Human touch boosts outstanding brands to the top
By: Jim Katzaman - Get Out Of Debt
Tags: Brand Strategy, Customer Experience, Marketing, Social Media, Influencer Marketing

Consumers love brands that act in more human and personal ways. People seek an emotional engagement — a relationship consisting of loyalty, honesty, reliability, longevity and commitment.

“Consumer purchases have been proven to be affected by emotions,” said marketing expert Lama Barr on her blog on Talkwalker, a social listening and analytics platform. “Love is one of the most powerful emotions out there. You don’t need me to tell you that.”

She indeed told more during an Africa Tweet Chat, discussing the importance of brand love, including how to measure its benefits.

Brand love is being married to a product to the point where no other brand can take its place.

“When we talk about brand love, we think of the emotional relationships between a satisfied customer and a brand,” Barr said. “It’s a combination of joy and trust, that sweet spot that once you unlock as a brand, you’re all set.”

It could be the number of customer mentions and referrals to your business.

“I like to keep a close eye on the sentiment of the customer mentions,” Barr said. “Repeat customers is such an important and often overlooked metric. It is more expensive to gain a new client than to retain an existing one.

“Positive brand mentions are key,” she said. “Some brands can be so fixated on the volume of mentions only and miss out on the immense value of sentiment analysis. Then there’s the challenge to track word-of-mouth referrals.”

Guide toward digital touches

One technique is to use a comment form with check boxes.

“That could work,” Barr said. “Push people toward a digital touchpoint by asking them to leave a review on social media or fill in a quick online survey. Sentiment score was another one of the key metrics we used in our report on the world’s most loved brands.”

Brand love guarantees there will always be demand for a product in good times and bad.

“If you build a strong relationship with your customers, they will be willing to pay higher prices,” Barr said. “I often think of Apple as a case in point. Happy and loyal customers are like free brand influencers.

“Price premium is a huge benefit of brand love, especially in today’s challenging climate,” she said. “Consumers are more likely to remain loyal to the brands they’ve built strong emotional connections with.”

The three key loyalty benefits identified in Telewalker’s report about brand love are price premium, brand loyalty and brand advocacy.

If you’re already inclined toward a brand, favorable engagement with it will reinforce your love for it.

“Don’t jump on the bandwagon,” Barr said. “You have to evaluate whether a trend is in line with your brand purpose and identity first. Being relevant is essential.”

As Zig Ziglar said, “People don’t buy for logical reasons. They buy for emotional reasons.”

“Being relevant is essential for trend engagement,” Barr said, citing brands that do it right. “By engaging with trends, you connect with the emotional engagement while building relevance with your consumers. In the long run, it wouldn’t be worth sacrificing your brand purpose and identity.”

Priceless fan experience

Fandom is true love without the financial enticement for sponsorship, which will latch onto anything for a price.

“Fandoms tend to suit brands in the entertainment and gaming industries,” Barr said. “Not to my surprise, TikTok was one of the most loved brands in Africa, based on our latest research.

“When done right, sponsoring a sports team, band or event can capitalize on bonds between consumers and their favorite teams,” she said, pointing to Etihad Airways as a great example of corporate sponsorship. “I love how Etihad does it.”

Public relations and influencer marketing work when the promoters are aligned with the brand’s goals.

“This offers a lot of pros and advantages for brands,” Barr said. “How do you select influencers to help you achieve these pros?

“Brands and marketers need to track their influencer campaigns down to a T,” she said. “Freebies are not good enough. You need to prove return on investment.”

Barr explained that proper linking with influencers is key for success.

“They need to be onboarded to a brand as if they’ve just been hired to work there,” she said. “Know the ins and outs. They need to genuinely love the brand. Brands also need to focus on building a connection with the influencers’ communities.

“Vetting influencers is a crucial step of building an influencer marketing campaign,” Barr said. “Influencers can help build strong community relationships around a shared passion. Just make sure you pick the right ones for your brand by vetting.”

She has a free resource to help marketers find influencers in Africa.

“As marketers, we have a shared goal to raise the standard of the industry and help each other out,” Barr said.

Without “revealing too many spoilers,” she said Talkwalker research of the world’s most loved brands has Lego at the top.

“After analyzing more than 700 brands globally, we identified 11 brand-love methods,” Barr said, based on the free Talkwalker report.

About The Author

Jim Katzaman is a manager at Largo Financial Services and worked in public affairs for the Air Force and federal government. You can connect with him on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.