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Blog Home Business Marketer The Brand Intimacy Metric: What Makes Consumers Connect with Companies?

The Brand Intimacy Metric: What Makes Consumers Connect with Companies?

About a year ago, the Harvard Business Review published the results of a study on brands and their customers. The takeaway from the research, conducted by consumer-intelligence firm Motista and technology company CEB, was this: if companies hope to grow, focusing on customer experience and satisfaction isn’t enough. Rather, brands must connect with consumers on an emotional level. “A company’s job isn’t done when customers are simply satisfied. Even good customers can become better customers if you can find a way to make it personal,” HBR said in a video summing up the results.

Sound intimate? It is — and that’s the point. Now more than ever, brands and their agencies are finding that getting personal with their customers is the key to business and marketing success.

The Brand-Intimacy Metric

The idea that strong brand-customer relationships require a personal touch isn’t particularly new, but at a time when ad clutter is a top concern and chief marketing officers anticipate upcoming challenges like generating sales while attracting the right type of customer, it has more relevance than ever. Just ask MBLM, the self-proclaimed Brand Intimacy Agency. For the past two years, MBLM has been analyzing brands — and consumers’ feelings toward them — for its Brand Intimacy Report, the latest version of which was released in July.

MBLM ranks brands based on their numbers of users and the intensity of their customer relationships. This is measured using such metrics as interaction (Sharing), level of commitment (Bonding), and how much consumers identify with the brands they engage with (Fusing).

This year, the agency found that Levi’s is currently the number-one brand among men, LEGO has the top score for nostalgia, and Ben & Jerry’s is considered the most indulgent brand, providing “moments of pampering and gratification.” MBLM’s quantitative research study, which encompasses 52,000 brand evaluations and 6,000 consumers, also discovered that in the U.S. Apple is the most intimate brand overall, followed closely by BMW.

Every year, MBLM ranks brands based on the depth of their relationship with consumers for its Brand Intimacy Report. Credit: MBLM

Rina Plapler, partner at MBLM, explains that the need to assess brands in this way is directly related to the evolution of the customer journey. The past two decades, she says, have produced “seismic shifts” in technology, consumers’ decision-making processes, and the path to purchase. In order to be effective, modern companies must make consumers feel as though they’re connected to the brand in some way that goes beyond the need for, and even love of, the product. Brand intimacy, Plapler says, is about “being focused on having a clear emotional component to your brand.”

Plapler isn’t the only one who feels that a different approach to marketing was overdue. Research firm Gallup reported back in 2014 that “Americans’ attitudes toward their money have changed.” It also found that deciding what to buy is no longer a purely rational act. Rather, the more engaged consumers are with brands — meaning that they’re proud to be your customer, feel you deliver on your promises, and consider your brand a perfect fit — the better the business outcome for companies of all kinds. In its customer engagement report, Gallup noted that consumer electronics shoppers who are fully engaged spend 29 percent more per shopping trip, and hotel guests spend 46 percent more than actively disengaged consumers.

Tapping into Emotion

According to Plapler, 90 percent of all purchase decisions are based on emotion. “It’s very important that brands are able to connect with their audiences on this level,” she says. “We believe intimate brands perform better, and our data related to financial performance seems to mirror this.”

[sstk-pullquote align=”right”]… Think of brands as having personalities. They should feel human to consumers… and those that do are more likely to form strong bonds.[/sstk-pullquote]
It’s little wonder, then, that so many marketers are adopting an emotion-forward mindset. In another article by the Harvard Business Review, consumer-intelligence agency Motista encourages brands to zero in on “emotional motivators” such as the desire to feel a sense of belonging and security, and provide value to consumers based on their unique needs. To appeal to a consumer that wishes to stand out from the crowd, for example, brands can emphasize how they can help “project a unique social identity.”

Emotion is always top of mind at San Francisco-based digital marketing and creative agency Teak. According to Teak partner and creative director Kevin Gammon, it’s “really critical” for consumers to relate to how a brand speaks and acts. “A brand can talk about a product in a rational way — it tastes better, it’s faster, it has brighter colors,” Gammon says, “but if there’s a positive emotion tied to that product, that’s much more powerful.”

In producing branded content for such companies as JanSport and Duraflame, Teak’s team of 35 project managers, designers, and writers think of brands as having personalities. They should feel human to consumers, Gammon says, and those that do are more likely to form strong bonds.

One of the tools that brands can use to humanize themselves is nostalgia. Part of nostalgia marketing‘s appeal is that it taps into what Gammon calls a “very deep-seated emotion,” which in turn can boost the intimacy level between consumer and brand. “If I loved Starsky and Hutch in the ’70s and there’s new product related to it, I’m going to love it because I have this connection from childhood,” Gammon says. “The deepest (brand) connections are always going to be emotional.”

Nostalgia is also one of the six archetypes that MBLM uses to measure brand intimacy. Along with fulfillment, identity, enhancement, ritual, and indulgence, MBLM has found nostalgia to be consistently present in the world’s most intimate brands because of its ability to evoke emotions. For example, in comparing auto brands Chevrolet and Chrysler, MBLM discovered that “nostalgia is notably a big advantage for Chevrolet,” which boasts a nostalgia ranking of 51 compared with Chrysler’s 32. The agency’s survey data, which reflects the consumer’s impression of Chevrolet overall, ranked it higher than Chrysler in nearly every brand intimacy metric measured.

As part of its Brand Intimacy Report, MBLM puts top brands head to head to see which has a more intimate relationship with consumers, and why. Credit: MBLM.

The Need for Authenticity

In the quest for intimacy, marketers are also finding that authenticity counts for a lot. While it doesn’t factor into MBLM’s rankings — Plapler says it “did not emerge as one of the most compelling factors in building intimate relationships” — authenticity underpins everything from sponsored content and influencer marketing to social media and can have a positive effect on consumers’ perception of brands. A 2014 study by communications and PR agency Cohn & Wolfe found that consumers believe authentic behaviors like communicating honestly about products and services and acting with integrity are important, more so even than innovation and product utility. More than 60 percent of global consumers told Cohn & Wolfe they would buy from a company they deem authentic over its competitors.

For Teak, authenticity — along with consistency — are pillars of the brand-customer connection. To ensure that the work it creates for brands rings true to consumers, Teak starts by conducting audience research and matches what matters to the customer with what matters to the brand.

In the case of backpack and collegiate apparel brand JanSport, this effort led to the development of Live Outside, an ongoing marketing campaign that Gammon says is “all about being connected to the outdoor culture and celebrating free spirit.” Teak commissions street artists to paint bare walls in cities around the world and films the process for use on JanSport’s social media channels. This year’s effort in Rio de Janeiro included interviews with the artists that offer a real, raw look at how they work and live. In spotlighting the outdoor lifestyle in a way that excites consumers, JanSport is able to engage and energize its target audience.

For Duraflame, Teak created a series of online videos based on #adulting, an existing meme creating by and for millennials who increasingly find themselves involved in grown-up activities like framing posters, getting renters’ insurance, and yes, making fires. Gammon notes that Teak used humor to “celebrate these moments” and show consumers that Duraflame understands them and their needs.

The relationship between consumers and brands is forever evolving, so it stands to reason that the way we measure it should evolve, too. For the time being, prioritizing intimacy, emotion, and authenticity looks to be the best way to liaise with consumers. After all, just because a brand isn’t human doesn’t mean it can’t act that way.

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