Research released in the Harvard Business Review earlier this year showed customers who are ‘emotionally connected’ with a brand are 52% more valuable than those who are just ‘highly satisfied.’
According to the report, customers are considered to be emotionally connected with a brand when “it aligns with their motivations and helps them fulfill deep, often unconscious, desires. Important emotional motivators include desires to stand out from the crowd, have confidence in the future, and enjoy a sense of well-being, to name just a few.”
In our blog we recently talked about going above and beyond having satisfied customers. We explored what it takes to make your customers love you and how, by doing this, you then create a customer-base who pays you back time and again.
Emotion and the power of emotional connection is why this will always be true. The festive season is the perfect moment to see the how powerful emotional connections are established and reinforced by brands in order to drive sales, improve customer loyalty and create strong brand advocates.
Marketeers have always been experts in leveraging emotion for commercial gain and this comes to the fore at Christmas more than any other time of the year. Maximising sales at Christmas is key because demand in the marketplace, for many businesses, is much higher. This is why emotion and the connections it creates are the most common, and most powerful, theme running through Christmas campaigns.
The best content engages us, it entertains us and it gives us something we didn’t have or didn’t know before. This is what the best Christmas campaigns do because they don’t tell us what to buy; they show us how to feel.
Here are some ideas on how to start forming and strengthening the emotional connections in your customers, not just a Christmas time, but through the whole year:
Give them something they don’t expect...and make it personal. When brands give something unexpected to their customers it always triggers an emotional response, predominantly one of gratitude. It’s even more effective when it’s something that’s personal to the individual.
A great example of this is something we saw Spotify do earlier this year. In response to Apple Music, Spotify launched their ‘Discover Weekly’ playlist as an added perk for their users. They describe it as “like having your best friend make you a personalised mixtape every single week.” And it’s had the desired effect. In its first five months Discover Weekly has had 1.7 billion streams.
Tell a story. Our emotions are heightened when we feel part of a wider narrative. Telling your brand’s story is when you become more than a product or service. You become something your customers want to be part of. In the world of health and fitness this can clearly be seen in the rise of Crossfit, which excels in telling its story. From 13 Crossfit gyms ten years ago it is now a global brand valued at $4 billion.
Make people care. Give people a reason to care about you. When we care about something we are driven to act. This could be purchasing a product, it could be sharing a social media post or it could be making a recommendation to a friend. Inspire people to act by giving them something to care about.
At Quinyx, we work with brands across industries and the most successful, no matter their industry, are the ones who forge emotional connections with their customers. We provide them with the tools that allow them to focus more of their time on making this happen, delivering more for their customers and achieving even greater success.
