Posts in Behavioral psychology

Apple swings for the emotional fence, breaks ad rules

Seven Million Reasons Why Strategy Eludes the World’s Most Expensive Ad Spend

February 23rd, 2024 Posted by Behavioral psychology, Brand differentiation, brand messaging, branded content, Consumer insight, Digital disruption, Emotional relevance, Mission, resonance, storytelling 0 comments on “Seven Million Reasons Why Strategy Eludes the World’s Most Expensive Ad Spend”

Important to respect the human sitting on other side of the screen

The Super Bowl attracted a bit north of 123 million viewers, the greatest aggregation of human eyeballs in one place at one time, and thus the reason why 53 TV spots aired at a $7 million per 30-seconds clip. It is an unprecedented event where advertising is as much of a contact sport as the action on the football field. People tune in specifically to consume the ads — what an amazing impact opportunity-in-the-waiting, but nevertheless not often optimized largely due to an absence of sound strategy on how people make decisions and take action.

  • David Ogilvy once famously remarked that if attention was all that mattered then you could put a ‘gorilla in a jockstrap’ in an ad. Yet that’s not what drives real effectiveness. He knew it and built a global agency powerhouse on that model of respect for consumer insights, perhaps now forgotten in the age of ‘can you top this’ over-reach with the display of so many digital bells and whistles.

Moreover, the Super Bowl ad is just the tip of the spending iceberg when looking at the total costs of gargantuan celebrity contact fees, massive production budgets and the veritable supermarket of extensions in packaging, retail tie-ins and social media on and off ramps.

Yet in astounding fashion, sound strategy is mostly absent from this festival of short form cinematic spectacle. The temptation to pursue attention at the expense of real relevance is just too great. In circa 2024, the ad party turned into a conspicuous mish mash of celebrity faces, much like excessive name-dropping at a Hollywood cocktail party. It’s no secret that all-too often the celebrity brand will outshine the product brand. So why does it go this way?

Guess what, emotion drives behavior

The neocortex area of the human brain governs our decisions and the actions we take. As much as we would all prefer to believe that people are logical beings who make decisions based on facts and information, instead we respond to emotional cues – how we feel in the presence of a brand. Yet too few of the ads we saw were designed with intention to drive for that kind of authentic connectivity. Given the huge one-shot spend level, you’d think it would be different.

Yes, a different approach is needed

In 2023’s super game, the highest rated commercial was a total outlier from a small pet food company called The Farmer’s Dog. This high-level and instructive achievement in strategic brand communication was the polar-opposite of the celebrity dragon-riding special effects we witnessed this year. Here Farmer’s Dog offered a story well-told that traced the poignant and touching relationship between a dog and young girl owner, charting the course of their life’s journey together. Not a word was spoken. No celebrity cameo. No green screen special effects wizardry.

It was an emotional, heartfelt, memorable celebration of the incredibly powerful and important relationship between a person and their dog. There was no recitation of production formulation features or superior ingredient claims. The brand wasn’t shouted in every frame. It didn’t need any egregious self-promotion to get the message across. It was supremely effective because people left it with an emotional connection. We all recognize that unique bond between pet parent and furry family member. The pet food existed as an enabler of pet wellbeing on life’s pathway.

Desperately seeking attention

Creating content for an engaged audience is just different than trying to capture an audience with some wild content. Too many brands seeking attention at the expense of sound strategy. The truth is human beings are feeling creatures who think not thinking creatures who feel. If you want to manage perceptions of your brand, and yes that should be a goal, then you really need to manage emotions. If your objective is to assure communication is remembered, to have impact, then emotional gravitas is paramount.

Proper use of the world’s greatest ad venue to deliver boldness

Way back in 1984, Apple used the setting to unveil their new Macintosh computer with a historic ad that captivated the world’s attention. It was a bold and also controversial strike, so much so the Apple Board was wary of showing it right up to the telecast. It aired and both ad history and the upstart Apple brand was made. It was a powerful message about democratizing the power of creativity and expression in the hands or everyone – railing against the dictates of the “establishment.”

Speaking of bold, what about sustainability and ESG in the midst of uncertainty?

Nearly every major brand in the food, beverage and lifestyle worlds is working hard to address their sustainability bona fides and emissions performance. It is by definition an opportunity for a brand to focus on higher purpose, mission, reputation and value beyond transactional thinking. Yet we don’t see that showcased here. We have entered a new era where brands are expected to have a point of view, a belief system and to be standard bearers of change. We remain hopeful that someday soon, a progressive brand will take advantage of the super venue to convey what people seek – a healthier, safer planet.

Guidance going forward

Put the consumer at the center of your planning and thinking and work backwards from there. Recognize that shameless self-promotion makes a brand the hero of any story told, and by doing so casts the brand in direct competition with the consumer who sees themselves each and every day as the hero of their life’s journey. Celebrate your consumer and their wishes, needs and aspirations like Farmer’s Dog did with such excellence. This is sound strategy. Your brand deserves this approach to spending effectiveness and outcomes, whether at the Super Bowl or in routine quarterly brand and business support.

If this post gets you thinking about how best to optimize and improve your planning for improved communications effectiveness, use the email link below to ask questions and start and informal conversation.

Looking for more food for thought? Subscribe to the Emerging Trends Report.

