Emotional Branding AI: Discover the emotion your brand's selling

A thoughtful, emotive brand gets to the heart of what customers want. So we need your brand's reputation, values and message to shout this out.

While people tell stories and hook people in, we forget that our businesses should too. People relate to a brand story. Your brand needs balanced personalities. If you take it too far one way, we are risking it being inauthentic.

One of the best ways to build trust (especially in today's increasingly AI driven world), is the use of Brand Photography - capturing your story in all it's glory.

When you tell a story, it does five incredible things:

1. Neurons fire in the same pattern as the person telling the story, building empathy and trust.
2. If the story's emotional, your brain releases dopamine to boost brand recall. Giving your body a nice reward.
3. When the idea conflicts, your brain releases cortisol, increasing your attention and memory.
4. If we relate to the story and the person recalling it, it increases our connection and builds trust.
5. When we use vivid language, it lights up our imagination. So... make sure they can smell, see, touch and taste it.

To give you some context, I will tell you a story.

Between 2012 and 2015, I worked in the marketing department of Coventry University. We moved the positioning and reputation from mediocre to one of the top universities in the UK. Considering the stranglehold Cambridge and Oxford have on the top students, it was amazing.

I spent 12 months working on a single campaign, focused on a student's childhood dream job. It connected people with nostalgia and made them linger longer.

This campaign starred at open days, helping generate User Generated Content (UGC). The success of the campaign led to a 20% increase in university applications.

It's understandable that you won't know where to start, so I wrote a blog post on brand foundations, that unpacks the key elements you need to create emotional branding.

Emotional connections build consumer trust in your brand

Here's a great example of how simple it is to align your brand and connect it to emotions.

If I write about Coca-Cola or McDonald's, you start making judgments about my connection to them. You either love the experience or hate the stranglehold they have on fast food and diets.

When you align with a brand, even in passing, people form opinions about you. The emotional connection drives the brand's image. Brand image is the opinions people have of your brand, which is why emotional connection is so important.

Since one of the main goals of branding is to build and uphold a great reputation, it makes sense to work out what emotion you're selling.

Coke rules the roost of the advertising world, to the point where Pepsi don't try to compete. In a blind tasting of Pepsi and Coke, people preferred Pepsi! But, as soon as people knew what they were drinking, you guessed it. People loved Coke!

This is reputation and alignment. Nostalgia takes them back to hot summer days. That iconic bottle with beads of water dripping off it! Then, of course, there are the Christmas Holiday ads.

Long-term, loyal customers have an emotional bond to the drink, which positively affects the brand image.

What can small businesses learn from big brands?

We need to get into the heart and soul of customers.

‍Build a brand that tells the truth, stands for authenticity and originality. Without diminishing its values. It's the values, mission, purpose, and vision that guide your long-term goals.

To get into the heart and soul, you should look at (audit) your current brand.

Give yourself a brand audit.

Start by using Mini Martin, our AI agent, to uncover your brand's emotion. We'll give you a report and email you tips to start connecting to people's emotional needs.

The second thing to do is find the gaps in your current brand. Areas where the message is weak or confusing. It needs to focus on how customers should walk away feeling.

You need to look at:

1. A material audit Is your marketing incl. brand identity (fonts, colours, logos and design assets), reflecting the right emotions?
2. Verbal audits How's your tone of voice and message adjusting to meet the user's needs? Is there a list of tone words and phrases to use?
3. Behavioural audits How do you or staff behave? These are in the form of conscious and unconscious messages.
4. Competitor audits With all the above info, can you outperform competitors?
5. Peer audit Is there a famous brand/company that you aspire to be like? How do they communicate emotions?
6. PR audit Where have you gone wrong in the past? What did you do right? How do we go about maximising that in the future?
7. Customer audits How are you perceived? How do they feel about your brand? What are the positive things people say about you? Can the negative testimonials be learnt from? If you can get in front of current customers and talk to them, even better!

Once you have started getting your foundations in place, you might want to take a look at your website design. We often find that all the foundation work unvails some disconnects between the online and offline brand identity.

Target Market Research

Customer and staff interviews are an invaluable resource. Ask them why they chose your products and services instead of competitors. What do they think you do well?

Think about those negative experiences people had with a competitor. How did that experience make them feel? What can you do to ensure you don't deliver that experience to your customers?

You'll be amazed to see where you fall short when you look to see how emotional connections work.

What can you do with a brand audit?

Once you've identified gaps and things to fix. You can use your strategic roadmap to engage creative agency for graphic design support. Where they'll be able to give you a hand with print design, digital design and website edits.