Building Brands on the Marketing Power of Emotions

Write this down, “Building brands on advocacy”. This is a phrase that’s about to take the business world by its horns. Today’s companies are constantly struggling to increase their profits against dynamic and often erratic consumer behaviour. One thing that most companies realise is that today’s consumers aren’t just looking for products, they are looking to get their stuff from companies that stand up for something, companies with authentic corporate responsibility. With so much ad blindness in today’s information saturated environment, running Oscar-worthy ads on sports networks no longer cuts it for a long term marketing strategy. Sharply dressed actors playing dentists aren’t able to sell toothpaste anymore. Consumers don’t trust ad speak no more than a 15 year old believes in Santa Claus. Today’s companies face the need to keep up with consumer behaviour or pack up, and what better way to do that than through the marketing power of emotions?

Emotions and marketing have long been a viable merger for driving traffic into selling points and profits over the roof, but somehow, most companies have only managed to stumble upon an emotional marketing strategy once in a while rather than carefully planning it. The marketing power of emotions has been the driving force behind the music and movie industry, but somehow the business world has been left behind, perhaps due to a lack of creative know-how on how to run an emotional marketing campaign based on CSR initiatives. Emotional branding is one of the benefits of corporate social responsibility that companies can exploit and reap from. An example of such an emotion based marketing is pedigree’s initiative to find new homes for shelter dogs, not your average charity initiative, but a whole new business model that has helped the company create a new stream of loyal customers who’s sympathy for the initiative reward the company with great business. Such customers are less likely to ditch pedigree for any other brand and are more likely to willingly spend more money on the same products.

The benefits of corporate social responsibility are seen time and again in the CSR initiatives of the most of today’s top brands. The Red Goldfish book by Stan Phelps and Graeme Newell explores the jungle of B-Corps to dig out an enormous amount of evidence of emotion based branding being put to practice by some of the most successful companies. These companies have created great revenue streams by nurturing the marketing power of emotion and channelling it through corporate social responsibility programs. 

The book contains hundreds corporate responsibility examples which any business manager looking to develop CSR initiatives for their company will be keen to study and learn from. Additionally, the authors have collected over 3500 videos of CSR initiatives and uploaded hundreds of these videos onto the web. The links to the book and other resources are made available at the end of the video here: http://602communications.com/red-goldfish-new-book-social-enterprise/