Bob Wheatley is the CEO of Chicago-based Emergent, The Healthy Living Agency. Traditional brand marketing often sidesteps more human qualities that can help consumers form an emotional bond. Yet brands yearn for authentic engagement, trust and a lasting relationship with their customers. Emergent helps brands erase ineffective self-promotion and replace it with clarity, honesty and deeper meaning in their customer relationships and communication. For more information, contact [email protected] and follow on Twitter @BobWheatley.

Path to Purchase is Evolving

Your Customer’s Path to Purchase is Changing – Are You?

December 12th, 2023 Posted by Behavioral psychology, brand advocacy, Brand Beliefs, Brand differentiation, brand strategy, storytelling 0 comments on “Your Customer’s Path to Purchase is Changing – Are You?”

Now more than ever, brand storytelling is the link to engagement

It is our mission at Emergent to continuously study the evolving dynamics of influence on the consumer journey to purchase. No surprise, we are doing business in revolutionary times. To wit, advances in AI technology will permanently alter the future of brand communication and how consumers operate when buying. Meantime, another behavior shift has arrived ahead of the trust challenges AI will inevitably create. Below we bring you the details.

Since the dawn of modern retail shopping, people have invariably looked for guidance from trusted sources as they seek to make what they believe to be less risky purchase decisions (people always work to avoid a bad decision/experience).

Below are two more recent areas of influence on consumer behavior. Then ahead we see a third pathway that is currently dialing up.

  1. 10 years ago, we started looking to credible third parties

We trusted those perceived to be credentialed experts from academic, scientific and reputational influence backgrounds who brought their educated assessment of what constitutes the state of the art in any given category.

2. Five years ago, this evolved to a focus on belief in peers

With digital apps came crowd sourcing and social community “proof” at our fingertips. We experience this through sites such as Facebook, Yelp, TripAdvisors, Goodreads, TikTok, LinkedIn and Instagram that aggregate the views and experiences of our peers. We trust fellow citizens to verify and validate the assertions and claims made by brands.

3. Next, public trust failures have led consumers to turn inward for guidance

We are on the cusp of another evolution in buying behavior. People are looking inside themselves – relying on their intuition, inner wisdom and ‘gut feel’ about brands and businesses. This felt-to-be-true knowledge springs from an implicit understanding that originates in the subconscious. In essence, consumers land on a sense of what feels right to them. They trust these feelings to provide guidance and confidence for their decisions. Pundits in the brand strategy world are referring to this new school of thinking as Noetic Intelligence.

What does this mean for brands when consumers turn to intuition for trusted guidance? Your response should be to refocus on what people are feeling in the presence of your brand. Translating that into best practices means dialing up stories that amplify values, beliefs, deeper meaning and emotion to hit the right subliminal chords.

Storytelling is the most potent, engaging, strategically-differentiating form of communication available to businesses and brands.

By definition, this is a unique and more emotive approach focused on a different and more lifestyle relevant set of topics than pushing product features, benefits or reciting factoids and reports to support a new technology or innovation achievement. Specifically:

  • What is your brand higher purpose?
  • What do you believe in?
  • What is your opinion on substantive issues impacting the world around us?
  • How are you enabling a path for consumers to act upon their beliefs and values?
  • What lies within the heart and soul of your brand’s value system?

Stories help people get involved with your brand and don’t present themselves like overt selling. Instead, storytelling cultivates interest and engagement, fueled by an increasingly easy ability to publish and distribute through social channels and other content platforms as narratives, videos and podcasts.

Stories can help build an emotional connection between brands and users, by enabling the humanization of brand conversations. This is how you secure rapt consumer attention.

  • When I started in this business, we often bemoaned the challenges of controlling messages and lamented that our outreach existed only within media platforms owned and managed by third parties. Today brands can operate independently as publishers AND media channels. Yet some brands are hesitant to fully leverage this incredible controlled messaging capability to greatest effect.

All too often, brands remain tethered to product presentations rather than the context and belief afforded by stories. A pet food brand can self-promote its ingredient quality, nutritional philosophy, commitment to ethical sourcing and the like. Or the brand can bring forward stories of transformational change and impact their diets have on beloved pets whose lives were improved through better nutrition and the wellbeing that bestows. This blends with and imprints the positive lifestyle associations people desire with their furry family members.

Which is more compelling? The story of how a pet’s life has transformed from consuming a new diet. Or waxing on about nutritional panel ingredient integrity and high sourcing standards? It’s going to be the first approach every time. Human beings love stories. So why don’t we see more of it more often in marketing?

During the persuasion era of brand marketing, interruption-style media was deployed to circulate product feature communication constructed around entertainment or humor to bait the attention of its intended audience. Some of this marketing manipulation thinking still lingers today, despite our knowing consumers have the ability to avoid nearly all of it.

The story telling era has emerged to replace interruption and manipulation

Some of best examples of powerful storytelling can be found in books and movies that deftly use conflict, tension, struggle, and lead character redemption, ultimately leading to a favorable outcome as a blueprint for successful engagement. Yet many brands struggle with storytelling because it’s not a direct product hard sell. As if hard selling will continue as a bankable path to consumer engagement anyway?

Brand storytelling is at its most dynamic state when integrating:

Culture –

Culture governs shifts in preference, social relevance, priorities, meaning and even language. It is influential to behavior and so should be respected as a conditioning and context agent for brand stories.

Psychology –

Neuroscience proves how we work incessantly to avoid perceived risks. Our subconscious is the ruler over decisions and actions and so we use archetype development to help inform the tone, manner and character of brand messaging that resonates.

