There are 7 essential steps to the Emotional Marketing process:
1. Insights: How well do you know your customers?
Identify the primary feelings, emotions and behavior that motivate your customers to make a decision. Connecting those feelings to your brand will inspire more thought and consideration.
2. Positioning: What makes your brand different, better?
Repositioning a brand in emotional ways creates greater recognition. Positioning is everything. What are you doing to create differentiation with your brand or organization’s position – particularly against your biggest competitors? Is your positioning supporting the brand story and heritage? Can you tell someone what makes your brand better or truly different in less than 10 seconds? If you can’t, you have a positioning problem.
3. Storytelling: How interesting and relevant is your story?
Stories are processed through an entirely different cognitive system – where people tend to put down their cognitive defenses. Therefore, a good emotional story can make a significant impact on motivating response. Your brand story must create a powerful emotional connection. Creating a brand story is not simply about standing out and getting noticed. It’s about building something that people care about and want to buy into.
4. Imagery: What kind of powerful images evoke curiosity and attention?
People process images thousands of times faster than text; love to share cool imagery and are drawn to beauty and universality. Research indicates that Images may be superior to words in inducing evaluative responses, communicating emotions and creating memories. Emotions drive the basic motivations that energize behavior – which is one of the reasons why TV and video is so effective in influencing consumer purchase behavior. Expressing a brand’s essence through unexpected and powerful visuals attract greater interest and attention.
5. Ideas: What type of ideas make people remember?
The very definition of idea means “a thought or suggestion as to a possible course of action…or the aim or purpose”. The brands with the most original, creative, emotional and unique ideas are the ones that stand out, are memorable and create conversations. The best ideas make you feel, think, remember and share.
6. Integration and technology: What is the best way to mange outcomes?
Adaptable, personalized digital experiences ensure your brand connects emotionally with customers across all platforms and channels. Creating personalized experiences to ensure that your brand connects emotionally with your consumer, no matter where they are, what device they are using or how they interact with it.
7. Analytics: How can you use analytics to emotionally track a customer?
You are constantly learning from your consumers and how they connect emotionally with your brand over time. The customer journey is about understanding how and where to connect in every touch point your customer is interacting with. It’s not just about collecting data but knowing what to do with it. Go beyond data and dashboards to reveal actionable, emotional insights that influence conversations and tactics.
These are simple steps that we work with every day. This process works and has continued to yield positive and meaningful results for our clients.
