Emotional branding is an effective way to build emotional connections and personal relationships with consumers that help deliver the brand promise and build trust; it is a means to create a brand image that resonates with buyers' desires and aspirations to form an emotional connection. Emotional branding is a way to penetrate the consumer's subconscious minds to drive their purchasing decisions. It means that you're not trying to sell a product; you are telling a story. The story is the product and the customer is the hero or the victim. To understand the emotional concept we need to understand the difference between a case study and brand storytelling. Case studies are rough, rational raw materials that need to be formed into a story shape to make an emotional impact. Case studies are made of logic, facts, and numbers. These facts and figures cannot bond with an audience without a story, especially on the emotional level. Marketers and advertisers are highly aware of the power of applying emotional storytelling that make a sufficient impact on customers to encourage or influence them to make an action or change their purchasing decisions behaviors.
Facts and logical information messages do not affect the customers who are bombarded daily with thousands of similar messages, so case studies’ analytical information is quickly forgotten. Emotion messages and emotional storytelling can capture customers’ attention much longer than case studies and are more attached to their memories. When emotion is activated, the brain stores as many details as possible about the related event and prepares for quick recall of the information. Backed by solid emotion, memory can often pop up instantly, even years or decades after the event. Recalling these events can elicit a wide range of human emotions, from joy to fear, fury, and grief. Emotional memory is a hypothesis theory model that explains why some memories may last clearly for years in the human brain while others become hazy and fade with time. Emotion serves as the anchor for memories in the human brain. Memorable events in someone’s life often become anchored in the brain in “event clusters” like episodes of a story. Brands shall build their core stories to induce positive feelings in their consumer's subconscious, thus keeping them connected and attached to brands’ messages even years after released advertising messages. Most companies have the raw material for telling stories, such as customer testimonials, real-life stories told by the employees, customers, and working partners. These raw materials can be easily shaped into emotional storytelling to feed the corporate culture and core values. These corporate culture anchored stories create a solid and authentic brand foundation.
Emotional Storytelling Examples -Dove Real Beauty Sketches, You’re more beautiful than you Think
According
to statistics, just 4% of women globally are satisfied with their appearance.
Dove did something in pursuit to inspire the remaining 96%. Dove investigated
these figures and thought about an idea to prove that majority of women are
wrong about their self-image. Dove shaped this idea into a storytelling advertisement
just in YouTube video made over 69.5 million views and thousands of comments and engagement. In
2013, Dove, the soap brand company, posted ads featuring women who were the
subjects of an FBI-trained forensic artist. Without seeing these women, the
artist drew every woman individually based on her description. Soon After, the artist drew the same woman based on a stranger’s
description. The result was astonishing. The sketches drawn from the stranger’s
description were always more beautiful than those in which the women depicted themselves.
Many women do not realize how beautiful they are. The ad attempted to help
women accept themselves and find greater happiness in their intrinsic beauty.
Emotional Branding Examples- Athlete Endorsement
Whether by fulfilling some purpose or accepting themselves as they are, the brand story resolves the internal conflict in human minds: the desire for self-acceptance. Many ads do not carry emotional stories; it markets a particular product or service benefit starring the brand as a superhero. These ads are a waste of effort and money. Brands like Nike, Adidas, Red Bull, Rolex, Under Armour, Tiger Woods, Unilever, Coca Cola, and Porsche developed athletic and intellectual accomplishments and a sense of self-actualization. Brands realize how much sports fans love their sports heroes and will put up much money to get their brands in front of those cheering and passionate fans. If athletes who worked for their entire lives to achieve valuable objectives and meanings can achieve something, this purpose can be associated with the core aspect of a brand promise then transferred to the fans.
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