Emotion –

Humans are feeling creatures who think. We are not analytical, fact-driven decision-making machines. Emotion sits at the front door of how we behave and influences our opinions and judgments. It is fundamental to our actions and the decisions we make. It’s the emotional grist which makes the communication memorable by the way.

Today this approach manifests in a refined set of outbound tools including:

Content streams

Social communities

Installations and pop-ups

Real world and retail experiences

If you want to know more, ask questions or discuss Noetic Intelligence and its application to your business, use this link and let’s talk.

Looking for more food for thought? Subscribe to the Emerging Trends Report.

Bob Wheatley is the CEO of Chicago-based Emergent, The Healthy Living Agency. Traditional brand marketing often sidesteps more human qualities that can help consumers form an emotional bond. Yet brands yearn for authentic engagement, trust and a lasting relationship with their customers. Emergent helps brands erase ineffective self-promotion and replace it with clarity, honesty and deeper meaning in their customer relationships and communication. For more information, contact [email protected] and follow on Twitter @BobWheatley.

Emergent analysis of what happens when brands fail to keep their beliefs and mission

What Happens When You Lose Your “Why”

August 10th, 2023 Posted by Behavioral psychology, brand advocacy, Brand Beliefs, brand marketing, brand messaging, Brand preference, Consumer insight, Emotional relevance, engagement 0 comments on “What Happens When You Lose Your “Why””

Reclaiming higher purpose renews brand energy

Most brands with a strong higher purpose (a refined “why” that informs behaviors and decision making) got that way because the founder(s) injected beliefs from their own sense of mission.

Staying true to the founder’s core purpose/vision and retaining the brand’s deeper meaning over time can be challenging. If higher purpose is intentionally woven into the fabric of how the organization operates, the belief system can be steadfast generationally. If the mission is largely a reflection of the leader’s ethos and the company experiences regime change, the “why” can disappear in the hands of executives who manage most often for profit and loss priorities rather than refueling the company/brand belief system.

  • Apple lost its way when Steve Jobs was forced out in 1985. The company suffered as a result. When he returned in 1997 the higher purpose roared back. Business boomed.
  • Starbucks began with religion around changing the coffee experience, from better beans to establishing the Italian espresso beverage traditions in its unique “3rd Place” setting. When Howard Schultz left, the “why” went with him and subsequent leadership focused on operational efficiencies and expansion. Business declined until Schultz returned.

“Why” is influential to how a brand is built and sustains – providing a true north that transcends changing conditions and cultural shifts over time by securing a devoted community of true believers. It is fundamental to how brands engage successfully with core customers. It flies in the opposite direction from commoditization pressures and an unproductive focus on the competition.

  • Nonetheless “why” can be left behind if new leadership isn’t entrenched with the same point of view as the founders.

Our brush with half-baked “why” – A mini case study on reclaiming purpose

In 1949, Chicagoan Charles Lubin was trying to figure out how to send his epiphanous cheesecakes to a man in Texas enamored with his sweet, dense creations. But cheesecakes (and baked goods like them) generally didn’t travel well; thus, why the bakery industry of the era primarily consisted of smaller businesses servicing a local trading area.

Lubin began experimenting and later innovated a new brand at retail through his pioneering of flash freezing tech – a process to preserve the taste, texture and eating experience of his baked delights. As a result, a new category was established through his single-minded mission to make high quality baked goods available to a much wider audience. Reinventing the baked goods business to create widespread access was his “why.”

Lubin’s innovation was personified by creating the iconic Sara Lee brand – named after his nine-year old daughter, who for most of her life would remain hidden in the background. He was wildly successful and eventually sold his company to Consolidated Foods. The corporation renamed itself after the bakery division (Sara Lee Corporation) even though it was largely a meat products business. After the sale, Lubin eventually retired and a series of CPG experienced leadership teams came in to run the company, expanding distribution into foodservice and adding new categories to spur growth. But along the way Sara Lee lost its why.

The company was focused on volume and balance sheet considerations, not the embedded love affair with bakery creations that touch people’s lives. With a diluted soul, the business resorted to price promotions and other commoditizing behaviors to keep the volume numbers going.

As we’ve seen before when the “why” dissipates or disappears all together, the energy underneath the business often goes with it. Sara Lee lost relevance as the focus moved from consumers to chasing the competition. Performance inevitably flagged and the parent company started to consider if it was possible to divest the Sara Lee baked goods division even though their corporate identity was tied to it. Tough to do.

In a last ditch effort to turn the bakery ship around, we were retained on a mission to restage Sara Lee Bakery and recapture the qualities and meaning Charles Lubin had originally brought with him. We needed to break with the most recent past in a big way and author a new story for the future.

  • How do you quickly, decisively disrupt perceptions?  You do something over-the-top that forces consumer reassessment. You create a new story and put substance underneath it. It was time to swing for the fences.

Solution: Sara Lee’s First International Symposia on Dessert

Go big or go home. We sat down with Sara Lee, the actual person, and after many hours of conversation about our plans to rescue the business her father had started, Sara agreed to become a spokesperson for the brand named after her. To properly showcase her debut, we decided to create an event to showcase a new era at Sara Lee, complete with an updated product line. It would be done specifically for the top North American food media so the story could be told as widely as possible in a credible setting.

