We are witnessing the age of emotional branding and this is the real mission of every brand: making itself felt rather than just seen. It’s about drawing an advantage from perceptions and establishing a real and emotional contact with consumers who are increasingly becoming the main protagonists.
For many years, brands have been acting in isolation, using consumers simply as passive targets, bombarding them with messages, and sadly, ignoring their real needs and aspirations. Today, engaging in emotional branding means first and foremost rebuilding contact that is authentic with the consumer, or better, with the person as a unique individual.
Engagement, storytelling and personalisation are the new aspects of marketing for businesses for whom ‘informing customers’ is simply no longer enough. A brand needs to engage, narrate, and create empathy with the end-customer by creating a lasting and meaningful relation with individuals in what is today being defined as the age of emotional branding.
Building stories that generate a passionate response is becoming increasingly important.
This process starts from within the very structure and parameters of a product: its logo; its brand name; or the packaging. This means listening. Because empathy starts from here. To truly create products that engage, one needs to take time to properly understand the sector to which one is referring. We need to analyse the market, analyse the competitor, analyse the potential customer. Branding comes after this.
For a number of years now, there has been a wider process in place that looks at narration and how consumers absorb and relate to this incoming information. Emotional branding is the result that occurs when we manage to successfully combine storytelling in our presentation of the end product, when we manage to shift consumers’ attention to how the brand will make them feel – rather than on what the brand will give them.
A logical consequence of a brand’s will to establish an intimate relation with the consumer is personalisation, a trend which currently seems to be very popular in food and beverage packaging as the famous example from Coca–Cola with its campaign ‘Share a Coke’ substituting – and to a certain extent sacrificing – its logo for the consumer’s own name to take centre stage.
Nutella followed suit with ‘Nutella is You’ and proposing jars personalised with named labels. To reacquire contact with the target audience, the product has been personalised with the name or a role in life as though to speak directly to the consumer and telling him: “This product is not a brand: this product is you.”
At face value, it is a simple idea. Yet, the simpler the idea, the more successful it is and this was no exception. This move meant returning the brand to where it belongs – to its rightful owner, the consumer. Putting the consumer at the very heart of the brand’s life.
Even more interesting was a campaign run by Absolute Unique, where the uniqueness of each product was secured through a seemingly complex industrial printing process which, in turn, makes the consumer unique.
A lot of emotion comes with the brand name. Emotional brands are those that communicate what the product stands for, what we call the ‘brand promise’. This is why, contrary to what many think, a brand name is the result of thorough study and scientific research and not the product of a sudden bout of inspiration! It has to be profoundly strategic if it is to sustain the brand for a very long time.
The name is the very essence of the brand’s emotion
There essentially exist four distinct phases in the creation of a winning brand name. First there is definition, what the name says, what it implies, in which markets will this name be showing and to whom it will be appealing. Then there is the creative elaboration, concentrating on the real concept rather than on the product or its description. This is followed by selection where one needs to look at all the potential options of names available because the name needs to respond to creative, marketing and legal linguistic criteria. And finally there’s control, which involves in-depth analysis, partly from an aspect of intellectual property to verify that the name has not been already registered, and testing the name on potential consumers.
How do we build a successful brand name in this era of emotional branding? The name is the start of our storytelling. Without the name, there can be no story; without a name, the brand cannot exist. The name is the very essence of the brand’s emotion. Communicating with our respective audiences starts from here.
www.corporateidentities.eu
James Vella Clark is a manager at Corporate Identities.