Functional vs. Emotional Branding: Creating a brand halo.
Today’s marketing reaches buyer personas with tailored, relevant information indexing into buyer needs. Buyer needs ultimately drive purchasing decisions, and those needs can be categorized as functional or emotional.
Competing as a functional brand.
Buyers that evaluate brands on characteristics such as premium, performance, value, and practical are evaluating the functional ability of the brand. In these cases, buyers understand the specific function that the brand or product serves, and evaluate whether it satisfies their need. In the market of online survey tools, Survey Monkey owns the characteristics of value and ease of use. The functional performance of their survey builder and simple, easy integration creates an exceptional product platform to rivals. Often, the brands that own functional characteristics create superior products relative to their rivals and maintain their brand leadership by continuously innovating.
“Functional branding highlights how the product or service solves the buyer’s problem.”
Competing on emotive characteristics.
Emotional brands are associated with words like simple, sophisticated, traditional, and modern. These characteristics create a feeling or evoke an emotional response from the buyer. Emotive-driven brands tend to convey more empathy, personality, and connection in their marketing messages. These emotive characteristics focus on the experience of the brand from website to customer interaction, and the product, itself. Standout emotive-driven brand, Apple, rewards buyers with a feeling of instant gratification (simple, modern, innovative) and esteem during the buyer journey. From the moment a consumer walks into the Apple store, or visits their website, they get a unique experience that seeds an emotional bond towards the Apple brand.
“Emotional branding highlights the personality of the company.”
Benefits of a Brand Halo
Brands are not strictly identified with one category or the other; a successful brand has equity as both a functional and emotional brand. Brands that perform well as both often exhibit the halo effect. The halo effect is a cognitive bias, like a mental shortcut, meaning that most of the time we have no idea we’re doing it. The halo effect occurs when the interaction with one characteristic, experience, or product within a brand influences emotional or logical responses towards other characteristics, experiences, or products within the brand. So, when a buyer has a positive interaction with a customer service rep, they may feel more positively towards the product.
Two important advantages of having a brand halo:
1. Strong buyer loyalty. Creating a brand halo will keep your buyers coming back for more. Additionally, this means those buyers will choose you over the competition.
2. Brand advocates. There’s no better way to reach a new customer than a friend or family referral. Brand advocates choose you, and they tell their friends to choose you.
To achieve a brand halo, the theory is simple. It’s not easy, but it is simple. First, identify the ideas, values, and beliefs your buyer’s hold true. Then, live it. To create a brand halo, become a brand that embodies those characteristics, values, and beliefs. Become the brand that buyers relate to and identify with. What’s your cause? What’s your purpose? And how can you prove it? Answer those questions with action, and you’re on your way to achieving a brand halo.
“It’s not easy, but it is simple.”