Don’t Just Tap A Random Key, Strike An Emotive Chord

Someone was arguing that a brand should really only try to evoke a single emotion.

Their thinking seemed to be that focusing on a single feeling would be more powerful – and manageable.

We disagreed.

Emotive branding is about the relationship between brands and people.

Relationships, especially meaningful ones, are multi-dimensional and work in a number of different contexts.

When we thought of how someone special in our life left us feeling today, we realized that beyond the general “warm” feeling that thought evoked several sub-layers of more distinct feelings.

The same was true of the brands we admired. 

Once we went beyond feeling “good” we discovered why we felt that way.

And that was because they made us feel a variety of positive emotions in the course of doing business with them.

So we decided that a key meaning-driving ingredient of emotive branding would be made up of at least four emotions.

We called this an emotive brand’s “Emotional Space”.

And in practice we’ve seen this play out to our expectations.

We take clients through an exercise in which they choose four feelings from over 300 possibilities.

The clients are asked to think about how they’d like to leave people feeling after doing business with their brand.

We prompt them with relevant examples – a current employee, a customer, a supplier, etc – and ask them to imagine the feelings they most like these people to have the next time they are making a decision about the brand.

For example, how would you like an employee to feel when they walk into their office?

Or, how would you like that employee to feel about your brand when offered a job somewhere else?

With this forward-thinking, outside-in mindset executives suddenly see new possibilities for their brand.

What interests us most is how they end up choosing a range of unique emotions.

Part of our process is to intrepret how the selected feelings can be played out in the relationship between the brand and people.

It is at this point that we can clearly see how the different feelings can be readily evoked in specific brand moments.

It is only natural to want to keep things simple – and to therefore focus on creating only one feeling for your brand.

But that decision would foresake the richness of meaningful relationships.

Strike an emotive chord.

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