The other day, I was thinking about a specific nutritional supplement. Like most people these days, I immediately went to my phone and Googled it.

Not surprisingly, I instantly got connected with literally thousands of businesses wanting to sell me that specific product.

And that caused a lightbulb to go off in my head:

Consumers today have a practically unlimited number of choices.

And that got me thinking about how businesses can stand out from the crowd of competitors to get people to choose their products from among all the thousands of others.

The answer? Emotional Branding.

How People Choose

When people make buying decisions – either online or in real life – the use three basic criteria:

• Personal Perspective
• Psychological State
• Emotion

The most important of these for the people offering products is emotion. If you can find a way to get people to create an emotional attachment to your product, your business, and your brand … then you already have succeeded in capturing the marketplace.

Think about the brands you use in your everyday life. Maybe you prefer Coke to Pepsi. Maybe you drive an Audi rather than a Kia. Or perhaps you like the Green Bay Packers over the Detroit Lions.

Now think about why. Without exception, it’s because you have a deep-seated emotional connection with that specific brand. After all, it’s only human.

Basic Human Emotions

Think back to the Psych 101 class you took in college. Science has identified eight basic human emotions:

• Fear
• Anger
• Surprise
• Joy
• Sadness
• Anticipation
• Trust

If you can connect one of these emotions with your specific brand – preferably not fear, anger or sadness! – you can tap into your prospective customer’s primary human emotional need.

And then you can create a resounding message that creates a genuine connection with buyers.

Emotional Branding Creates Uniqueness – Creating good ties

So how can you create these emotion bonds to transform passive shoppers into customers who are fiercely loyal to your brand? There are a number of effective strategies:

1. Reverse Engineering – Choose one of the “positive” emotions from the list above then work backwards to figure out how to get your brand content to invoke that emotion in buyers.

1. Offer Solutions to Everyday Problems – People are going online to find solutions to universal problems. If you can figure out ways to offer up your brand as that solution, you’ve already won.

1. A Picture Is Worth 1,000 Words – Great images make it easier for people to connection emotionally with your brand than dense written content. Images that offer universal solutions — such as life contentment, professional success, happy relationships, and so on – can draw people into your brand and start building those valuable trust bonds.

1. Build a Perfect World – People are naturally hopeful about the future. When you can show how your brand can help make people’s future better, most will be open to buying into that future – especially if you can paint a visual image that connects.

1. Overcome Objections – Simultaneously, most people are naturally skeptical. Identify potential drawbacks to people choosing your brand then preemptively explain why they are invalid.

1. Use Your Storytelling Skills – Finally, create emotional bonds by sharing personal stories about your brand, your company, even your personal life or your happy customers. Stories offer immediate connections with genuine emotion.

Whew! That’s a lot to get started. To learn more, get together with Lytron and start creating emotional branding for your business.