Brand Intimacy: Creating Emotional Connections with Customers

Creating emotional connections with customers looking to buy your products can make all the difference. Emotions are the driving force that influence most buying decisions. Stirring strong emotions, whether positive or negative - can help you create a bond between your customers and your business. This is an important objective for almost all businesses. Positive emotions are crucial to a brilliant retail customer experience, as a loyal customer is the one that is most likely to recommend your company than a one-time customer.

What is Brand Intimacy?

Brand intimacy is defined as the deep emotional connection between a business and its customers. The brand intimacy marketing model involves a focus on emotions and can affect how customers make purchase decisions and whether they become loyal fans of the brand.

Brand intimacy is different from brand loyalty. While brand loyalty may depend on loyalty incentives and rewards, brand intimacy is entirely dependent on how a customer ‘feels’ about a brand.

Brand intimacy engenders reciprocal bonds that are deepened by emotional connections. The connection is created when a customer has engaged with and repeatedly tried the brand’s offerings.

The Brand Intimacy Model

The degree of overall positive emotions a customer experiences toward a brand and the extent to which he relates the brand with its brand attributes determines the strength of the emotional connection. Some of the signs of this intimacy are fulfilment, identity, nostalgia, indulgence, ritual and enhancement.

The Brand Intimacy Model consists of a number of stages that reveal the degree of brand intimacy with customers. Sharing is the first stage where users and brands engage and interact with each other. The next stage is bonding, in which acceptance and trust are established when an attachment is created leading to the relationship between the customer and the brand becoming more significant and committed. The final stage of fusing comes about when the person and the brand are irrevocably connected and co-identified. At this stage, the identities of the individual and the brand have merged together and attained a form of mutual expression.

The model which measures the level of brand intimacy and assigns a quotient for it has a number of steps and facets that companies can invest in to achieve brand intimacy. The first step of this model is connecting with customers by developing strong emotional connections. Theretofore, the company can invest time, money and effort in one of the six archetypes or characteristics of bonds to achieve its brand intimacy targets. These archetypes are:

1. Fulfilment: Meeting customers’ needs beyond what they expect and positioning the brand as one that over-delivers.

2. Identity: Creating a precatory image for the brand that resonates with customers. This helps customers feel part of a group and feel that the brand represents them.

3. Enhancement: This is when the use of your brand’s offerings helps make the customers better, smarter and more capable. This reinforces your brand reputation and creates even deeper connections with consumers.

4. Ritual: This involves making the brand a part of consumers’ daily routines. Brands can involve themselves in customers’ lives in a variety of ways. They can create content that engages prospective customers and encourages them to revisit the brand’s platforms regularly, hence becoming a ritual in their lives.

5. Nostalgia: Another way to make deeper emotional connections is to evoke memories that customers have of your brand. This works especially well in cases where the brand has been a fixture in the customer’s childhood.

6. Indulgence: Providing customers with fun and gratifying experiences is another sure-shot way of creating a relationship with them.

A business needs to exceed the expectations of its customers by investing in one or more archetypes of bonds in order to create a deep emotional connection between the brand and customers.

Best Practices for Creating Brand Intimacy

1. Exhibit Empathy

2. Maintain Authenticity

3. Identify Customers’ Motivations

4. Show Your Caring Side

5. Connect with Customers

6. Practice Storytelling

7. Maintain Relationships with Clients with CRM

8. Nurture Your Leads

9. Connect with the Community

10. Provide Customer Service Through Social Channels

How can Interics INBrands help create Brand Intimacy?

INBrands is a part of Interics Designs and is a reputed brand consultancy, brand launch agency and advertising agency in India with more than 34 years of experience in this field. A strong team of strategists and graphic designers means that Interics INBrands possesses the expertise and experience to be your special branding partner to create an effective brand launch strategy that kindles brand intimacy with prospects.

Interics INBrands offers comprehensive branding services - beginning with helping companies figure out and express their brand’s purpose and brand positioning, to market research, brand identity design, and defining the brand’s design elements. This extends to the design of comprehensive and detailed brand style guides/manuals to allow for its usage and adoption across the organization.

When working on our Integrated Branding Program, we collaborate with the top leadership of the client to understand the ‘Big Picture’ by developing a strong understanding of what the company believes in, the challenges it faces, and where it is headed to. This helps us come up with the right brand positioning strategy to increase brand awareness and create brand intimacy. We also engage in extensive research to understand the market, the competition and customer insights, to develop a comprehensive brand launch strategy to help unleash the brand’s potential.

As a further element of Brand Strategy, we also provide Brand Architecture to support growth in the future and create the Brand Image with a captivating story for the brand that is expressed through a strong Design Language to create a deep connection with the customers and increase brand intimacy.

About Interics INBrands

Interics INBrands is a division of Interics Designs - a branding agency in India with more than 34 years of experience as a design agency, brand launch agency and packaging design company in India. With an admirable portfolio of clients for brand positioning strategy, startup branding, corporate identity program in India, product launch strategy, creative packaging design, spatial branding and more, we offer the full gamut of branding services.

Conclusion

Brand intimacy is crucial for building trust with your clients and prospects. Using consistent brand messaging and visuals that embody your brand identity can help your brand become iconic and create deep relationships with customers for enhanced brand intimacy. Brand intimacy will, over time, help your organization increase brand value by developing a steadfast bond with your customers.

Interics INBrands is the right branding partner for this crucial process.Visit www.intericsdesigns.com for more information.

If you are looking for the best creative design agencies and advertising agencies in Pune, Mumbai, India, visit http://www.intericsdesigns.com/. Interics Designs specialized in brand identity, marketing communication, exhibitions, space design