A Better Way to Brand

Introduction

In today’s competitive world, where products and services often seem increasingly interchangeable, brands need every advantage. Marketing strategies have traditionally focused on functional attributes and rational appeals, rather than leveraged the power of emotion. A Gallup study has shown companies that prioritize emotional connections with their customers outperform their competitors by 85 percent in sales growth.¹

Things need to change.

Brand Intimacy Overview

Here’s where Brand Intimacy can help. Brand Intimacy is the emotional science behind the brands we use and love. It starts with the understanding that almost 90 percent of all decisions are made on emotion, not rational thought and measured consideration.² Advances in neuroscience and behavioral science have taught us that to influence decision-making, you have to appeal and connect to people’s emotions.³ And that is true whether it is a personal, professional, or group decision.⁴

Every aspect of your brand and marketing needs to align with having an emotional foundation. Although instinctive, it is not always clear how to do this, so we developed a proven three-step process to create, shape, and build intimate brands. Each step builds on the other, informing and advancing. A strong essence, compelling story, and flawless customer experience are the key components of a powerful, intimate brand.

We invented this new paradigm in marketing and have been leveraging it to create award-winning healthcare brands for companies of different scales, areas of focus, and geographies.

Intimate brands outperform their peers across profit, revenue, and stock price. They also have more engagement, with users willing to pay more for them and less willing to live without them.

A Framework for Building Intimate Brands

Essence: Create Brand Differentiation
Story: Build a Powerful Narrative
Experience: Deliver Meaningful Customer Engagement

1. Essence: Create Brand Differentiation

Intimate brands start with essence: a strong foundation that creates an ownable force of attraction and connection. Essence includes the building blocks for your brand: Name, Strategy, Identity, Design System, and Brand Architecture.

Essence is extremely important for healthcare brands so they can create more differentiation. Brands all speak to highlighting value, quality, and outcomes. Brands also look related, applying the clichéd symbolism of logos with circles suggesting comprehensive care or abstracted people to connote partnership. The same color schemes, icons, stock photography, and web templates further the impression of a saturated category. In this sea of sameness, it is almost impossible for any customer to distinguish your brand from your growing competitors.

Here’s the thing. Spending marketing dollars to communicate the same thing as everyone else is ineffective. We know looking the same and promoting rational benefits does not align with how customers make decisions. Your brand has to be rooted in something authentic, emotional, and important. Over a decade of research has taught us there are six drivers most effective for building intimate brands. We call them Brand Intimacy archetypes, and they are markers consistently present, in part or in whole, among strong intimate brands. Archetypes identify the character of brand relationships. These archetypes are not specific to any one industry, so naturally, the relevance of some archetypes over others can vary.

Archetypes: Characters of Bonds

1. Fulfillment

Exceeds expectations, delivering superior service, quality, and efficacy.

2. Identity

Reflects an aspirational image or admired values and beliefs that resonate deeply.

3. Enhancement

Enhancement occurs through better use of the brand—smarter, more capable, and more connected.

4. Ritual

Ingrains a brand into daily actions—more than habitual behavior. The brand becomes a vital part of daily existence.

5. Nostalgia

Focuses on memories of the past and the warm, poignant feelings associated with them. These are often brands a customer has grown up with.

6. Indulgence

Creates a close relationship centered on moments of pampering and gratification that can be either occasional or frequent.

The first step is to see what archetype mix is right for your brand and how to then ladder these to create a strong brand strategy. Design plays a pivotal role here as well. The colors you select, your logo, and the system you create can all convey emotional cues. Design can anchor and extend your brand in a unique way, helping it immediately make a positive impression, as well as stand out among your competitive set. Design can also reinforce your brand archetypes that drive a stronger connection to the brand.

2. Story: Build a Powerful Narrative

Story is often the most under-leveraged part of our framework. A compelling narrative is crucial as brands engage in more ways than ever before. Weaving together a brand story, both at the company level as well as to distinct stakeholders, is essential to creating meaningful customer connections.

