BRANDING   |   POSTED ON 17.12.2015

Leading on from Part 1; we now look at the practical ways that your brand can leverage emotive branding to build relationships, gain new followers, increase customer numbers and brand advocates.

Once you know your target audience and what they need, want and feel and you identify the emotions that your branding/marketing materials should target then it’s time to create marketing messages that trigger the right emotions in your audience so that they align with your brand and convert.

Design only with your audience in mind

Create targeted design and use your medium to enhance your message. All content should be created in a way that makes it easy for your audience to share.

Use a powerful combination

By combining imagery and language in the correct emotional way you will engage and build a relationship.

• Create a strong relationship between images and the copy
• Use confronting imagery to ensure that your message is heard
• Use iconic symbols to make an impact
• Use contrasting images and type in an emotionally jarring way
• Appeal to your audience’s common cultural and geographical anxieties
• Let customers fill in some of the blanks and open up a two-way conversation
• Use simple but powerful copy and images
• Ask a question and allow customers to engage and provide their own emotional insight
• Always address your customer, not the product you are trying to sell

Seasons and holidays

And at this time of year it’s especially important to design and craft marketing messages for seasons and holidays:

• Create a seasonal tradition that involves your brand and your customers. The Starbucks red cups over the Christmas season every year is a fantastic example.
• Employ the emotional values of the holiday – family for Thanksgiving and Christmas, celebration for New Year’s Eve as example.
• Encourage the emotions of the season.
• Get your customers to help – ask for their holiday photos and share them with your message. This will also serve to create a sense of inclusion.
• Collaborate with your customers – learn what the seasons and holidays mean to them, the emotions they feel and target those emotional triggers.
• Use the power of social media to immerse your brand into the holiday season.

Emotive branding is the practice of building brands that appeal directly to a customer’s emotional state, aspirations and needs with a view to leverage those features of their customer psyche to convert them into engaged customers and long term ambassadors. If you get emotive branding right you will build relationships that will stand the test of time.

Learn more about how to leverage emotive branding by contacting the brand agency Liquid Creativity team, your local branding specialist.