Brand intimacy and emotional connections are buzz words, that are often used and seldom understood. Time and time again, we hear how critical they are for business success. Most businesses, dare I say 98%, do this as an unconscious competence or not at all.
Emotional connections create a more human way of doing business and greater profitability.
Connecting as a brand means your business starts to relate in a more human way with your customers. A connection means your customers feel felt by your business. Feeling felt means you are acknowledging how your customer emotionally experiences life. This feeling felt connection can be at every brand touch point, and is a doorway into a high trust relationship, greater perceived value and therefore greater brand margin. Emotional connections drive profit.
The connection becomes even more powerful when there is empathy. Empathy is when you feel the feelings of your customers and your organizational values align with your customer’s personal value system. For instance, a customer may feel fear about time management and accordingly value timeliness. To create empathy, your organization can show you understand those fears and by making a timeliness based brand promise that demonstrates an alignment in values.
Any CEO who does not understand the emotional connections with their customers is in trouble.
Customers do business with brands they feel connected to, and so emotional connections drive competitive advantage. Businesses that have not developed emotional connections with their customers are open to attack by competitors who do. A business either needs to position itself for success through consciously creating emotional connections or competitors will position it for failure.
Branded emotional connections mitigate risk in business investment, because it allows a business decision maker to invest in those outcomes that will be most valued by customers. By using the emotional connections to design the customer experience, brand messages, branded content, products, services and customer solutions, your brand becomes a better fit with their life.
As is true in personal relationships, building an emotional connection with others starts with self awareness. A brand needs to look in the mirror using qualitative research and begin to understand their self image, and when they know themselves, it is then they can reach out to customers through emotional connections.
Louise Kelly
Managing Director
Hearts and Minds
Founder Thought Leaders Circle
Thought Leaders Circle 