The QCARD Emotional Connection Workshop

Derrick DayeAugust 18, 20164 min

“The essential difference between emotion and reason is that emotion leads to action while reason leads to conclusions.” ~ Donald Calne, Neurologist

Nobel Laureate work in the fields of behavioral economics, neuroscience, and human motivation demonstrates that decisions are impacted by both rational and emotional factors. Emotion is behind every impulse to act, while the rational brain can allow or veto that action. In order to truly and deeply understand why your customers act the way they do, you need to understand and measure emotions.

The key to accelerating brand growth is uncovering your brand’s emotional ‘Right Space’. Your brand’s emotional ‘Right Space’ consists of the emotional associations that your brand can own versus its competitors that are relevant to consumers, and are drivers of purchase behavior in its category.

Once you understand the emotional associations that will maximize purchase behavior, you can ensure that your Integrated Marketing Communications are executed with relentless consistency across all touch points to drive growth and build brand equity.

Apple figured this out long ago when it uncovered that the emotions associations of delight, surprise, connection, and love drive purchase behavior in their category. This short video demonstrates how Apple expresses these emotional associations with relentless consistency across every marketing decision they make.

Why doesn’t every brand ensure that it executes the most important emotional associations with relentless consistency across all of its touch points?

Firstly, they may have not measured what their brand’s emotional ‘Right Space’ is and don’t know what the right emotional associations to reinforce are.

Secondly, even when brands know what emotional associations drive purchase behavior, there are a lot of hands with differing biases touching their brand. Think of all of the stakeholders, departments, agencies, and global teams that touch your brand. What if you could align each and every one of these players with the few brand associations that would have the most impact on your brand’s growth and equity?

The Blake Project helps deepen our clients’ understanding of how emotions drive customer behavior in their categories, while making those insights actionable in their marketplace and within their organizations. With Hotspex, our emotional connection technology partner, we have developed a unique process that is designed to build and activate your customers’ emotional connection to your brand.

It is with this expertise and advanced technology that we help brands overcome challenges, as well as uncover and take advantage of their greatest opportunities.

An important pathway to making this possible is The QCARD Emotional Connection Workshop.

Brand Emotional Connections Heat Map

In this highly interactive and facilitated one-day workshop, key stakeholders learn the most important aspects of building emotional connections. They also work together with our QCARD technology to help understand and align the brand from an emotional perspective .

Common objectives for the QCARD Emotional Connection Workshop include:

  • Uniting stakeholders on the meaning and value of building emotional connection
  • Finding out where a brand stands through the eyes of stakeholders
  • Understanding which emotions are or should be evoked by a company’s mission, vision, and values
  • Aligning internally on a positioning emotional ‘Right Space’
  • Using this internal positioning of the emotional ‘Right Space’ as a benchmark to test against external audiences (e.g. customers)
  • Discovering which emotions can be a competitive differentiator
  • Developing and/or testing executions through gauging reactions to strategic and tactical initiatives (e.g. positioning, ads, concepts, packaging)
  • Evaluating new product or service ideas and innovations

Depending on your organization’s objectives, The Blake Project customizes a specific set of brand alignment exercises that uncover where your brand and its competitors are perceived to be today and uncover the biases and opinions each of your stakeholders hold towards where they believe your brand needs to go in the future.

The exercise is conducted using the full, globally validated spectrum of positive and negative emotions (96), personality associations (182), and functional attributes (38), most predictive of consumer behavior to uncover new insights and hypotheses about your brand’s future, while aligning your team of stakeholders with the best course of action.

The qualitative maps serve as a point of comparison against the market view that would emerge from a quantitative study among customers/consumers as the same battery of emotional, personality, and functional associations are used.

Marketers that harness the power of emotions are today’s true brand builders and are uncovering new opportunities for growth faster than their competitors. The QCARD Emotional Connection Workshop is the 1st step towards deepening your understanding of emotions and how they can drive unprecedented growth for your brand.

“We have debated how to bring this brand character to life at this multi-functional team meeting for several years and thanks to your methodology, this is the first time we have been able to get aligned and move forward with action. (alignment across properties – digital and traditional packaging) Hotspex map is our unified theory of brand which creates consistency across all touch points.” ~ Marketing Director Tier 1 CPG Company

The QCARD Emotional Connection Workshop Specifics

  • One full day delivered at the location of your choice.
  • Workshop participants include the senior leadership team.
  • The ideal number of participants is eight to twelve.
  • One to two weeks prep time required by The Blake Project.

Simply email me, Derrick Daye for more about how we can help you build an advantage through strong emotional connections for your brand.

The Blake Project Can Help: Accelerate Brand Growth Through Powerful Emotional Connections

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

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