Building Emotional Connections

Philip Kotler once described brands as helping people to make decisions.

Sometimes brands can help people feel certain emotions, emotions that may even be only tangentially related to the products themselves. Brands can create tremendous appeal by linking to or promising desired emotions.

Lovemarks theory is based on a simple premise: human beings are powered by emotion, not by reason.

Although the importance of emotions in consumer behavior is certainly not a new topic, there is still a feeling that marketers have minimized them in their market approach in the past. Of course, it is easier to change the packaging of your product or add a different ingredient than to make your brand ‘less sad’ or more ‘passionate’. However, recent neuro-research illustrates that we have been underestimating the impact of emotions on decision making for a long time.

If I ever needed proof that our emotional response to the world around us is quicker than our ability to think, I got it a couple of weeks ago. Anticipating that I was about to hear another pseudo-science sales pitch, I cut off the speaker with an ill-considered outburst. In retrospect, I suspect that I did them an injustice. But the episode does highlight the powerful role that emotions play in shaping our behavior.