Do you like movies? Do you read novels or short stories? Do you go to the theater? If any of these are true for you, you’re going to like emotive branding.
There is a reason that human beings have developed so many art forms that tell stories. We even developed stories about art that doesn’t technically have a narrative, such as painting, sculpture, and modern dance. We do this because of that conscious mind sitting on top of our nervous system. It’s a connection maker, a synthesizer, a transformer of what we see into something we can understand.
Above all, it wants resolution. It wants things to click into place in a way that reaffirms our feelings, memories, hopes, and fears. That’s what stories do: they resolve. A set of characters act on each other, events unfold, and the story resolves them all. Boy gets girl. Good triumphs over evil. Faust goes to hell.
Some wonderfully insightful research by Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues (check out “Thinking, Fast and Slow”) shows that our dominant mode of thinking is to take whatever is going on in front of us and fit it into our previous experience. We do this even though it often means we miss what’s really going on. (We also have a mode that enables us to assess events accurately and analyze them logically, but we have to call on it consciously.)
Human beings developed the dominant mode because we’re not purely rational. As much or more, we’re emotional. We need strong emotional bonds to survive gestation periods of nine months; weaning that takes years; and preparation for biological adulthood that takes well over a decade. We have to form bonds, and keep them strong, or our families and societies will fall apart.
One of the main ways we form these bonds – and rear our children – is by telling stories. The stories all have one thing in common: they resolve. Things click into place in a way that makes them easier to remember. They’re not abstract concepts anymore, because that emotional and intellectual resolution “happened” to us in the telling. Then we go forward and act out the values and lessons we learned.
This is emotive branding in a nutshell. It happens to us.
It’s not just an idea or a strategy. Emotive brands resolve things inside us in a way that makes them easier to remember and act on. They invisibly spur us to make connections with other things we value, and form our own synthesis of how and why an emotive brand belongs in our life.
Have you ever wondered how people in one country can have a completely different view of history from people in a neighboring country? It seems crazy, but it’s mostly sane. The people in each country were told different stories their whole lives. The facts may be more or less the same, but the stories resolve in completely different ways.
We call this culture, but we could also call it emotive branding.
In each country, the stories were different, and those differences happened in the telling. It’s extremely difficult to undo that when the stories are about things such as freedom, justice, and dignity. That’s why successful diplomats don’t contradict the stories they hear from their counterparts in other countries. They look for shared stories, and develop new shared stories, until there is a basis for trust and cooperation.
Emotive branding can do the same for your business: align your story with stories your target audiences have already internalized, so that there is always a feeling of resolution and confirmation when they interact with your brand. Sometimes this involves actual stories. Sometimes it’s more subliminal. The result is the same: a fusion of feeling and thinking that remains alive inside people and influences how they behave.
