Emotional Branding: How Your Brand Makes People Feel
Maya Angelou wrote that people will forget what you said and what you did, but never how you made them feel. It reads like a poster on a dentist’s wall. Look again through a marketer’s eyes, though, and it is the clearest brief ever written for emotional branding: how your brand makes people feel.
Our creative head John Smeddle makes that case in a column for Campaign Middle East. Here is the short version, and what we think it means for sound.
A fifty year old brief that still works
John’s point is simple. In an era of feature lists and AI-written sales copy, brands are sliding into a homogenous soup. Angelou’s line, written for people rather than brands, is the way out: treat customers the way you would want to be treated, and they remember the feeling.
He goes as far as saying it belongs on every creative’s screen and at the top of every internal brief.
Our original music for Expo 2020 Anthem.
View case study ↗Exhibit A: five minutes of music
To prove it, John points to a short film. A group of people tell the stories of special moments in their lives, then put on headphones and listen to one piece of music. Every single one of them is moved, in their own way: some to tears, some to quiet smiles, some to long introspection.
For John, that film is a five minute lesson in what sonic branding can do when it is more than an audio signature tacked onto a logo. Five minutes that could change a brief from ‘make us something catchy’ to ‘make people feel understood’.
His sting in the tail: the mantra is not about how customers should feel about your brand. It is about how your brand should feel about them. Read John’s full piece in Campaign Middle East.
Our sonic identity for Islamic Arts Biennale.
View case study ↗Our take
We agree, and we would go one step further. Feeling is not a mood board word; it is something you can design. When we build a sonic identity, the first question is never ‘what should we sound like?’ but ‘how should people feel when they hear us, and what are we promising them?’
Music is the fastest route to that feeling, which is exactly why it has to be honest. If the sound promises warmth and the experience is cold, people notice, and they remember that too.
Our original music for Dubai World Cup.
View case study ↗ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE… AND OUR NEWSLETTER.
