Building Brand Sentiment Beats Lowering Prices

Brands compete on value, commodities compete on price. Look over on your campaign messages for 2016 to determine which your product falls into. Are you offering discounts, slashing prices and undercutting the competition? To compete in 2017, focus on building brand sentiment by communicating to a psychographic audience.

Last week our chief creative officer shared the essentials for capturing customer mindshare. The article pinpointed the three tiers of the neocortex that make up memory banks which brands must appease in order to capture mindshare.

Brands help people tell a story about themselves. Nike means athleticism, Apple means creativity, C2 means efficiency and so on. Instead of focusing on price, shift the attention of your commercial campaigns towards building brand sentiment.

Before doing so, it's important to shattering preconceptions about consumer behavior and understanding the underlying psychology such as:

1. Decision making is emotional, its justification is rational.

TESLA launched this week in Dubai, mixing its messages to appeal audiences that want to save the world with cars that rely on clean energy. They may ignore any discrepancies in the value chain involved with manufacturing a green car. We can already see from TESLA's launch messages that it's pulling on the emotional heartstrings rather than the logical long-term advantages of a clean car.

2. Clasp Experience Design That Enables Purchase Decision Ownership

Shopper marketing has evolved and now marketers must be able to predict paths to purchase within and outside the store. Designing an experience that naturally guides the shopper needs to come from intuition. In this way, they own the decision after purchase instead of feeling led. Nike's Internet of Things initiative introduced actual and aspiring athletes to the stage Nike Fit and its ability to rank an everyday citizen as the champion of his or her township. Rewarding athleticism with in-store redeemable points for products that represent the natural progress of the specific sport (swimmer needs new goggles, graduates to flippers for trying scuba for the first time) allows Nike to guide the experience.

3. Understand that customers’ minds can be in conflict with themselves.

Perceptions build memories, which drive recall and loyalty. Drive economic value around what your organization generates by investing brand activation's around rational, physical and emotional decision pillars. Last year ASUS tapped into Virtual Reality to showcase its latest product line, capitalizing on the anticipation of VR to correlate the power of its devices. By immersing VR participants and spectators in the awe of another plane of new age gaming, ASUS was able to tap multiple layers of what constitutes positive memories.

-

Thanks for reading!

If you would like more information on how we tirelessly submerge our teams in building brand sentiment for clients, reach me on [email protected]