We decided to create a symposium on dessert – in the dessert capitol of the world, Vienna, Austria – the birthplace of sweet bakery creations and traditions beginning in the 18th century. We also knew that a media event staged in Vienna was likely to be enthusiastically attended, and over three days we would have the full and undivided attention of our media audience 24 hours a day. It would be an extraordinary opportunity to exercise great influence, a ‘must-do’ if we were going to change the paradigm of what people think Sara Lee is.

Working with Austrian Airlines, the Austrian Economic Council and the Vienna Tourism Board, we were able to secure airline seats for 56 journalists for a song, hotel rooms at the famous Hotel Imperial at a rate more like Motel Six and free access to the famed palaces that made Vienna the cultural heartbeat of the world during the time of Mozart.

We recruited the top seven pastry chefs of Vienna to help reimagine new desserts using Sara Lee products as a base, to enchant and inspire the food media luminaries who would attend. We developed a comprehensive itinerary of educational events and experiences designed to provide so many varying story angles that any media decision maker would feel they could carve their own unique narrative around the experience.

  • We brought a in a food historian who charted the emergence of sweet baked goods from the Roman Empire to modern day.
  • We created a section on the psychology of eating dessert revealing the cultural issues at work between American sensibilities and European attitudes on indulgence.
  • We prepared a hands-on cooking experience for all 56 media, dividing them into teams to work alongside Viennese pastry experts each challenged to work with a specific Sara Lee product.
  • We brought the media to the oldest operating bakery in the world, opened in 1560, to hear a presentation on the history of chocolate.

The most important facet of all though was on the opening night where the editors gathered for a special reveal – they would be meeting the real Sara Lee and Charlie Lubin’s wife for the first time. This event, fit for royalty, was staged in a palace next door to The Hofburg, the Imperial seat of the Hapsburg dynasty. The editors were to experience a curated menu based on a 18th century royal banquet, dining on china from the royal house. Ahead of a presentation that would whisk them forward to the modern era of baked goods and the new Sara Lee brand.

After dinner a video presentation chronicled  the history of dessert – a retrospective on the birth of sweet baking traditions and its evolution over time, a way for the brand to lock in its ‘knowledge broker’ cred on bakery expertise. At the conclusion of the video the room went dark and then Sara Lee was introduced to an awestruck crowd of food journalists (there really is a Sara Lee). You could feel the electricity when Sara walked into the room. Sara spoke of her father’s legacy, mission, values and unveiled the new product line for the editors, inviting them to join a dessert fantasy experience.

  • Sara Lee’s top chefs created a dessert fantasy in the adjoining gold-gilt ballroom where Viennese pastry masterpieces were arranged near and around new desserts made with Sara Lee products. The editors were challenged to determine which was which. To a one, they couldn’t tell the difference. Perceptions were changed.

For three days it was around the clock substance interlaced with dazzle, including a specially staged concert with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra at another palace in an unusual oval shaped hall where Mozart conducted his first concert when he was six years old.

From this hosted media experience, Sara Lee Bakery dined for more than a year on story after story after story about the events and tastes in Vienna. The media showcase for new products was unprecedented for Sara Lee. A reacquiring of the brand’s “why” sat at the center of the entire venture and with it a departure from the price oriented self-promotion that had been going on for years before.

  • The business results were gratifying and the project was credited at Sara Lee Corporation’s annual shareholders meeting as the reason for significant improvement in the bakery division’s results.

The most important aspect of this campaign was its ability to reframe the Sara Lee brand and product experience in a relevant and resonant way. Sara went on to be the centerpiece of  brand communication for three more years before she ’retired’ to her former and much quieter life with her family.

The lesson: when the “why” is diluted, the business resorts to manipulations to create a reason to buy, and these tactics don’t – and will never – connect in the same way as purpose, beliefs and values. When Sara Lee found its footing again, it was remarkable how that change was reflected in the brand’s performance. Beliefs, deeper meaning and mission are core to creating the emotional connections that impact consumer buying decisions and actions.

  • Great care should be exercised to help ensure your company’s “why” will remain steadfast and vital over time – even if new leadership arrives to carry the torch forward.

If locking in your company’s “why” resonates with you or if your organization needs to optimize its purpose and belief system, use this link to start a conversation. We promise it will be interesting and enlightening.

Looking for more food for thought? Subscribe to the Emerging Trends Report.

Bob Wheatley is the CEO of Chicago-based Emergent, The Healthy Living Agency. Traditional brand marketing often sidesteps more human qualities that can help consumers form an emotional bond. Yet brands yearn for authentic engagement, trust and a lasting relationship with their customers. Emergent helps brands erase ineffective self-promotion and replace it with clarity, honesty and deeper meaning in their customer relationships and communication. For more information, contact [email protected] and follow on Twitter @BobWheatley.

Brand purpose, meaning and beliefs

You Can Harness Marketing’s Law of Physics

August 6th, 2023 Posted by Behavioral psychology, Brand Activism, brand marketing, brand messaging, Brand trust, Differentiation, Emotional relevance, engagement, Higher Purpose, Strategic Planning 0 comments on “You Can Harness Marketing’s Law of Physics”

Divining the formula for consistent engagement and growth…

Are you aware of the remarkable chain reaction that will unleash powerful forces to immediately increase your brand’s salience, relevance, resonance and traction? Significant brand dynamism and energy are released when this singularly vital key unlocks engagement with your intended customer audience.

