Measuring what matters – your brand’s emotional equity
By Todd Trautz and Brent Snider Maru/Matchbox | April 2023
Do you know how your consumers emotionally connect to your brand? Are you leveraging and building upon those emotions in your marketing communications? Are you bluntly capturing affinity or brand love as a metric in your tracker with no idea how to use it to your business advantage?
Brand health or equity tracking is vital to brand growth and understanding the true impact of marketing efforts. However, to do so effectively, it is critical to capture ‘why’ consumers choose your brand. David Ogilvy’s infamous quote highlights what we are missing in tracking “A brand is the intangible sum of emotions and product attributes,” which succinctly points to the consumer’s brand heuristic. The brand is a mental shortcut that directs actual behavior. As Ogilvy explained, it is comprised of two things:
1. What do consumers, in a fast, implicit, and associative manner, believe the brand functionally or rationally delivers? (The jobs to be done).
2. How do consumers emotionally connect and feel about the brand (Emotional equity).
Emotional equity is not only how close a consumer feels to a brand or how intensely they feel but why and how they connect. These important levers shape the consumer heuristic by providing the positive emotional “payoff” that drives and reinforces the behavior. Brand loyalty, satisfaction, and NPS are strongly correlated to positive emotional connections to the brand.
As part of the human decision-making process, we evaluate brands in a fast, associative, and subconscious manner the positive emotional value of choice. We will inherently choose the product or brand with the greatest positive emotional “payoff,” regardless of rational benefits or features [these help consumers ‘feel’ good about the choice they made]. Consumers will never choose a brand or product that they emotionally feel negative about.
This “intangible bundle of emotions” that shapes the consumer’s brand heuristic is not immeasurable. Consumers cannot directly express the emotional dimensionality of the connection because the emotional feedback process occurs involuntarily and subconsciously within our System 1 pathway. Capturing emotional equity requires a passive System 1 solution that can quantify and validate what emotions are being evoked, how strongly, and what bundle delivers the optimal emotional “payoff.”
At Maru, we quantitively capture each emotional component and how they interact to form your brand’s emotional equity. We do this passively using a patented, globally validated library of 10,000 images. Our visual semiotics solution employs a gamified UX and, on average, generates over 1.5 million data points to reveal the individual emotions and pathway of your brand’s emotional equity.
In addition to understanding ‘why’ and ‘how’ consumers emotionally connect to your brand, we also capture how consumers want to feel in your category or how they want to feel with your brand using a projective technique. This whitespace exercise allows you to see what emotional levers are aligned or similar and which need to be adjusted to attract more consumers to your brand or product. Consumers are more open to your messaging when it comes to the same emotional wrapper in which they already perceive the brand or want to feel.
This direction provides marketing and the creative team with an activation roadmap to inform creative briefs and align emotional tonality and messaging to deliver the emotional “payoff” that strengthens equity, drives behavior, and attracts new consumers to your brand.
By aligning your marketing efforts to the specific emotions that comprise your brand’s emotional equity, we can directly connect your tracking to better business outcomes.
Brand tracking doesn’t need to be a quarterly exercise of trying to “triangulate” insight to explain or align with marketing and sales. With Maru’s holistic approach to brand tracking, we don’t just provide you with measurements but rather an actionable plan on how to impact the metrics and why they are important. Without action, it’s just an observation. Observations do not grow brands or change behavior.
If you cannot recall the last brand decision you made with your tracking data, maybe it is time to understand and action your consumer’s brand heuristic. You have nothing to lose but insight.
To learn more about Maru’s Implicit Response Platform (IRT), read our whitepaper:
