March 2008

Love and Communication

Marketing thrives on analytics and hard data. But sometimes it's the immeasurable, touchy-feely stuff that can make or break a brand. Are you paying attention to the emotional side of customer communications?

By Selena Welz

I find weddings fascinating. Few events offer a better public spectacle of the range of human emotions: generosity, vanity, joy, fear and…well, yes…love.

With such a volatile array of emotions involved, it's no wonder people shell out big bucks for the Big Day. It's not that they actually need their table linens to match the bridal bouquet; it's that their emotional lives are on the line. And the wedding planning industry cashes in on all this emotional collateral.

For example, The Knot, a wedding planning site, boasts 3.2 million unique visitors per month and more than 3,000 new members each day. And these are loyal and active members. In fact, the founders of The Knot started a similar site, The Nest, for newlyweds, partially to give the former brides-to-be somewhere else to go because they were still hanging around long after their Big Day had passed. That's a level of brand commitment that would make any marketer drool.

Emotion Sells

Research has shown that emotion plays a major role in consumers' relationships with brands. The traditional advertising model assumes that consumer purchasing behavior and decision making is based on logic and information processing. Traditional advertising works to persuade that logic by highlighting product features and connecting those to consumers' needs.

A recent study published in the Journal of Advertising Research examined successful advertising campaigns that detailed very little about the actual product and concluded that "favorability toward brands is strongly correlated with emotional content in advertising, but not with factual content." A March 2007 report published by the American Association of Advertising Agencies and the Advertising Research Foundation said, "Emotional reactions not only come first, they facilitate memory and influence actions."

What's more, the strategy of pure, logical persuasion doesn't seem to be effective anymore. According to a 2006 Forrester report (Consumers Love to Hate Advertising), only 13 percent of consumers polled said they buy products as a result of advertising, and a mere 6 percent believe that companies generally tell the truth in ads.

Building an emotional relationship with a brand like The Knot seems simple when its audience comes pre-equipped with a cache of emotion—excitement, dread, or something in between—ready to be invested. But what about products and services that just aren't all that emotional? How deeply can one really feel about kitchen cleaner or industrial can-labeling technology? The trick here is remembering the human needs that make kitchen cleaners or industrial can-labeling machines necessary.

Get Past the Product Features

Many marketing campaigns are generated from the point of view of the business. They say, "We have these great features on our product, so you should buy our product, not the other guy's." Creating an emotional bond means moving beyond descriptions of features and getting at the underlying need for the product.

Take, for example, the Kleenex® Let It Out™ campaign, which features a series of TV commercials with people telling stories from their lives and then getting very emotional. A box of tissue isn't sexy, and there is little to differentiate one brand of tissue from another. That's why the Let It Out campaign doesn't talk about its product features at all. Instead, it addresses an underlying need for tissue: that people cry sometimes. But it goes a level deeper by addressing why people cry. Sadness, joy…it's stuff we can all relate to.

The Let It Out TV campaign is complemented by an interactive website where visitors can upload their own stories of joy and sorrow. That's a pretty deep level of engagement for a box of tissue. But by this time, it's not a box of tissue, it's a box of Kleenex.

Walk a Mile in the Customer's Shoes

Knowing what your customer wants is great. But to forge an emotional bond, get to the underlying human factors behind a want or need. It's not so much what they want, it's why they want it. What are your customer's aspirations? What keeps them up at night?

Consumers need kitchen cleaner because they want clean kitchens. But why? Maybe they have small children and don't want them to get sick. Maybe they don't want to be embarrassed when guests come to visit. Maybe they'd rather invest in an extra strength cleaner than be constantly annoyed with a messy spouse.

Realizing these underlying needs means really absorbing the consumer's point of view. Imagine yourself as the consumer. What is your day like? What is frustrating to you? What makes you feel secure or insecure? And why?

Even marketers working in a business-to-business context can find a human perspective. A better can-labeling machine may increase manufacturing efficiency and benefit a company's bottom line. So how does that affect the person who made the decision to buy that better machine? Do they feel more secure in their job? More professionally successful? More powerful? Identifying these factors can help you find the most effective way of forging a bond with your customer base, whoever they are.

Communication Is a Two-Way Street

We emphasize this point a lot, but it's worth repeating: You must know your customer, beyond demographic data on a spreadsheet. And that requires real communication—the listening kind. Find ways to solicit regular feedback from your customer base. Even an informal move—like a manager stepping in to speak directly to a customer when a service call goes bad—can provide insight into the customer experience.

Forging an emotional bond between consumers and a brand is all about identifying the human factor. How will you know what keeps them up at night if you aren't regularly communicating with them and relating to their emotional needs?

About the author:

Selena Welz is associate managing editor at Tendo, and would like to attend your wedding. Email her an invitation.