  • This is a law of marketing physics that creates trust and enduring relationships with consumers who will join your brand as supporters, believers, advocates and evangelists. Read on…

The theory we’re working to change…

Marketing has been hamstrung for decades on a recurring, reflexive default to using various forms of manipulation as the primary currency for purchase motivation. Chasing consumers with messaging that pushes status seeking, vanity, peer pressure, fear or social acceptance, alongside a devotion to amping product features and benefits often goosed with a price incentive. All of these tactics won’t deliver on the requirement of consumer trust and relationship. Brand business built on a foundation of transactional thinking is passé and expensive. Over time these all-too-familiar tactics inevitably commoditize your brand while forcing a continuous, elusive pursuit of incremental differentiation.

  • It’s a hamster wheel of strategic misfires that springs from a misunderstanding of how human beings are wired to make decisions.

Let’s take a collective timeout, step back and consider more deeply the human condition. New insight on how our minds function can indeed lead your brand to create trusted consumer relationships.

This requires moving away from a perception that consumers strictly buy “products” – and the only message that resonates is repetition of feature/benefit selling.

People aren’t buying what you do anymore, they’re buying why you do it.

Inspiration vs. manipulation

A reliable formula for repeatable, predictable results founded on brand mission and purpose is fundamentally more effective.

People are on a continuous search for deeper meaning. They innately resonate to values and beliefs that are aligned with their own views. When your brand reflects their values, you offer them a symbolic flag they wave as evidence to the world around them of who they are and what’s important to them.

In reality, this is human biology at work. Two important areas of the brain govern how we operate – the limbic and neocortex. The thinking, rational side of the brain (neocortex) governs learning, analysis and language. The limbic area informs our decisions and behaviors. It is driven by emotion. Brands want to find a home in the limbic zone that influences our decisions. It’s only there, that a brand will truly matter to the user beyond its functionality.

We know the sheer volume of data the limbic side can process per second is vastly superior to the learning area. Simply stated the limbic brain is far smarter than we give it credit for – thus, why our “gut instinct” can be so immediate and important to informing behaviors. This explains why the neocortex routinely defaults to the limbic part of the brain for our actions.

Inspiring consumers with your higher purpose, beliefs and mission – your “why” – is the pathway into the limbic brain. If you want to have a deeper relationship with consumers, then imbue your brand with deeper meaning by focusing on your why.

  • Brands that fail to focus on an emotive sense of “why” end up forcing people to make decisions with only empirical evidence, reluctantly burning precious mental calories in the neocortex. This explains why those decisions often require more personal commitment of time and energy, leaving us feeling taxed and uncertain.

This is what we mean when we talk about winning hearts and minds. The heart represents the limbic feeling part of the brain, and the mind is the rational, language center. Most brands are quite adept at attempting to win minds; that usually requires a comparison of product features, benefits and price points. Winning hearts, however, takes more effort and in the long run is far more rewarding.

  • Products with a clear sense of “why” give people an emotional pathway to trust them. Their purchase of your product serves as another way to tell the outside world who they are and what they believe.

In his book, Start with Why, author Simon Sinek provides a salient example:

“WHAT Apple makes, serves as the tangible proof of what they believe. It is that clear correlation between WHAT they do and WHY they do it that makes Apple stand out. This is the reason we perceive Apple as being authentic. Apple’s WHY, to challenge the status quo and to empower the individual. It is a pattern that repeats in all they say and do. Apple, unlike its competitors, has defined itself by WHY it does things, not WHAT it does. It is not a computer company, but a company that challenges the status quo and offers individuals simpler alternatives.”

There are lots of ways to temporarily manipulate people to do things – lowering price, for example. However cultivating long lasting brand advocacy is an outcome of inspiring people with your mission and beliefs. Only when your brand “why” is clear and people believe what you believe can a true consumer-to-brand relationship unfold.

It’s hard to make a case that your products or services are important to someone’s life if your efforts are founded on analytical facts and arguments the brand deems as valuable. However, if your “why” corresponds with consumers’ beliefs, they will see your products as a tangible way to help them express what they believe.

This formula for success shows up in messaging

Your brand narrative and story are either founded on your “why” (inspiration) or on what you do and how you do it (features and benefit selling). Inspiring consumers to join your brand as advocates and evangelists begins with embracing your mission and higher purpose. At Emergent we’ve created proprietary messaging process designed to refine and articulate brand higher purpose and how that manifests in characterizing the company’s mission, products and business strategy.

  • We’ve learned that the journey through this experience can be enlightening for company leadership. The outcome produces a clear foundation and anchor to help inform strategies, decisions and business investments moving forward.

Importantly, the real magic here is the shift a refined “why” creates in resonance and relevance of brand communication. By replacing the outmoded manipulation selling tactics and its requisite higher media costs to generate traction, this new modality of inspiring consumers will open doors to sustainable engagement and improved relationships with your brand’s user base. This is how communities of believers are created and brand trust is secured.

If you are inspired to further investigate and optimize your company’s “why” use this link to open an informal conversation on how this can work for your business.

Looking for more food for thought? Subscribe to the Emerging Trends Report.

Bob Wheatley is the CEO of Chicago-based Emergent, The Healthy Living Agency. Traditional brand marketing often sidesteps more human qualities that can help consumers form an emotional bond. Yet brands yearn for authentic engagement, trust and a lasting relationship with their customers. Emergent helps brands erase ineffective self-promotion and replace it with clarity, honesty and deeper meaning in their customer relationships and communication. For more information, contact [email protected] and follow on Twitter @BobWheatley.

