Brand experiences need emotions, but which ones?

We all know that emotional engagements are good for brands, but which lead to best results, asks MarketCast’s Steve Smith.

Think about one of the best books you have ever read. Feels good, doesn’t it?

No matter what the book – it might even have been a factual book – chances are you get that feeling because of how the story is told. As the old adage goes, it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.

Psychologists have a term for how stories are told. Metacommunication. And studies show that metacommunication has the biggest influence upon how people feel about brands than anything else, because metacommunication is entirely emotional.

A brand that resonates with people emotionally is a brand that people will feel strongly about over time. It’s what helps make a brand ‘strong’ in people’s minds. And Kahneman’s research around System One, System Two thinking shows us that people who have had a positive (or negative) emotional experience with a brand are likely to draw on that experience when having to decide between two similar brands.

But what about cognitive experiences? Aren’t these just as important? A while back I conducted a study across 40 brands. I wanted to find out which has more impact upon a person’s likelihood to prefer one brand over its competitors: emotional engagement, or cognitive engagement?

Taking supermarkets as an example, people who experience positive emotions when having a media encounter with a grocery brand are on average 10% more likely to prefer that grocer over its competitors than if their experience was mostly cognitive.

There are likely two responses to this.

Firstly, is it enough for a brand if a person only connects emotionally? Of course, if a person who has an emotional response doesn’t link it back to the brand then there’s little value to it. However, connections and associations aren’t always conscious.

Robert Heath in his book, Seducing the Subconscious, demonstrates how the most successful advertising campaigns are those that are able to effortlessly slip under our radar and influence our behaviour without us knowing.

He gives the example of a commercial for Nationwide Building Society. Playing in the background is the Ben E King classic, Stand by Me. Although you may not recall the ad or the message (he describes the commercial as ‘very forgettable’!), it means that you are likely over time to associate Nationwide with being reliable and supportive when facing major problems.

Secondly, perhaps a brand owner might only want to convey information, so it doesn’t matter if people respond emotionally or not. Yet studies show that metacommunication is strongly related to whether people believe that information. Think of that book again. It may have been a work of fiction, but you believed it whilst you were reading it, didn’t you?

The next question is, what kinds of emotions are most beneficial to a brand? It depends upon the brand category and a multitude of other factors including people’s personalities and values, but research I have conducted shows there are three main types of emotions that are most likely to lead to brand success: empathy, desire and excitement.

Empathy

Empathy is about putting yourself in the position of others. It’s that warm feeling you often get when you see an ad that connects you to a character or scenario. People often experience empathy when they encounter depictions of pride, love, humanity, loneliness, friendships and memories.

Think John Lewis Christmas ads or the puppy in the Kleenex toilet tissue commercials. These scenarios are commonplace in FMCG ads. Babies, children or families enjoying a meal or leisure time together are regular features. Empathy draws you into the scenarios so you have a feeling of participating in them.

Brands employ empathy as a vehicle for another emotion – security. Take some financial brand communications. Those pension ads of older couples laughing together in the sunshine, or health insurance ads featuring parents with their children. Being put into that situation, you want to make sure your loved ones are taken care of. Likewise, ads for cleaning products often feature children and babies. You want them to feel safe.

Empathy needs to be dealt with carefully. Like in some films, it is easy for empathy to turn into sickly sweet sentimentality or for brands to use it inappropriately. An ad for a major US insurance company aired during the 2015 Super Bowl. Showing children who have died in preventable accidents, it resulted in a social media backlash. Rightly, the brand tried to to raise an important social issue, but doing at the very moment when Americans were in a collective party mood was a mistake.

Desire

Feelings of desire are especially important for more premium brands. Think of Apple design and Steve Jobs’ fixation with how the iPhone should feel. Or the look of a Paul Smith suit and the cool sensuous lines of cars featured in Audi or BMW ads. Or from FMCG, Peroni with its muted colours, and its links with the beauty of Italy and Italian opera, or fragrance brands that use gold, pastels and images of attractive men and women.

For such brands, elegant aesthetics are key to creating desire. So often are depictions of adventure, mystery and pleasure. Desire is about the power of representation – that such brands stand for a lifestyle people desire and aspire to. It is also about exclusivity and inclusivity – a desire to be included in ‘the set’ whilst also excluding others.

A belief in brand claims is essential for desire. You need to have integrity – that you will deliver what you promise. This means cognitive claims are important, but they need to be oriented toward configuring emotional responses of trust and loyalty.

Claims about and evidence of heritage can be useful here. VW and Levis are brands that leverage and build upon their heritage, spending years developing their products, while remaining true to quality, reliability and engineering.

Excitement

Excitement is the third emotion essential for making many brand experiences valuable. It is especially evident in ads for video games, films, auto, travel and even FMCG. Think of the adrenaline and thrill of Red Bull events, or Pepsi Max events featuring Jeff Gordon.

In experiences like these, thrill is combined with sit on the edge of your seat risk. This is a cross over with empathy – you imagine yourself being in the position of the main character.

Music can play a central role in creating excitement. It gives us cues for how we should feel and what we might expect. It is especially important for fashion, car and sports brands. This BT Sport ad advertising its coverage of the 2014/15 Premier League Season creates excitement through a fast tempo, coupled with cheering crowds.

There is another reason why creating emotional responses is so important for brands, and it’s to do with the competition for people’s attention. Watching TV one moment, reading a text another, then Facebooking the next.

People are spending less time concentrating on one task or experience, fragmenting their attention across a multitude of demands, needs and wants. But the thing about emotional responses is they tend to be immediate. You see something and in a moment you feel excited, angry, happy, passionate. You hear the first few bars of a song and you’re taken back to that holiday, that day, that moment.

One of the proof points to the importance of emotional engagements is the longevity of some brands, whilst others fall on the wayside. Think of the most iconic brands you know.

Would Coca-Cola be so successful were it not for all those Christmas ads with their call for community and togetherness, or Nike without those inspirational calls to ‘just do it’, or Dyson without its elegant aesthetics and easy to use products, or Ikea without its democratic, affordable design appeal? These brands have longevity in people’s hearts – and minds – because they continue to understand people and engage with them emotionally.

There’s a challenge here to media and advertising agencies. Emotions and the roles they play in brand experiences need unpacking and then leveraging. Which emotions and even combinations of emotions have greatest impacts across which brands and brand categories, across which types of people (such as according to their personalities), across which media and according to what brand strategies?

And so which research methods should you employ to reliably uncover and then measure them to create insights and tools which facilitate brand experience design and planning that go on to build success for your clients?

Create some answers to these and you will create some excitement.

Steve Smith is research director at research consultancy MarketCast