5 Steps for Choosing Your Brand Emotions – Branding 101 – 06

As an entrepreneur, you know that a brand name is more than just a word or phrase. It’s the cornerstone of your company’s identity, and it should reflect the values, mission, and vision of your business. The combination of your brand name and – most importantly – your brand messaging, and even your visuals, should work together to cohesively evoke the emotions in your audience that you’re hoping to relay.

If you don’t strategically consider this piece of your branding, you may inadvertently be creating messaging that causes the wrong emotions to be felt by your prospects.

Knowing the feelings that effectively capture the essence of your brand can be a challenging task, but it’s also an incredibly important one.

Here are 5 tips to help you come up with a brand name that evokes the right emotions and feelings in your customers:

Define your brand’s mission and values

Take some time to reflect on the core mission and values of your business.

• What sets your brand apart from the competition?
• What are the core values and mission of the brand, and which emotions align with and support those values and goals?
• How do competitors in the market evoke emotions in their branding, and how can the brand differentiate itself in terms of emotional appeal?
• What emotions does the entrepreneur personally want to evoke in the audience, and how can these emotions be integrated into the branding strategy?

As an entrepreneur, you need to understand the essence of your brand so that you can select branding options that resonate with your target audience.

Research and understand the target audience for your brand

You’ve done your audience research in an earlier step in this series, but you like focused more on the demographics and interest.

Drilling down into the emotions behind those audience members – understanding their values – will help determine which emotions will resonate most with them.

There’s many ways you can do this. You can have discussions with your best existing customers – those that most closely align with the audience that you want to target. You can also find your audience online – such as on social media or forums related to your industry – and read their posts and comments to try to understand the emotions behind their communication. You can also create surveys and questionnaires, although a lot of thought has to go into the right questions to ask to reach the emotions behind the answers.

Consider which audience emotions align with your values and vision

You’ve now identified the core values and mission of your brand, and hopefully gathered quite a bit of information about the emotions behind your target audience.  Now consider which emotions align with and support those values and goals.

• What do you want your customers to feel when they think of your brand?
• What emotions do the target audience members typically experience in relation to the products or services offered by the brand?
• Are these the emotions that you want them to feel? If so, how can you encourage more?  If not, how can you change it?

This will help ensure that your chosen brand emotions are authentic and consistent with the brand’s identity.

Emotions of visual elements

Most entrepreneurs who speak with me have already established at least some level of their brand’s visual elements. Others have full-fledged brand visual guides. Yet often, these have been coordinated based upon visual appeal, yet most of the entrepreneurs haven’t yet elevated their branding to encompass an emotional level to their branding.

It’s entirely possible that you’ve been intune with your audience enough to have incorporated the feelings that you want to invoke into your brand visual elements without even realizing it.  To make sure, you will want to undertake a brand visual audit.

Consider the emotional impact of your brand’s visual and messaging elements, such as its logo, color scheme, and tone of voice. These elements should be chosen to support and reinforce the desired emotional response.

• How do the visual and messaging elements of the brand, such as its logo, color scheme, and tone of voice, impact the emotional response of the audience?
• Are colors aligned with your brand’s values and message? For example, if your brand is eco-friendly, you may want to use greens and blues to evoke feelings of nature and sustainability
• Are fonts that easy to read and reflect your brand’s personality? For example, if your brand is modern and sleek, you may want to use a clean and minimalist font. A brand whose audience is into grunge or alternative culture probably wouldn’t reflect the right emotions with a minimalist font.
• Look at your visuals and graphics. Do you use high-quality and consistent visuals across all of your marketing materials, from your website to your social media posts? This will help create a cohesive and professional brand image.
• What about clutter? Avoid using too many visual elements or overcrowding your designs. Instead, use white space to create a clean and organized look that is easy on the eyes.
• You probably understand the importance of storytelling in your brand – I’ve spoken about this before. Don’t forget that a photo is worth 1,000 words and can help tell your story as well. Consider using visual storytelling to engage your audience and evoke emotions. This can be done through the use of compelling images and videos that showcase your products or services in action.

Test and measure the emotional response to the brand among the target audience

Just because you’ve set your branding at some point in the past, does not mean that it cannot change. While I don’t recommend you just change it randomly based on a whim, having done careful research will tell you if finetuning your branding pieces will be helpful.

And when you’ve determined that it will be helpful, it’s okay to change. When you’re growing your business from small, towards the million-dollar mark and beyond to a multi-million-dollar or multi-billion-dollar enterprise, you will likely need to go through several iterations of your overall branding during that journey – even if your main brand component – your logo – never changes. This is what the most successful brands tend to do over time.

You will want to gather consistent feedback. This can be done through surveys, focus groups, or other forms of market research to gather feedback and refine the emotional branding strategy.