In the previous blog post here on Tremento I talked about what a top-of-mind brand is and how you can use triggers to become one. In the last post we talked about day-related triggers. This post, however, will be all about emotion-related triggers. This will be all about linking your brand to a certain feeling your customer might have often. Curious? Let’s get going.
So in this post I’ll talk about emotion related triggers. By this we mean feelings in subjective manners like ‘I’m in love’ or ‘I’m feeling anxious’. How can we link those feelings to your brand? We won’t be talking about things like ‘I’m hungry’ or ‘I’m in a rush’ – these will be tackled in the third (so the next) post about triggers.
Emotion + Brand = Success?
No, there is no such formula. But linking your brand to an emotion your potential customer encounters often, does increase the likelihood of your brand becoming top-of-mind. Of course, we don’t want to link your brand to a negative emotion, except if your brand is the solution to that feeling.
That being said, let’s think of some emotions people feel often:
- Happy
- Sad
- In love
- Anxious
- Scared
- Tired
- Insecure
- Excitement
- Satisfaction
There’s plenty more emotions we could come up with, but let’s go with these for now. We could link these emotions to certain events, weekdays or moments. For example: people might be happy on salary day. They might feel (extra) in love around festive season and Valentine’s Day. They might be scared when they’re about to miss a deadline, or have to pay rent. They might feel insecure when they go on a first date, and excited when they go to a movie’s premiere.
Which emotion should we go for?
The trick here is to find out what emotion is most often triggered with your potential customers. If your target audience exists out of millennials, then you’d much rather focus on the feelings of excitement and happiness whereas if your target audience mainly consists out of people-on-their-way-to-work in some business district, anxiousness and tiredness might resonate better.
That may sound sad, but it’s true. And it’s up to you to make them happy! Or even more happy. So let’s create some ideas.
How to be an emotion-triggered brand?
The best way to do this is to start mind-mapping. I created a few mind-maps to give you an idea on how to do this. I made one for a small boutique hotel near the ocean, a coffee shop on the corner of a busy street, and a bagel store on a school campus.
The examples above were all made within a few minutes. Of course, if you’re doing this for your brand, you should dive deeper. And you should be able to come up with way more feelings and situations. Not exactly sure how to do this? Get to know your target audience first by creating buyer personas.
As you can see, I highlighted different things in each mind-map. I did this to create links between the daily situation of the potential customer and the feelings the brand sparks in them. Because that’s how we can get to creating emotion-trigger slogans.
Create links
So now that we know a little bit about our target audience’s daily situation and the emotions you spark, we can come up with some slogans and ideas. Let’s start with the small boutique hotel.
Small Boutique Hotel: We’ll call the hotel ‘Ocean Point’ for now. Located at the beach and a perfect get-away for couples who are normally busy, busy, busy. The target audience would surely benefit from a (couple of) night(s) at this hotel. How can we communicate this?
- Forgot to make a reservation for her birthday dinner? Come to Ocean Point, where romance is no effort.
- Too busy for weeknight dates? Book a weekend at Ocean Point.
- One year jubileum coming up but don’t know yet where to celebrate? Ocean Point is where you should go.
SOOOO CORNY, you might think. But it’s all about those triggers. When the potential guest is feeling stressed again because he or she forgot to plan a weeknight date, Ocean Point will pop up. When they think about a get-away, they will think of Ocean Point. And so on.
Coffee Shop: Okay, let’s call the coffee shop ‘At Us’. Located in the heart of a city’s business district, this shop deals mainly with coffee-on-the-go kind of people. They feel stressed, rushed, in a hurry, and just need their morning cup of gold. What can we communicate to make sure ‘At Us’ is the coffee shop they think about as they step off the bus and walk those last 500 meters to their office – passing 10 different coffee shops on the way?
- Five hours of sleep, 1 cup of At Us.
- Long day ahead, but a coffee At Us will get you through.
- The best part of waking up is At Us in your cup.
- No coffee, no work. Start the day At Us.
And last but not least, the Campus Bagel Store: located right next to the university, this is a place where youngsters go to get their breakfast, lunch or a snack. The store is named ‘Bagel’o’. They have a chat with the people they meet inside, sometimes they sit down, but more often they take their bagel outside (and/or to the library).
- When your intelligent brain needs a break, Bagel’o.
- For all your New Year’s Resolutions when it comes to lunch: Bagel’o’clock.
- Time for lunch, time for Bagel’o.
- Swipe right, meet me at Bagel’o.
BUT, what about me?
You’ve seen how we came up with different ideas for different kind of brands. Now it’s up to you.
- Create a mind-map and include the same categories as we did in this post
- Use your buyer personas to fill them in
- Create links between your target audience’s daily situations and the emotions you try to evoke
- Craft trigger-related slogans
- No, not just 5: create about 20 of them, and then use only the best.
- Use those slogans in ads, in your property, in your overall communication
- And make them even better by combining them with day-related triggers.
Did you enjoy this post?
I’m trying my very best to put out content that helps you, the owner, designer of manager of a hospitality brand, to bring your business to the next level. All posts on Tremento are created with hospitality brands specifically in mind. Articles talk about practical tips and inspiration for social media, design, photography and more.
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