Forbes India

Is rousing of emotions and associating them with a brand, a good strategy? Will a brand built on emotive appeal grow faster? If so, which type of emotion works best? The answers to these questions are worth trillions of dollars. I don’t have the answers. But I am attempting to understand the questions much better. Man has understood the infinitesimal atom and the infinite universe but not his own mind. There isn’t much that is conclusively known about how emotions are provoked. Therefore, ‘the role of emotions in brand building’ remains a hotly debated subject.   [siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget] For too long, marketing has been loosely taken as being the same thing as advertising. The role of many other building blocks has been relatively devalued. Brand positioning is attempted almost entirely via advertising content. It’s claimed that ‘emotion sells’. But, sales are merely a consequence, an output. What is the measure for the input? To answer this, hundreds of studies have been done researching responses ranging from the psychological to the physiological. The responses evaluated and graded include blood pressure, dilation of pupils, perspiration, concentration of hormones in the blood, brain activity amongst others. Such indicators have been recorded for thousands of consumers and duly reported. Yet, we are far from concluding anything. Emotions are richly experienced but poorly understood. Given their imprecise and nebulous nature and the absence of concrete evidence-based formulations, no one is ever right or wrong about them. Emboldened by this, creative lobbies have over promoted emotion as the key ingredient in brand building because it increases their own importance. At its essence, marketing is about need creation and fulfilment. We have now arrived at the central question – Does triggering of emotions more effectively move consumers towards intended actions? We don’t even have a recognised definition of emotion. Dictionary meanings are liable to be inappropriate and misconstrued. For our purposes, emotion is a response that gets higher attention, engagement and comprehension. On being emotionally roused, the intended consumer notices, feels, understands better. Evolution hardwired us essentially as Stone Age creatures. When we register an impact in our memory we remember it through emotional hooks. This is also a structural reality in the human brain. The hippocampus is our filing manager and it sits right next to the amygdala that is the centre for emotion. Both awareness and recall perk up when emotionally rousing content is consumed. Naturally, what is more emotionally rich is likely to get more velocity of sharing. Given all this, the case seems to be quite straightforward and decided in favour of emotion. Not so at all! What seems perfect in theory, most often fails in practice. Firstly, emotion is a continuum. It is very difficult to have differentiation based on degree of emotion. Consumers respond to an emotion based on context and comprehension. Secondly, there are other parts of consumer and brand interactions where no element of emotion is involved. This includes patented technology, product quality, accessibility, pricing and place of origin. Consumers purchase brands to experience desired outcomes. It is their action that takes them from the current to the desired states. Emotions often get reduced to something abstract. Coca-Cola says “open happiness” whereas L’Oreal says “because you are worth it”. Such abstraction is rarely comprehensible. The primitive impulses of our subconscious mind are hardwired. It is unlikely that our given instincts may change as a response to advertising. To conclude, we must investigate why actions do not directly follow from emotive impulses. Why is heightened emotion only a temporary state? Why do consumers get back to the evaluation mode sooner than later? These answers are crucial. I may have disappointed brand managers who want to lead lives of lofty purpose and motivate millions via emotions. I am sorry to counsel them that our calling may not be so exalted yet. For now, we must simply manage brands in whichever way it prompts consumers to take actions, generate sales, gain share and make profits. https://www.forbesindia.com/blog/marketing-and-branding/emotion-in-brand-building-the-questions-that-await-answers/

