’s experience: brand experience and an emotional connection.
If this is a new concept to you, or even if you’re well-versed in brand experience, keep reading. Emotions are at the forefront of marketing right now. Truly grasping how your customers’ emotions can affect change in your marketing and, by extension, your sales will open your eyes to a whole new way of targeting your ideal audience.
Brand experience combines customer experience, user experience and brand identity. The culmination of these three induces decision-making based on instinctive feeling, or affect heuristics.
Defining Brand Experience in an Age of Emotion
A full 70% of customer decisions are based on emotional rather than rational decisions. So what does that look like in a real-life scenario? Picture this with me: your child joined their high school track team, but their old shoes are wearing out. You need to buy new running shoes that are both reliable and made for their style of running. What brand immediately comes to mind?
Brand experience encompasses all the feelings you just had. Good quality, made for what you need, relatable messaging, nostalgia from when you wore that brand in high school. All these feelings come together in the consumer’s mind to create trust, which will determine whether or not they’ll follow through on purchasing your product again and again.
Disney, IKEA and Apple are a few brands that have created experiences across every touchpoint, bringing out respective holistic brand experiences that lead to customers with a high return rate.
How Brand Experience Builds Trust and Emotional Bonds
A pre-pandemic study by Motista showed that emotionally connected customers spend up to 2x more and have a 306% higher LTV. Not only that, but the rate at which these customers recommend their preferred brands is 30.2% compared to just 7.6%.
Emotional motivators can be gauged, harnessed, and used to target an ideal audience’s feelings. According to Harvard Business Review, these emotional motivators are a more accurate metric for a customer's future value than even customer satisfaction or brand awareness. A few high impact emotional motivators include:
- Having confidence in the future
- Feeling a sense of freedom
- Feeling secure
- Having a sense of belonging
The Psychology Behind Customer Loyalty
So how does a brand take some of these emotional motivators and use them in their favor? This Emporia State University article sums up some of the psychology behind customer loyalty and brand experience:
Trust comes from consistent quality, reliability, and positive experiences. Emotional connections are also a potent force in brand loyalty. When a brand elicits positive emotions, it forms a deep bond with consumers. This emotional connection can develop through storytelling, relatability, and a brand’s ability to cater to the customer’s aspirations and desires. A sense of community or belonging can also foster loyalty. When consumers feel part of a brand’s community, they are more likely to stay loyal.
This ties into Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs that points to the importance a person places on feeling a sense of belonging. Ultimately, brand loyalty comes down to knowing a brand can be trusted, relied upon for consistency, and looked to for the fulfillment of needs. Instead of focusing on outrunning the competition, brands should start focusing on genuine relationships with their customers.
As the world’s most valuable brand, when you purchase from Apple, users know they’re purchasing more of a lifestyle than just simply a device. Apple has done a great job of embedding their branding into every touchpoint a customer has along the way. Jeep is another brand that sells a lifestyle and sense of belonging rather than simply just a vehicle. Even though those are both large, entrenched brands, it needs to be stressed that smaller brands can build an excellent brand experience, as well. Brand experience is based on the connection between a brand and its core customers. Understanding your customer, building trust, and creating an experience that is wrapped around emotions felt when using or experiencing your product can be done with a brand of any size.
Emotional Triggers That Shape Brand Preference
Triggers like nostalgia, aspiration, and personalization are at the heart of a brand experience that lends itself to brand loyalty.
Nostalgia brings back past memories and helps recall positive associations. Tying this to a brand can cause your ideal customers to associate your brand with positive memories, giving them a warm feeling when thinking of your brand. HubSpot notes that this Nintendo commercial does a great job with nostalgia by reminding viewers of times gone by, families and siblings and feelings of love and warmth.
Empathy and Human-Centered Design
While it’s easy to look at successful brands and envy how they’ve honed in on their brand experience, know that it likely took them many pivots in their marketing and customer relations to reach that point. Being able to take constructive criticism from your customers on how you can more adequately relate to them is part of the process. Not only does this further you along the road to a healthy emotional relationship with your customers, but it shows your audience that you’re willing to listen and adapt according to their needs, fostering a much-needed bond of trust.
Designing Brand Experiences That Spark Emotion
There are several important factors that should be incorporated into successful brand experiences, including consistency, storytelling, and properly using customer feedback. Let’s delve into a few more specifics.
Deliver Consistency Across the Customer Journey
The customer journey includes all the touchpoints from when someone is first introduced to your brand all the way through to the content you create to keep them coming back. All content - whether on social media, in sales messaging, or in the buyer’s journey - should have a consistent voice, tone, and positioning. This means that whether someone sees a post on your Instagram feed or they bring up an email you sent to remind them their order is on the way, it should be apparent they’re from the same place.
Storytelling: The Shortcut to Emotional Connection
As Brent so eloquently puts it, not every piece of content you create needs to lead the customer to purchase something. Sometimes, your audience doesn’t yet know they are in need of what you’re offering. By creating great content that adds value to a reader’s life, you’ll have them coming back when they have another question. A great avenue to accomplish this is through storytelling.
Narrative sticks in the brain in a way advertising tends not to. Whether it’s by telling your origin story or customer success stories, creating compelling content doesn’t always have to lead your reader to a CTA – just back to you.
Using Customer Feedback To Deepen Connection
Listening to the audience is vital to keep your brand flourishing. Having a finger on the pulse of your core customers to see how they feel and what they need is a good way to move “onwards and upwards.” While you’ll need to filter out the voices that are simply chaos agents or trolls, being able to take a good, honest look at customer reviews, surveys and social media feedback, and pivot where and when necessary, will go a long way toward ensuring brand longevity. After all, your customers are your brand’s lifeblood.
How Kuno Creative Helps Brands Build Loyalty Through Experience
If you’re feeling a little overwhelmed with what it takes to create a brand experience, that’s understandable. It’s not going to be an overnight switch - rather, it’s going to take a lot of time, effort and research to be able to emotionally connect with those who value your brand the most.
As Brittany points out, these are great elements to consider when identifying and developing your company's brand experience:
- Emotional Connection
- Consistency & Reliability
- Authenticity & Transparency
- Social Proof & Community Influence
- Sense of Identity & Personalization
- Trust & Risk Reduction
Kuno Creative has helped many brands across sectors delve into their most valuable assets - like buyer persona development, journey mapping and emotionally resonant messaging - to build human-first strategies that encompass all of these vital points.
As an example, prior to partnering with Kuno, RapidAI didn’t do much in the way of marketing. They knew they needed a boost in this area, but weren’t sure where to start. After working with Kuno Creative to refresh their brand, here are a few of their stats:
- New organic contacts increased 1,373% six months after website launch
- Google ranking moved to the #1 spot
- Saw a 377% improvement in top ten keyword rankings
Similarly, Green Circle Growers needed to get their orchid brand, Just Add Ice, on the virtual map. The services they utilized included demand generation, content marketing, video marketing, brand experience and SEO. A few of their results included:
- Organic search increased by 34%
- Online orders increased by 74%
- Blog views increased by 493%
We focus on building trust through emotion, transparency and authenticity. As we get to know your brand, we’ll pull out the very best and create a relatable brand experience that stays locked in on building lasting customer relations.
