Emotional connections build better brand experiences

Today’s brands compete on a number of different levels – while products certainly come into play, emotional experience has become equally important. That said, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for brands to control those experiences when it is up to consumers to create their own journeys and choose their own touch points.

For Roz Calder, director of the NeedScope research tool at TNS, the greatest challenge for brands is the building of better, more consistent brand experiences during what she terms the touch point revolution. Where previously marketers were able to predict the context, touch point or order in which brand experiences would take place, today’s focus on personalisation – consumers’ need to choose their touch point for their own purposes in the moment of their choosing – makes this impossible. Marketers are operating in a time and space where the key lies in focusing on how emotion can be used to deliver consistent brand experiences across touch points and coherent customer journeys, regardless of what form they take.

“To what extent can the brand experience be built and managed?” Calder asks. She explains that in the past, the path to purchase helped to organise the brand, shopper and customer marketing via a set of defined touch points. However, today there are simply too many touch points where the consumer interacts with the brand and it is no longer possible to predict which touch point will be used for which experience.

To survive within this touch point revolution marketers need to break down the silos within their own organisations – they need insight teams and market research to provide them with a unified view of each silo. Consumers view brand experiences as the same regardless of the touch point, but in order for their experiences to be cohesive, everybody involved in the planning of that experience must have the same view of the touch points where those experiences take place.

A unified view is a good place to start, Calder believes. From there marketers must learn to balance the needs of consumers for relevant brand experiences which add value within the context of that particular touch point, as well as for the touch point to be inherently flexible, with the brand’s need to provide a coherent brand experience that is differentiated from other brands in the market, all of whom are offering experiences across touch points.

It’s a task that becomes far less challenging when marketers actually understand the needs of the people they’re creating experiences for and the touch points that matter most to them. The problem, says Calder, is that technology tends to obscure any meaningful sense of who and why audiences are being targeted, as programmatic is essentially driven by behaviour, becoming blind to the brands people interact with and why. It’s an approach which does not allow for nuanced and responsive communication.

The better approach, she says, is programmatic targeting based on digital segmentation, allowing the focus to be on the creation of relevant moments for the people most likely to interact with the brand. Emotion too is key. Emotion allows the brand to create consistent experiences across touch points and, when managed correctly, as a consistent thread, emotion influences both conscious and subconscious decision making.

Marketers must match the emotive needs of a target audience and the emotive meaning of the brand. They must then plan to deliver the relevant touch point experience in a way that connects with the emotive brand meaning.

Finally, differentiation is as crucial as ever. A brand’s competitiveness will depend on optimising the range of touch points for conversion, enabling consumers to choose their own path to purchase. Brand equity exerts the most influence over choice, which makes building and managing brand equity such an important part of the process. Moreover, marketers must learn to see touch points not only as an opportunity to deliver the right function, but also to generate the right emotion. It is this emotional appeal that will build brand recognition of the brand experience regardless of the customer journey.

The big take-out: In an age where consumers choose their own touch points and build their own experiences, marketers need to look to emotional appeal to build connections and consistency across touch points.