Why Building Emotional Rewards For Customers Needs To Be A Priority

Building a loyal customer base means continuous sales and recommendations leading to increased profit. Your brand is the key to achieving this loyalty.

All brands provide customers with a feeling. To build loyalty, a brand must understand how it creates an ‘emotional reward’ for its customers. Getting this right requires you to think about how your brand’s personality and values evoke these emotions.

Every action has a consequence. How you manage your brand creates an emotional reaction in your customers. Understanding these emotions and working to evoke the right ones can clearly differentiate your brand from its competition and build deep, long-lasting relationships with customers. Successful brands know exactly how they want their customer to feel and reflect this in every aspect of their brand.  

A high-end brand for example, might want to make their customers feel superior or elite. It will carefully consider how shop locations, price brackets and product availability impact customer perceptions. Another brand might focus on making its customers feel humane or altruistic, by offering sustainable products or donating a percentage of profits to environmental charities.

This kind of emotional loyalty doesn’t happen overnight and needs continuous development and reinforcement.  Decide how you want your customers to feel about your brand and whether it is how you are actually being perceived. Think about how your brand’s personality traits and values reflect these emotions and what you can do to carry these through to every aspect of your business.

Sometimes when a company stands for something specific there are people who won’t agree. When that happens it can polarise opinion and cause debate. Strong brand personalities are more likely to create emotional attachments. The Apple vs Android battle is a good example of why polarisation isn’t necessarily a negative thing.

Being a generic ‘try to please everyone’ brand might not cut it in an increasingly competitive marketplace. To protect and grow your brand you must consider how your brands personality and values result in how people feel and use this knowledge to drive loyalty.