Brand Intimacy can help you present your brand authentically. The Identity Archetype, in particular, can be useful to accentuate. Identity reflects an aspirational image or admired values and beliefs that resonate deeply. Leveraging this as a core element of your brand instills a strong sense of who you are.

The Story phase is where the brand gets a unique voice and fresh visual expressions. What you say is important, but-how you say it is also key. Is your brand a guide? A cheerleader? A change agent? Are you humorous? Cordial? Direct? Your tone needs to reflect your unique personality, which in turn helps create further distinction. Words are half the story. In the Story phase, your brand’s visual expression in social media and campaigns also gets developed. Does your style reinforce your voice? Does the design of your social posts and campaign command attention and convey emotion? A strong message with a weak design will not move the needle and vice versa.

3. Experience: Deliver Meaningful Customer Engagement

Experience is a critical phase. It is where your brand comes to life and how people engage with it. Brands today need to be dynamic, motivating, rich in content, and continually updated. We create a frictionless presence for your brand so you can delight users across channels, places, and devices.

In healthcare, like in most businesses today, your website, apps, and social presence are the places your audiences will go to learn more and form early brand impressions. In this era of instant gratification and seamless user experience, even minor missteps can result in being passed over. Whether it’s confusing navigation, slow-loading pages, or convoluted customer service, friction creates disengagement and sends customers flocking to competitors who offer a smoother experience.

What is clear is that different audiences require different tactics, and there’s rarely a one-size-fits-all marketing initiative that works. Importantly, 33 percent of customers who abandoned a business relationship in 2020 did so because personalization was lacking, indicating friction in customer experience.⁵

Attracting a prospect requires different cues than trying to sell an existing customer a new service. Brand Intimacy Stages are a tiered system for encouraging customers to deepen their relationships with you. The Stages identify the depth and degree of intensity between a customer and a brand. Each stage has a different strategy and a related set of marketing recommendations.

Stages: Strength of Bonds

1. Sharing

Sharing is when the person and the brand engage and interact. Knowledge is being shared, and the person is INFORMED about what the brand is all about and vice versa. At this stage, attraction occurs through reciprocity and ASSURANCE.

2. Bonding

Bonding happens when an attachment is created, and the relationship between a person and a brand becomes more significant and COMMITTED. This is the stage of acceptance when TRUST is established.

3. Fusing

Fusing occurs when a person and a brand are inexorably linked and CO-IDENTIFIED. In this stage, the identities of the person and the brand begin to merge and become a form of mutual REALIZATION and expression. Stages reveal and measure the depth and degree of intensity of an intimate brand relationship.

This is important today when the cost and time of acquiring a customer can be significant. Acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing customer. Traditionally siloed or legacy, many customers are often unaware of the full range of services a company has. Activating more tailored cross-selling or up-selling strategies, as well as understanding the different drivers relevant at different stages of a relationship, becomes critical. The goal of Brand Intimacy is not only to increase your customer base but also to have your existing customer base grow with you, advancing to higher stages of Brand Intimacy, where we know they are advocates, more attached to your brand, and less price-sensitive. Brand Intimacy creates stickiness, with fewer customers leaving and more customers growing their relationships, directly impacting ROI. A 5 percent boost in customer retention can increase a company’s profitability by 25 to 95 percent.

Conclusion

Brand Intimacy is an effective vehicle to shape stronger, more meaningful brands. It anchors your brand to an emotional foundation, creates meaningful distinctive verbal and visual components, delights across channels, and engages audiences in effective and appropriate ways. It also creates a powerful platform to motivate employees. Intimate brands instill a strong sense of pride and are usually closely linked to purpose. This can also be critical when recruitment and talent acquisition are a priority.

Brands today, whether B2C or B2B, need a new approach to build stronger customer bonds. By linking to emotion, your brand can lead and inspire, finding new ways to connect and attract stakeholders.