“The aims of life are the best defence against death” –Primo Levi Surival is not compulsory. It is a willful choice. As a species, there is no place for us in the world where our existential threats won’t find us. Be it a viral pandemic, environmental degradation, loss of species or resource depletion, we are all in it together. We are inescapably in the same small boat on very choppy seas. The reason why humans have been unable to cooperate on a global scale has to do with our evolutionary hard-wiring and how we perceive our self-interest. It has forever been a story of ‘us’ versus ‘them’. We have never recognised mankind as one collective entity. Our genetic biases deter cooperation. [siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget] Paradoxically, our social and economic life is dependent on our ability to organise into large groups and manage the complex interrelationships between individuals. Doing business and making a profit is something that makes us willing collaborators. This is a case of evolution by the spread of culture rather than purely via natural selection. Richard Dawkins has defined a ‘meme’ as a piece of cultural information. Memes act in our mind much the same as genes do in reproduction. As ideas, they replicate from one to another carrier through communication between people. They change and adapt, often replicating improperly. Still, this mutation keeps them relevant. Memes compete with other memes for survival. The most memorable, persuasive, useful and malleable memes survive by exciting listeners throughout a chain of transmission. This is an abiding example of cooperation. You share with those who matter to you. We need to expand that definition to embrace the world. What I want to convey is something that doesn’t occur to us naturally, namely that cooperation and competition are fruits of the same tree. We must learn to cooperate while competing whether in business, as individuals, within entire gene pools or amongst corporations. Of these, the modern corporation is unique because it can pursue internal as well as external cooperation. A corporation is an ever-shifting network of co-operators. It uses economic resources such as capital, technology and knowledge to provide customers with what they want in exchange for profits. Cooperation goes beyond a corporation’s internal processes, past the boundaries of the organisation and across the borders of countries and continents. The relative growth of a corporation is observed to be a function of how well it competes. But, in fact, cooperation is the right spirit to cultivate rather than competing for narrow good. Since we are self-interested, as people and as institutions, this realisation doesn’t come naturally.  If we want to succeed at an individual, institutional and societal level, we must be selfish enough to collaborate. ‘The Theory of Co-opetition’ was proposed by Adam Brandenburger and Barry Nalebuff in 1996. By their definition, cooperation is how value is created while competition is how value is captured. To create the market, industry, sector or pie we must cooperate. To grab our share or a slice of it, we must compete. Indeed, much of what is most valuable in the world has emerged from cooperation. Yet, culturally, we overemphasise the lore of the competition. Cooperatively, we run families, society, local economies, and trade in goods, services, ideas and technologies. Business creates wealth that didn’t exist before. It ought to be grounded in reciprocity. Only ‘win-win’ can thrive whereas ‘win-lose’ can only lead to conflict. Competition and cooperation are not polar opposites. In fact, they are complements to each other. Being exclusionary over the long run is being suicidal. Surviving and thriving are both team sports. If we can begin this process of learning and self-realisation now, at a time when our mortal existence is threatened due to the relentless advance of coronavirus, we will make it a happier world for ourselves. https://www.forbesindia.com/blog/business-strategy/cooperation-first-competition-next-corporation-last/

The entire ‘content, design and brand advisory’ ecosystem is enchanted with newness. Those who rule here have hyped ‘new is gold’ as a mantra to further increase their own importance. In advertising communication in particular, this is an endemic issue. In the name of creating original, unique and impactful content, a recipe for disaster has been sacralised. This may have existential consequences for brands. It will diminish value for business. Why? Because owning a bit of the consumer’s memory is at the core of brand strength. A brand is a summative whole comprised, amongst other things, of logos, taglines, colour scheme, fonts and of course, advertising content. To be known and remembered is a prerequisite to being preferred. A brand that cements memory structures in the consumer’s mind is building a highway for its growth journey. [siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget] So, instead of finding ingenious ways to reiterate and buttress brand memory, this craze for faddish advertising devours the very same brand assets that it is supposed to strengthen. Brands are plagued with significant problems related to advertising effectiveness, under-investment in brand building and myopic decision making. Yet, if we ‘follow the money’, we see that all parts of the brand communications industry—advertising, PR, media, consulting, AdTech stand to gain if the ‘more and new’ mindset rules. Ad Blocking, subscription-based content models and data-linked personalisation are amongst the many real threats to mass advertising. Therefore, decision makers have opted for supplementary, new-fangled, targeted advertising purportedly endowed with emotive entertainment value. It is the wrong medicine for this malady. What is needed is tighter, snappier content, faster delivery, and a strengthening of a brand’s associative turf through recurrence. Since audio-visual content gets the largest investment, the need for novelty, whether in ideas, modalities, positioning or partners, has become a big priority. Talented people are convinced that their creative careers will grow only if they have patent title on something new. Awards build careers and reputations. Effectiveness is, at best, a secondary criterion. Those deluded go along seeking results beyond the expected. The hope is that something new may actually work and become revolutionary and shape shifting. The urge for fresh, original work is about making brands more noticeable, relevant and impactful. On the other hand, it is believed that doing more of the same is bound to be predictable in terms of both input and output. What is not recognised is the damage caused by scrambling memory structures. If on one day, you are associated with one thing, and on another day, you are about another thing, then on the third day, you are associated with nothing. Brands can own any ‘assets’ only when they are identified with them. This happens only via continuous, repetitive, frequent messaging over a long period of time. My counsel is not that things should stay unchanged, hackneyed, commoditised and uninspiring. Of course, we must change when change is needed. But a wide departure straight away is not sensible brand building. Change must be viscous. Imagine a kaleidoscope. The same assets can give us innumerable permutations.  A brand must not change to a point where it loses the power of reinforcement. Unnecessary exits from course lead only to the graveyard. Those responsible are not only on one side of the table. It isn’t only via creative pitches, lobbying for fads or an award-hungry pursuit of projects that things have come to the present state. The weakness is as much with clients who are unclear and unsure about their brands and, in desperation, allow newness to be the mantra for a redemption that never arrives. In advertising ‘old is gold’. https://www.forbesindia.com/blog/business-strategy/brand-building-is-like-body-building-repetitions-matter/