Street racing victory snatched by NOS

Why your “why” is vital to brand competitive advantage

July 6th, 2023 Posted by Behavioral psychology, brand advocacy, brand marketing, brand messaging, Brand preference, Brand trust, Emotional relevance, Higher Purpose, Insight, Strategic Planning 0 comments on “Why your “why” is vital to brand competitive advantage”

Doing business in the era of higher purpose and beliefs

As a brand builder focused on burnishing your organization’s most vital asset, your business goal isn’t to convince and persuade customers to buy. Consumers, weary of persuasion tactics and overt brand promotion, quickly dismiss those efforts with a simple click. To pass through the gatekeeping gauntlet, brands need to understand what consumers really want from you – and it’s not more of the same. Rather, your brand marketing goal is to inspire. You might agree motivating people isn’t easy. Thus, why you can’t build a community of committed users and devout brand evangelists by promoting improved formulations and recipes.

Yet so often we find brands preoccupied with their slightly better product mousetrap, thinking enhanced features and benefits comprise the alluring magnet to fuel growth. Not so. Instead, you are navigating in a mental and emotional ocean between the rational and the heart.

Giving people a sense of purpose, deeper meaning and belonging lie at the foundation of every sustainable brand-to-consumer relationship.

The incredible power of “why”

In the early editions of The Fast and The Furious movie franchise we witnessed the recurring testosterone-amped challenges of street racing. Inevitably, as our hero races neck and neck towards the finish line, a canister is activated next to the console that injects Nitrous Oxide into the engine. Boom, an incredible burst of horsepower slingshots our intrepid protagonist across the finish line, literally blowing the competition away.

The NOS (Nitrous Oxide System) is a secret acceleration amplifier that supercharges engine output, thus burying the other racers in a cloud of oxygenated dust. Today similar competitive advantage exists for brands that tune their value proposition with an advanced power generator of relevance and resonance. The NOS of brand marketing is a different kind of “air and fuel” chemistry, founded on an emotional alchemy of mission, meaning and values.

Just like engines of a certain size generate similar levels of horsepower, food and beverage brands focused on claims of superior taste cancel each other out because great taste is table stakes. On a technical formulation level, products in most categories are nearly identical. Competitive advantage based on assertions of technical wizardry isn’t sustainable because everyone brandishes the same wand. Literally everything we eat or drink can be reverse engineered to deliver comparable taste and texture performance.

“Why” is the catalyst for authentic relationships with your users

Here’s the news: the consumers’ worldview has changed – and relating to a brand is now fundamentally the same thing as relating to a person. When you refine and invest in brand purpose and mission, it creates an opportunity to achieve transcendence – the state of being admired – where consumers “join” your brand as members, not merely customers.

Meaning, in order to secure significant financial premiums, sustainable brand relationships must be built first on their admiration and trust of your brand. As evidence of the shift, brand advocacy is now a more important and relevant goal than loyalty.

Of note, this representation of goodwill can be isolated as a component of business value. It can result in higher margins or traffic. Moreover, deeper relationships with consumers will ultimately help reduce the cost of promotion, improving ROI and bottom-line performance. This happens because you are no longer relying on a constant (expensive) drumbeat of self-promotion to refire fleeting, fickle attention spans.

Businesses built on “why” understand that brand relationships work best on the basis of true, authentic reciprocity and humanity. Consequently, they are not superficial, opportunistic or purely transactional. In order to mine the advantages of sustainable brand relationships, marketers have a responsibility to push added meaning, trust and belief to the forefront of the relationship. This insight forms the basis for sound strategic planning.

  • Consumers expect premium food and beverage solutions to meet their great taste requirement. Competitive marketplace leverage isn’t found on the factory floor. It is discovered in the hearts and minds of consumers who now care more about why you do what you do than either what you offer or even how it is made.

Mining the influence of cultural shift

Operating in tandem with a refined value and belief system is the wider influence of cultural shifts on preference and behavior.

Purchases today are largely symbolic gestures. They are flags consumers wave to inform the world around them about their lifestyle priorities – an expression of who they are that is in many ways a mirror of the cultural context swirling around them. For consideration: to what extent have you embedded symbolism and flags of meaning in how your brand story is packaged and presented to help consumers signal those values-based belief statements through purchasing your products?

Larger issues now influence food culture precipitating changes in what consumers are looking for in brands. The store checkout lane today has evolved into a form of voting booth where consumers cast their ballot in favor of a better life and world.

What do they want? Are we helping them with what they want?

More sustainable choices:

One of the most powerful cultural influences of the era we live in is the emergence of conscious consumption – a realization that our eating and purchasing decisions have a consequence. People are learning about the relationship between food production and carbon emissions impact.

  • Climate change is upon us and with it comes a sensitivity to what goes on behind the curtain of our carbon-heavy food system.

Recently in Chicago, for five straight days a grey haze and smoky odor blanketed the city, sending air quality to “worst in the world” status – all due to Canadian wildfire smoke that traveled south and wouldn’t dissipate. Wildfires are occurring at record breaking levels now. These global climate events are a recurring theme.

