James-Lange Theory — Intelligent Branding
Branding isn’t easy.
People talk about branding like they just want to “sell their product.”
The point of branding is to communicate a message.
To make the customer feel something.
But it’s so surface-level level there’s almost no meaning attached to it.
We must understand some psychological facts about human nature to make it sink deep.
“The greatest need of the human soul is the need for appreciation, the need to feel important.” William James a 19th-century American philosopher once said.
James pioneered in helping to make psychology a formal discipline in school and he’s often referred to as the father of American psychology.
In his work, he developed what is today called the James-Lange Theory of emotion.
This guy’s theory is that our emotional experiences arise from our physiological responses to external events.
How is this related to branding?
We can think of the brand as the “external event” that causes physiological and emotional responses in the customer.
When a customer encounters your brand, their body has a physical reaction — perhaps their heart rate increases, they feel a sense of excitement or anticipation(apple makes me feel like btw), their palms get sweaty(a little too much), etc.
According to the James-Lange Theory, these changes shape the customer’s emotional experience and perception of the brand.
This explains why brands have die-hard fans.
I mean aside from features and functionalities, this is also an important aspect of our relationship with brands.
And as we know, everything is selling(well, almost)
Life would be a lot less fun if we buy based only on logic. So yeah, we buy on emotion.
This is why branding is about the emotions.
The brands targeting Gen Z use memes in their marketing.
Clothing brands use ‘community’ in their marketing.
Marketing aims for some emotion and branding helps do just that.
All emotions can be boiled down into the following:
- The desire for pleasure
- The avoidance of pain
Brands focus on these two in their marketing.
Try applying it in yours.
