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As a copywriter who creates content in support of brand messaging, I am familiar with emotion. My copy often speaks to—or at least attempts to speak to—a potential customer’s sometimes unspoken concerns around product reliability and performance. Boiling the message down to its essence, I’m essentially saying on behalf of my clients, “Buy our product because it will make you look good to your boss.”
Branding, at its core, is about emotion, even though it may not initially seem to be. There’s a raft of writing out there about how millennials are capable and, indeed, willing to form a deep emotional attachment to a favored brand. I think we actually all do.
So, imagine my pleasure at reading a post “Marketers Must Follow The Brand Insights” by Mark Di Somma of Branding Strategy Insider.
In June, Mr. Di Somma attended a conference about brand strategy in a changing world. One speaker, Chris Wren, exhorted his audience to follow their insights. “Wren’s challenge to participants to take the path of greatest insight rather than the one of least resistance was a reminder to every brand strategist and manager in the room that customer-centricity is not always convenient or personally intuitive.”
Mr. Wren presented Western Union as a case study. We’re all familiar with the company’s yellow-and-black logo and likely with the often-less-than-photogenic business districts where it plies its money-transfer trade. But I bet many of us were not at all familiar with the Western Union’s “home cooked” video campaign. (See below.)
I was astounded at the emotion that welled up when I saw people “from many lands” (as we used to say in grade school) entering their local Western Union office and being presented with an authentic home-cooked meal. The meal was emblematic of everything they missed from home and of the good things they are able to do for their families by working in this country.
Marketers at Western Union took what seems to me to be a leap of faith in going with their intuition about the right message. As Mr. Di Somma puts it, “So here we have a company in the money transfer business exploring motives that, on the face of them, seem well removed from the business at hand … Any yet … they make sense. For a team working through these insights at the time, though, I can well imagine that at some point they must have wondered whether they were uncovering a human gem or in real danger of going off-course. Kudos for making the right call.”
Equally important, as Mr. Di Somma notes, is being able to stop at just the right point, so that your campaign doesn’t risk “over-shooting the framework that consumers recognize and respond to.” How do you develop that sensitivity? I think the key is in staying tuned into your own emotions, listening to real people and, of course, social listening, and being willing to go where the 5Y approach takes you.
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