People were advised to stay indoors. To avoid breathing the outside air given its hazardous particulate content. Meanwhile unrelenting heat waves in the south impact farm and crop viability while helping sponsor conditions that encourage deadly tornados. All of this serves as real-world evidence to everyone that climate change impacts are among us.

The outcomes of these environmental incidents and increasingly erratic (dangerous) temp and weather conditions is a cultural shift towards preference for eco-responsible and sustainable choice, although in many cases brands haven’t made it any easier to identify what is a credible carbon-friendly option.

Health, wellness and a desire to reassert personal control:

Latent pessimism reinforced by daily media reporting has most people believing the future is less certain and that conditions beyond their control may impact future quality of life. Humans resolutely look for ways to add control when everything around them appears chaotic. This has served to amp the importance of investments in personal health and wellness. This is a move to create physical (and emotional) resilience in the midst of events that suggest the environment is suffering at the hands of policies and behaviors which inflict various forms of climate damage.

No longer just a weight management motivation, healthy living is a lifestyle and “survival” choice that helps people reacquire a sense of control over their wellbeing. Gym visits, the explosion of Pilates classes, cycling exercise studios and online therapists. Similar to how consumers increasingly see the connection between food choice and sustainability, efforts to improve personal and mental health are cultural mandates increasingly embraced by a wider swath of the population.

Experiences over consumption for its own sake:

Culinary and environmental tourism, chef-inspired food and wine events, even dangerous expeditions to the deep ocean floor, serve as reminders that experiences offer a form of expectation magic that has surpassed the former thrill of the consumption economy.

We have managed to pack and stack storage facilities with the worn-out treasures of “buying stuff” – evidence that years of acquiring has left families with mountains of extra clothes, furniture, equipment and credit card debt. “Things” as evidence of elevated status and success no longer hold the same allure.  We have exhausted materialism and replaced the void with interests in adventures that reward our emotional desire for transcendent and novel experience.

Modern brands as coach, guide, advisor and enabler

All of these evolutionary changes in behaviors and desire provide one of the most positive, significant and vital opportunities for brands to acquire a valuable role in their consumers’ lives. Your brand’s number one job is to help your users on their life journey. To provide value that extends beyond the utility of the product you sell.

  • How incredible is it that consumers have arrived at a place where advice and guidance are key to achieving their goals. Can we help provide it? Can we step into the breach to be an enabler of their wishes and interests? Can we impart wisdom and tools they can use to improve their lives?

Yes we can! If we finally decide that improved relationships are key to business growth more so than product feature/benefit selling. This is the challenge of the age and one, if you choose to accept it, that can result in a deeper relationship with your users founded on delivering deeper meaning and value.

  • Here is a link to our one-page overview of these shifts and changes. Please take a moment to click the link to read. It may serve as inspiration for a deeper conversation with us about ways to map an improved future for your brand and business.

Looking for more food for thought? Subscribe to the Emerging Trends Report.

Bob Wheatley is the CEO of Chicago-based Emergent, The Healthy Living Agency. Traditional brand marketing often sidesteps more human qualities that can help consumers form an emotional bond. Yet brands yearn for authentic engagement, trust and a lasting relationship with their customers. Emergent helps brands erase ineffective self-promotion and replace it with clarity, honesty and deeper meaning in their customer relationships and communication. For more information, contact [email protected] and follow on Twitter @BobWheatley.

Neuro-imaging helps us understand the true behaviors of people

The Most Misunderstood Tool in Marketing: Your Customer’s Brain

February 18th, 2023 Posted by Behavioral psychology, brand advocacy, Brand Design, brand marketing, brand messaging, Brand preference, brand strategy, consumer behavior, Consumer insight, Emotional relevance, Human behavior, Insight, Marketing Strategy, storytelling 0 comments on “The Most Misunderstood Tool in Marketing: Your Customer’s Brain”

Why we unleash the power of emotion to inform business outcomes

What drives people to make the choices they do? What is it that causes us to prefer one brand over another? What are shoppers actually, truly thinking? Until now, since no one had can come up with a scientifically tested, verified answer to those questions, brands reflexively plowed ahead using the same strategies and techniques as they always have. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

However, the laws of attraction for one brand over another are locked up in the consumer’s often misunderstood brain.

  • Now thanks to neuro-imaging research (known as fMRI), we have unprecedented insight into how emotions – such as generosity, greed, fear and well-being – impact brand selection and purchase decision-making.

Why is this insight so important? In our multi-channel, always on digital world, people are yanked, tugged, pelted, pushed, prodded, reminded, cajoled, whispered at, overloaded, and overwhelmed by an unrelenting stream of in-your-face product communication. The result? Snow-blindness.

Through behavioral research we can confirm that brands will most likely fail to engage when they rely on functional attributes of products – bigger, quicker, cheaper, more powerful, faster acting, or greater selection – rather than focusing on connecting to the consumer through deeper meaning. Storytelling strategies miss the mark when brand minders concentrate on only a part of the human behavior system – for example pressing hard on competitor brand weaknesses – only to leave the consumer’s emotions out of the equation.

Why do we continue to default to the time-worn approach of barking the benefits as if on auto-repeat? The answer starts with each of us. Literally everyone enjoys thinking of themselves as a rational being. We nourish and clothe ourselves. We go to the office. We think to turn down the temperature at night. We download music. We go to the gym. We handle crises – like missed deadlines, a child falling off a bike, a friend getting sick, a parent dying, etc. – in a mature and evenhanded way. Thus, we erroneously believe we’re reasoned analytical, logic-driven decision makers. Well, we’re really not.

