Stronger Brand BuildingWhy Emotions Matter
Our brains encode emotional memories more forcibly than other data.
Looking for the keys to stronger brand building? Want people to remember your brand in deeper and more enduring ways? Wish they would act more deliberately on your brand’s behalf? According to brain science, emotion is the key.
I’ve long been preaching the idea that brands should generate a specific emotional aura as part of their everyday brand experiences. I have urged them to evoke these selected positive emotions across the many interactions they have with people.
My thinking has been that by evoking emotions within the brand’s experiences, you are building the foundation for more positive and beneficial relationships with all the people that matter to your brand.
Furthermore, I’ve always sensed that emotion is the force behind our more enduring life memories. I’ve translated that thought in the branding context to mean that a strong, emotionally based connection will last longer. As such, these emotions are at hand during subsequent interactions with the brand—you might say “the pump is primed.”
Finally, I’ve long assumed that there is a compound effect, as subsequent interactions reinforce and increase the strength of the emotional connection.
The brain science that explains why emotion matters in brand building.
In his great book on empathy, Wired to Care, author Dev Patnaik explains how this connection works within our brains:
“The limbic system draws together many different elements of the brain to form an overall structure for handling emotional information… the amygdala is devoted to processing our emotions and those of other people. The hippocampus is essential in the formation of long-term memories. Together, the two regions serve to help us form long-term emotional connections with other people.
As it turns out, the more emotionally charged an event is, the more vivid it feels to our amygdala, which then helps our hippocampus to hold on to the event for the long term. That’s why our most emotional memories are also our most vivid ones. Our brains literally encode them more forcibly than they do with other data.”
That relationship between emotion and memory helps explain why we take emotion seriously in brand building. We call the feeling a brand intends to create its Emotional Impact. The idea is simple: a company’s Conviction gives people something meaningful to understand, while Emotional Impact helps shape how that truth is experienced and remembered.
How do you want your brand to feel to people?
There is a vast range of emotions a brand can create, but the goal isn’t to choose feelings simply because they sound appealing. Emotional Impact should grow from what is genuinely true about the company: its Conviction, the people it needs to reach, and the experience that will help that belief carry beyond the people who already know the business well.
That makes specificity important. “Trusted” or “innovative” may sound positive, but they rarely provide enough direction on their own. The useful question is how people should feel when they encounter what your company believes and understand why it matters.
For Emotive Brand, those intended feelings are Seen, Confident, Inevitable, and Unstoppable. They give us a standard for the experience we want our own brand to create, rather than simply describing what we want people to think about us.
Getting it right can deepen the difference between simply being recognized and giving people something they can genuinely believe in. For companies approaching moments when perception matters, that distinction becomes increasingly important: what the market understands and feels about the business shapes the context in which its value will eventually be judged.
Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design firm for product-proven B2B technology and AI companies.
