For your brand to resonate with the market, you must consider every way your brand touches prospective and current customers. This includes: customer service, support, accounting, shipping, as well as traditional communication such as collateral, advertising, public relations, etc. To develop a real brand strategy, all elements of a company’s external marketing must mesh seamlessly with what the customer will experience with any other part of the organization.

How the Relationship With Your Customer Affects Brand vs. Product

One key question we’re often asked is, should we invest in creating a brand for the company or for the product? Knowing when to invest in creating a brand for a product vs. having an umbrella brand for the company is an important decision. Start by answering these four questions:

Is the long-term relationship with customers and prospects going to be based on the company promise or the product?
Will your customers buy additional products from you because of their relationship with you or because of the previous product they bought?
How quickly will the product become obsolete, or will it be relatively timeless?
Will you be more than a one-product company?

When your funds are limited, and your answers lean more toward creating a preference for the company as opposed to preference on a singular product, invest your efforts in conceiving and delivering on a promise of value and experience around the company. As part of this work, you remember that creating a brand has an emotional component.

Purchase Your Assessment

Branding includes the Emotional Association the Customer has with Your Company

While you may be adamant that your solutions are truly unique, oftentimes, customers cannot really discern functional differences. Sometimes, the only way a company or solution stands out is by creating a unique emotional connection with the customer. If you believe branding is merely about your logo, corporate identity, website, collateral, or advertising and/or the vehicle you use to deliver your messages, you may end up very disappointed.

You will need a clear plan with built-in checkpoints and success metrics to keep everyone focused on turning the words of your brand promise into a real customer experience. Without a customer-centric brand strategy, you run the risk of turning your branding efforts into a set of communication tactics.

The Emotional Components of Your Brand Impact Customer Loyalty, Experience and Engagement.

Measure the Emotional Side of Brand Loyalty

There are a variety of ways to measure customer loyalty and engagement. All approaches involve asking customers to report how loyal they are to a brand/product. While the answers to this question yield important information and insights, when people answer this question directly, they provide a cognitive and rational response.

There are also emotional components to brand loyalty. Sometimes people may not even be aware of their emotional attachment. Anyone who has been “upset” by a change to a key brand attribute, for example, terminating or changing a flavor or process, is having an “emotional” reaction that can potentially and unconsciously impact loyalty. It is important for marketers to understand and measure the emotional side of brand loyalty.

So how can we understand and measure what affects the emotional side of loyalty?

Here is one approach:

Create a list of the positive and negative associations that affect the emotional side. This could be a color, communication channel, touch point, or even a distribution partner.
Pair the associations. For example, present service options associated with the same keywords/phrases of the brand promise and ask customers to select the matching tagline.
Measure the response time. The longer it takes the respondent to identify the correct tagline, the more the service options captured their attention and delayed them from clicking on the tagline. It may be a very short delay, but the reaction time is measurable and meaningful.

We help our customers use approaches such as these to discover which associations have the greatest impact, and compare associated in terms of their relative strength. We’d love to help you too!

FAQ:

(written by Penn of Sintra.ai)

Q1: What must be true for a brand to resonate with the market?
A: You must account for every way the brand touches prospects and customers—service, support, accounting, shipping, and every form of communication. A real brand strategy requires external marketing to align with the actual end-to-end customer experience.

Q2: Should a company invest in branding the company or branding a product?
A: It depends on where the long-term relationship will reside—company promise or product. The decision is best made by answering four questions:

Is the relationship based on the company promise or the product?
Will customers buy additional products because of the relationship with you or because of the prior product?
How quickly will the product become obsolete (or is it timeless)?
Will you be more than a one-product company?

Q3: When funds are limited, what is the best branding investment choice?
A: If your answers lean toward preference for the company (not a single product), invest in defining and delivering a company-level promise of value and experience—because that promise can carry across offerings and touchpoints.

Q4: Why is branding not just identity and communications (logo, website, collateral, advertising)?
A: Because customers often cannot discern functional differences between solutions. Differentiation frequently comes from a unique emotional connection—how the brand makes customers feel and what they associate with the experience.

Q5: What is the risk of branding without a customer-centric strategy?
A: Branding devolves into disconnected communication tactics. Without a plan, checkpoints, and success metrics, the brand promise remains words—rather than a consistent, measurable customer experience.

Q6: How do emotional components of a brand affect loyalty, experience, and engagement?
A: Emotional reactions can be triggered by changes to brand attributes (a process, a “flavor,” a service element) and can influence loyalty unconsciously. Customers may not be able to articulate these attachments directly, but they still shape behavior.

Q7: Why is measuring emotional loyalty different from asking customers if they are loyal?
A: Direct questions tend to produce cognitive, rational answers. Emotional attachment may be implicit—customers may not be fully aware of it—so you need methods that reveal associations and reactions, not just stated intent.

Q8: What is one practical method for measuring the emotional side of brand loyalty?
A: Use an association-and-reaction approach: (1) list positive/negative associations tied to the brand promise (color, channel, touchpoint, partner), (2) pair associations (e.g., service options mapped to promise language) and ask customers to match taglines, and (3) measure response time—delays indicate attention and emotional salience, enabling you to compare which associations are strongest.