In truth, the other part of our minds not governed by rational thought is flooded with cultural proclivities rooted in tradition, fear, how we’re raised, and a host of other subconscious influences which rise to apply a powerful but invisible influence over the choices we make. And the secret to enrolling that part of the brain – emotion.

“Emotions are the way in which our brains encode things of value, and a brand that engages us emotionally—like Apple, Harley-Davidson, and L’Oréal, just for starters—will win (in the marketplace) every single time,” reports Martin Lindstrom, author of the neuromarketing treatise, Buyology.

Roughly 85 percent of the time the brain is on autopilot. It’s not that we can’t think – rather our subconscious minds are a lot better at informing our behavior (including why we buy) than our conscious minds are. We are hardwired to defer decisions and actions to the sub-conscious and we don’t even realize we’re doing it.

The subconscious is at work informing our buying behavior

Mirror Neurons are always operating in the brain

A classic example, we tend to subconsciously imitate what others around us are doing. Think about how other people’s behavior affects our shopping experience, and ultimately influences our purchasing decisions. Mirror neurons override rational thinking and cause people to unconsciously imitate – and purchase – what is in front of them.

Or our brains build a story that we believe. We may see models in fashion magazines and want to dress like them or make up our faces the way they do. We watch the rich and famous driving expensive cars and lounging in their lavishly decorated homes and ruminate, I want to live like that.

Lindstrom provides a common-place and relevant example: “A shapely mannequin wearing hip-hugging, perfectly worn-in jeans, a simple summery white blouse, and a red bandana stops you in your tracks. She looks great—slim, sexy, confident, relaxed, and appealing. Subconsciously, even though you’ve put on a few pounds, you think, I could look like that, too, if I just bought that outfit. I could be her. In those clothes, I, too, could have her freshness, her youthful nonchalance. At least that’s what your brain is telling you, whether you’re aware of it or not.”

We rely on almost instantaneous shortcuts that our brains create to help us make buying decisions.

Is the decision rational? It may seem that way as a choice is made, but it wasn’t, and not by a long shot. In a nano-second and below your conscious radar an inner conversation is occurring. Lindstrom again provides an iconic example:

“I associate Skippy with childhood…it’s been around forever, so I feel it’s trustworthy…but isn’t it laden with sugar and other preservatives I shouldn’t be eating?…Same goes for Peter Pan, plus the name is so childish. And I’m not buying that generic brand. It costs 30 cents less, which makes me suspicious. In my experience, you get what you pay for…The organic stuff? Tasteless, the few times I had it…always needs salt, too…Plus, didn’t I read somewhere that “organic” doesn’t necessarily mean anything, plus it’s almost double the price…Jif…what’s that old advertising slogan of theirs: “Choosy Mothers Choose Jif”…Well, I am a fairly discriminating person…”

That entire evaluation happens in an instant and below conscious thought, based on deep-seated experiences, acquired knowledge, cultural bias and perceptions we hold close over time.

When emotional connections are the priority

Brain-scan studies confirm our heads are hardwired to bestow upon some brands an almost religious significance and as a result we forge binding loyalties that keep us coming back over and over again.

Imagine the power of fear in bringing actions to bear on a benign and unsexy category like home safety. We were tasked with creating a new residential alarm product category for First Alert, the smoke alarm brand leader. The task was centered on the leading source of accidental poisoning fatalities in America – carbon monoxide (CO). This household hazard is odorless, colorless, tasteless, completely invisible and early symptoms are identical to the onset of flu.

Sounds like an impossible task doesn’t it. In part because we know people invariably believe that hazardous events like this “will never happen to me” – not in my back yard. We conducted deep dive research with married couples who had children in an effort to understand where the levers of reception and action could be tapped. We learned that if their children were at risk from an invisible menace that would impact kids faster than adults, they would act quickly to mitigate the problem.

We created a name for the threat that made its invisibility an attribute – “The Silent Killer.” We built the campaign around a real family from Maine who lost their teenage daughter to an accidental poisoning event in their home. It could have been prevented if an alarm had been present. The parents for their part wanted to help educate other families to help them avoid the one thing parents fear the most: loss of a child to a preventable accident. In this case, the alarm is the only way to know invisible CO is present.

The story was powerful, emotional, personal and real. We did not devote any of the narrative to product features or technology. It was instead focused entirely on a heart-rending story that ended with a call to action to protect family members by installing an alarm. The campaign was so successful the new First Alert CO alarm business went from zero to $250 million in sales within 14 months of launch. City governments stepped in to write laws requiring carbon monoxide alarms in homes. National news covered The Silent Killer safety hazard. Local TV news showed people in lines around the block outside their hardware store looking to get an alarm. Thousands of needless deaths were ultimately prevented.

The power of emotion to move people to action cannot be underestimated. The dynamic exists in virtually every product category you can think of. It’s counterintuitive, however, to the traditions of focusing story on product features and benefits. Yet we’ve seen over and over that when how human beings operate holds sway in decisions regarding communications, the subconscious becomes a powerful asset on the road to preference and purchase.

Without it, we’re talking to ourselves in what is inevitably a snow blinding experience for the consumer who avoids the message.

Curious about learning which emotional triggers might be most compelling for your users?

Share your observations or questions here. Use the this link to start an informal dialogue on emotion-based marketing.

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