Brand Building:
Activating Commitment and Brand Attachment

Emotional positioning goes beyond “happy” or “sad” faces.

Getting to the Heart of the Matter

“Branding… is really a process for attaching an idea to a product. Decades ago, that idea might have been strictly utilitarian: trustworthy, effective, a bargain… over time the ideas have become more elaborate…even emotional…” - NY Times Magazine Article “Brand Underground’ July 2006

Over the last few years, virtually every time I’ve talked to clients and colleagues, attended a conference, or opened an industry publication I’ve encountered the “E” word – emotions.

The ubiquity of the word is a testament to the migration of the marketing world from the tangible to the intangible. As marketers we all believe that successful brands have an emotional appeal. While everyone is hopping on the “emotional band wagon” – conversations about emotion are often limited to what is defined in the context of emotional theory as valence.

Our good friend Wikipedia tells us that, in its most general definition, emotion is an “intense mental state that arises automatically in the nervous system rather than through conscious effort, and evokes either a positive or negative psychological response.” This, albeit, simplistic definition is in line with the general concept of valence – which is typically defined in terms of pleasure and its opposites.

• An emotion is said to be positive because it is associated with pleasure. Conversely, an emotion is said to be negative because it is associated with some opposite of pleasure – for example, anger, fear or sadness.

• Many of the research approaches used to measure emotional response rally around the notion of valence. Over the last few years we’ve seen techniques and measures based upon PAD (Pleasure, Arousal, Dominance) theories and a virtual explosion of biometric techniques, which range from Galvanic Skin Response to actually using MRI technology to observe a respondent’s brain while they view an ad.

When it comes to bringing brand strategy to life, indeed we want to know if the brand and its marketing communications make people feel happy or sad, however measures of valence are only minimally useful as temporary physiological reactions do little to explore how the marketing communication strengthens or reinforces the people-brand relationship.

Today’s most successful brands are those that develop a strong and enduring relationship with people. Critical to developing an enduring people-brand relationship is satisfying both the functional and emotive needs of people. Brands actively satisfy these needs through actual experience with the brand and its marketing communications. Therefore when developing brand strategy and bringing it to life it is important to go beyond valence to understand how the brand and its marketing communications tap into deeper emotive needs and desires.

• Emotive needs relate directly and powerfully to enduring self-concept

• Emotional valence is about temporary physiological reaction.

Therefore positive emotional valence is not, in and of itself, enough to strengthen or reinforce the people-brand relationship. It is only a creative means to an end – the end being the brand’s ability to satisfy emotive needs and desires.

Take, for instance, the memorable and quite successful Budweiser “Whass’up” campaign from years back. The humor of the original ad in the campaign led to positive emotional affect (i.e., valence) – male beer consumers generally found the ad to be amusing and entertaining. Now to be clear, the humor did indeed contribute to the success of the ad. But, what was most important was how the humor was used as a creative device to meet the needs and desires of male, beer consumers. Through this ad Budweiser became a fun and cool beer, synonymous with “being one of the guys”. It was about hanging out, unwinding and even getting a little wild and crazy. Had the humor of the ad not emotionally tapped into this “brotherhood of beer”, the ad might not have been as successful. And indeed we have seen many beer ads that, while humorous, amusing, and entertaining fail to make a true emotional appeal.

Over the last few years we have observed that the most successful advertising and marketing communication taps into both the functional and emotive needs and desires of people. Exploring how advertising taps into the functional needs of people has always been rather straightforward through direct questioning. But accessing the deeper emotive needs is a lot tougher as people have trouble articulating their emotional needs – and often aren’t even aware they exist at all.

• Through integrating projective techniques into our research approaches we are able to get under the surface.

• We access the subconscious communication of brands and their touch points allowing us to be the only market research firm to go beyond emotional valence and get to the heart of the matter.

Projective Photos are Used to Access the Emotive Layer

Benefit:
This helps consumers express their true feelings by overcoming the need for self-revelation inherent in conventional questioning (traditional approach: on a scale of 1-10, to what extent would you say this brand can be described as...)

This innovative approach reveals the emotional positioning of the brands:

For more information, please email tnsbcdinfo@tns-global.com.