It’s not biz; it’s how you connect
Positioning products to elicit emotional response is crucial
While many may think quality is a sufficient motivator, a purchase decision still includes intangible qualities like perceived value and trust in the brand
At the heart of every business model is the age-old buyer’s black box that tells us why they buy what they buy. We have spent decades trying to decode the motives that prompts a consumer to specifically pick up your product. For many, the answer lies in product leadership and the logic is ironclad — you provide quality, you build loyalty.
However, the reality is not quite simple. The current generation of buyers have to be courted and convinced. They are not easily swayed by marketing campaigns and gimmicks. They are choice rich and need a reason greater than a tangible product to keep them interested. Our brands cannot afford to be removed from the public in isolation but must be humanlike in its interaction and positioning.
Positioning the brand
Brand ideology, brand image, brand loyalty are just offshoots of the philosophy that brands are people. Based on this, each brand develops a unique connection with the consumer during the course of its life. This emotional connect, thus, becomes the defining factor that differentiates your brand from the market. It is also the vital ingredient of a brand’s success. As marketers and brand owners, we must look to position our product to elicit an emotional response from our target audience.
Let the consumer play an active part in the positioning of your brand rather than be a passive recipient to your campaign. This will only happen when as brands, we leave the idea of using cognitive positioning and look towards employing emotive means.
Most effective spokesperson?
Photojournalist David Douglas Duncan has been associated with Nikon for almost 70 years. The philosophy of connecting with your consumers is more than marketing jargon and becomes the guiding factor for all decisions.
People are more likely to heed to a veteran like Duncan or even their reference groups than they will to a brand’s official claim. They become your unofficial sales team, spokesperson and agent if they feel a kinship with your brand. While many may think quality is a sufficient motivator, a purchase decision still includes intangible qualities like perceived value and trust in the brand. When you connect with consumers, you are effectively connecting with their entire network of people. Thus, creating and sustaining the relationship can have a domino effect on your target market.
Bonds outlive quality
A more pragmatic business might argue that brand loyalty is not a function of emotional connect, Rather, it is about the product’s quality and ability to satisfy wants and may find brand building a futile exercise.
In a fast-moving industry where technology disrupts the status quo ever so often, what is the one thing that remains unchanged by the changing market conditions? It is the bond that you create with your consumers. That becomes a strength that makes you sustainable and impervious to competition that may boast of price or quality leadership. A brand’s authentic voice will create a community of people who become your strength as you move forward.
Clients care for brands that care
An emotional cachet with a brand is one of the hardest thing to build and sustain. It takes years of effort to be able to find that point of connect with your consumers but once in place, it transcends regions and time to give your brand a stable place. It has no language and speaks to the common values. Unlike marketing that requires customisation and constant changes, your brand’s connectedness with the audience requires no translations.
As our markets become more sophisticated, consumers more informed and products more advanced, the marketing techniques need some reforms too. Businesses need to change the age-old practice of extrapolating from sales figures. Intangible values like brand intimacy have grown to have a very real impact on the firm’s sustainability and current market performance.