Have you ever wondered in what emotional space does your brand reside?
What comes to your consumer's mind when they hear your brand's name and what do they relate it to? How do you know if you are eliciting the right emotions that will optimize growth for your brand in its category against your competitors?
As you build strategies and execute them, are you measuring what emotions you are infusing in your communications, activations, and touchpoints?
These are some of the questions that a brand manager or marketer must ask themselves and find the solution. Laying the foundation for the right emotional space of your brand at the beginning itself is one of the most crucial steps for any brand or product.
Let's take a look at the 3 steps which can get you to your destination
Understand Where You Stand Today
The first step in building an iconic and thriving brand is to understand where you stand today. This can be done by identifying the space in which your brand’s emotions lie right 'Now'.
To accelerate brand growth, it is critical to identify where your brand is building a positive emotional connection in a way which is important to consumers in the category that you exist so that you can execute consistently within that emotional territory.
Also as Marketers, the first thing we do is to measure positive brand associations, but a lot many times we ignore the negative associations which is also equally critical to igniting brand growth
As research suggests, humans tend to suffer from a negativity bias. The impact to brands is that one negative emotion has three times the impact on purchase behaviour that a positive one does.
By measuring your emotional space in which your brand exists Now, it becomes easier to identify any negative associations with your brand and start working on it.
Identifying and working through negative associations is essential to building a thriving brand.
So as a marketer and brand builder, do you know in what space does your brand's emotion lie Now? Do you know if you have any negative associations that could be indicators of concern for your brand?
Identify Where You Need To Go or where is your Destiny
Once you have identified where your brand lies in the current space, you need to identify where your brand needs to go. Every brand has an emotional ‘Right Space’.
The Right Space here refers to the emotional real estate where purchase intent, loyalty and advocacy towards your brand is maximized. These customer metrics typically translate into significantly better business performance across sales, profit, market share and the price premium that customers will accept.
An emotional ‘Right Space’ should be ownable, credible, and profitable.
Ownable in the sense that whenever these emotions thrive inside the consumers, your brand name is something that they are able to associate with more than your competitors. Credible in that it makes sense for your brand to direct consumer emotion that way. Profitable in the sense that you're in this race for a long run so identifying the emotional triggers that will lead your brand to a sustainable long-term competitive advantage.
So as a marketer you need to ask if you could make your consumers feel just one emotion, would you know which one to focus all your resources on? Will you be able to answer what your brand’s emotional ‘Right Space’ is?
Figure out- How To Get There
Once you have identified your brand’s emotional space that you operate in Now and ‘Right Space’, the key to building and growing your brand is executing every interaction with relentless consistency.
Your brand’s expression should be unified across every touchpoint from product, packaging, communication, to in-store activation.
The key to consistency is to uncover which of your brand elements (i.e. colours, pack shape, logo lockup, brand script, brand characters, taglines, package shape, etc.) evoke emotions within your brand’s ‘Right Space’ and then ensure that these elements are executed across every touchpoint with persistent consistency.
Every brand innovation journey should start with how you want to make your customers feel. Every creative and design brief should start by linking to your brand’s emotional “Right Space’.
It is advised that this 'Right Space is set up early on initial advertising storyboards and package designs so as to ensure that you are evoking the right emotions from the beginning itself, rather than creating a persuasion and breakthrough in the later stage
At the end of the day, consumers spend very little time thinking about your brand. They have jobs, families, their own lives and don’t have time to expend mental energy on figuring out what brand to buy or how to find your brand on the shelf.
This is why it is so important to provide them with mental shortcuts through a consistent expression of your brand’s emotional ‘Right Space’ across every single brand element and then ensure these brand elements are expressed in a unified manner across every single communication, activation, and touchpoint
In the end, just ask these question to evaluate your brand's 'Right Space'-Do you know what emotions you want your consumers to feel? Do you know whether this will ensure victory against your competition in your category?
Once you know that, you should invest in measuring how each of your marketing tactics performs in that emotional area. Not only will this ensure more effective use of your budget, but it will also drive stronger emotional connections with consumers, and build your brand in a way that accelerates its growth.