Discovering Your Brand Emotion — the Need Beyond the Need
Written by Ashley DeCarli
(3 min read)
A brand exists for one primary reason: to get people to care. As plain and simple as it may sound, it’s true. Your brand is what helps people understand if and how your business fits in their life. It is the powerful force driving decisions among anyone who comes in contact with our business, including customers, employees, partners and investors. Your brand is the reason why people choose you.
Your brand is the reason why people choose you.
To get people to care and choose you, your brand must tap into a NEED that lies in an emotional territory. Yes, the need must still fulfill an essential function, but it has to evoke feeling. This true need, a combination of function and feeling, can be found by exploring the “need beyond need.”
Your “need beyond the need” search centers around the most basic question we all become equipped to ask at a very young age, “why?” Start by thinking of the most obvious reason a customer may NEED your business and then you ask why. Keep asking why until you hit a figurative brick wall and cannot ask it anymore. Somewhere, just before that wall, you will discover that functional why that strikes an emotional chord.
We’ll use our own business, A Land Beyond, as an example.
As a business that provides brand consultation, the most obvious customer need we come across would be something like this:
“I need help developing my brand.”
This obvious need is purely functional and transactional. There is no emotion here, so we have to go deeper and ask why: Why do you need assistance developing your brand?
“Because my business is built around a great idea, but I struggle telling people about it. I need help explaining it in a way that people understand — a way that will set me apart.”
Still just functional, so: Why does this matter?
“Because I need customers to choose me. And after they do, I need them to talk about me, to share their experience with others and champion me.”
Functional again: Why?
“Because I didn’t work this hard to build my business only to just survive and get by. I built it to be successful.”
We have found emotion, but there could be more: Why?
“Because I want to be able to be proud of what I’ve built, do something that matters, make my family proud.”
Strong emotion, but does it go deeper: Why?
“Because I don’t want to look back at my life and feel it was absent of purpose.”
We’ve hit our brick wall — no more why.
What we uncovered here is the underlying emotion behind the functional need for brand services. The emotion is centered around finding purpose and achievement. Another way to look at the emotional need is by turning it into a problem. The emotional problem we must solve is a fear of falling short. There’s a fear of mediocrity. So when we marry function and feeling, we walk away with the real customer need:
“I need a brand that will take my business beyond mediocrity.”
When you land your brand in emotional territory, you create an opportunity for real connection.
When you land your brand in emotional territory, you create an opportunity for real connection. You have found the customer need that lies at the heart of the problem that you exist to solve. And when you take that need and blend it with your unique purpose, you have built a brand that has the power to realize your full business potential.
