Brands with heart & soul

Posted by Jason Dunstone on August 7th, 2009 at 3:45pm

Are you driven by your head or your heart? Be honest… Are you really that rational? Think about it. Your food, wine, clothes, car or favourite cafe. Think about your bad habits. Drinking, smoking, eating or how you drive your car. If you are anything like me, I’m sure your heart and the emotions within it have the upper hand over your good meaning head. Just like your good and bad conscience, do you really have that much control?

So why does much of the consumer branding and advertising continue to have such a rational focus on functional attributes such as service, convenience, price, distribution etc? Perhaps it is the complexity in targeting the appropriate emotions. Or it may be based on fear or other emotions reducing the ability to take such a perceived ‘risk’.

Roger Dooley posted a short piece on his Neuromarketing blog titled, “Emotional Ads Work Best.” In which he made the following compelling claim citing data from the book Brand Immortality by Pringle and Field …

“Campaigns with purely emotional content performed about twice as well (31% vs. 16%) with only rational content, and those that were purely emotional did a little better (31% vs 26%) those that mixed emotional and rational content.”

This article refers to Dooley’s comment and provides two ads as examples of emotional and rational advertising. Funny and interesting cases of the impact of emotional advertising.

It was also interesting in researching for this topic, viewing Kevin Roberts the Worldwide CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi discussing his take on the need to focus on emotions. In referring to Lovemarks, Roberts notes that “brands create loyalty for a reason. lovemarks create loyalty beyond reason.” In his speech to The Institute of Directors Annual Convention in London in April 2008, Roberts presents the interesting diagram below…

From my perspective, there are two key factors when adopting a strategy to target emotions …

Heart – it can’t be fake or insincere to make sales as consumers are savvy and have a built in bullshit detector
Soul – getting the rhythm right, relevant and targeting the appropriate emotions [e.g. fun is not for a funeral company but OK for a beer]

slide.002

An article I wrote on Think! in 2007 addresses to some extent ’soul’.

It is interesting the research I’ve been involved in over the years, that family businesses such as Coopers Brewery do the heart well. From this, they gain huge respect and consumer lobbying. A good example of this was when Pink recently visited Australia and asked on Twitter why people look at her funny when she orders a VB. Hundred’s of Coopers lovers from across Australia came the the defence of their loved beer.

In many instances brands and advertisers don’t appreciate the emotional connection they could have with their consumers.

This topic was discussed by me in our ‘first’ Think! Inspiration Vodcast talk on Monday the 3rd of August [Youtube goes for less than 10 minutes].