Branding strategy is more than meeting functional needs

“Main purpose of branding is to get more people to buy more stuff for more years at a higher price.”

Marty Neumeier, author “The Brand Gap”

The purpose of branding is to become the name people think of immediately when they want what you sell.In the beginning, brands differentiated between products and services. Today they meet aspirational needs as well functional requirements. Brands are a means of means of self expression. They are a mirror, a status symbol, they reflect our dreams and embody our values.

The effects of emotional branding strategy

Emotionally based campaigns are not only more likely to produce very large business effects, but also produce more of them, outperforming rationally based campaigns on every single business measure.
Les Binet, an econometrician and business analyst, analyzed the 25 years and  1000-plus cases on the UK IPA Effectiveness Awards database

Brand Positioning linked to Profits

An analysis of 55 US corporations found that brands that grew differentiation between 1993 and 1995 also grew operating profits significantly more than brands that failed to grow differentiation, and more than brands that merely increased salience.
-Du Pleiss, Advertising Likeability, Admap, UK, October 1998.

Brand building by connecting to consumers through emotions

Brand building by connecting to consumers through emotions

People are emotional beings.

They feel first, think second.
Feelings affect rational thought.
Most purchase decisions are emotional, justified with rational thought later.

In 2002 Daniel Kahneman of Princeton was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics. His work, for the first time, recognized that it’s the power of emotions and a person’s psychological makeup that are the key determining factors in buying behaviour.