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It is important to establish an emotional rapport with customers
We do live in exciting times, where things change with a blink of an eye; globalisation and technology advancement is shaping the way we perceive and see things today like never before. Strategies, tactics, and processes that just a decade ago reigned supreme, now look a little out of sync, when viewed through today’s consumer perspective.
The marketing landscape has been impacted by various forces in recent years.
An explosion of new media and technologies, economic uncertainty, and greater competition between brands, have changed the way brands and customers interact. In today’s crowded marketplace, customer engagement is more important and more challenging than before.
Making an emotional connection with your customer is critical whether you’re in a B2C or B2B business.
Today’s sophisticated consumers demand relevant messaging that engages them in a dialogue, and allows them to interact with the brand through their preferred communication channels at an emotional level.
After all, we are emotional beings. We make our purchase decisions based on how products promise to make us feel. That’s why great brands succeed by seeking intimate emotional connections with customers.
They aim for their customers’ heart more than their credit cards. To create valuable, sustainable customer relationships, great brands don’t sell customers on contracts and promise of product delivery but seduce them with connections. A relationship which is impactful, memorable and emotional leads to true brand loyalty. Customers don’t necessarily remember what you do for them as much as they remember how you made them feel. There’s where you can uncover your emotional benefit.
Emotional brand-building requires you to develop a personal dialogue with your customers on the issues that are most meaningful to them. In today’s complex and ever connected commercial landscape, brand perception is no longer driven by product efficacy. Instead, brands form strong customer loyalty by capturing their minds and hearts, and to accomplish these, only emotive appeals resonates. Customer relationship has shifted from production to consumption. It has gravitated from the sphere of rationality to the realm of desire and from the objective to the subjective. In this era of instant gratification, material satisfaction is so easily attained that emotional fulfilment is now the true challenge for marketers.
In order to make an emotional connection with the customer, brands must earn their trust. And this can happen if a brand is ready to deliver a consistently excellent customer experience time after time. It’s nice to surprise the customer with something special every now and then but the key is to deliver the promise every time.
Brand must earn their customers’ trust by being honest, open, transparent, authentic and genuinely interested in how they can solve their problem than just making a sale. An emotionally connected customer will be more interested in seeing a brand succeed, likelier to refer these brands to friends and will come to support if brands are unjustly attacked online.
While the current marketing trends are exciting, a lot is yet to happen when the marketer will face a new set of challenges with new and yet to be invented technology and devices. As we advance to places beyond metros and Tier-I cities and as more and more smaller cities and villages are connected by better roads amenities, electricity and internet connectivity, a new and almost untapped set of customers will create opportunities and challenges for brands. The biggest challenge will be to be less intrusive, yet establish more relevant one-on-one emotional connections. For brands, life within the pixel will change.
The author is MD and CEO, NeoNiche Integrated Solutions Pvt Ltd
(By Prateek N Kumar)