How much emotional affinity do people have with your brand?
21 May 2025
Why you should strive to make your brand an implicit choice
By Jon Wilkins
This final instalment of our six-part series examining the key success factors that are likely to shape the fortunes of your brand finishes with arguably the most powerful of them all, Emotion. We will explore why understanding the implicit connection and feelings towards your brand, and how to develop it, is fundamental to building a strong brand.
If you missed our five earlier articles you can catch up on Brand Salience, Brand Accessibility, Brand Promise, Brand Experience, or Brand Identity by clicking on them here.
Decision overload
The average person has about 70,000 thoughts and has to make about 35,000 decisions each day. That’s a decision roughly once every 2.5 seconds, including sleeping time! Some of these decisions are clearly more straightforward than others, but we need to make them to cope with everyday life as well as to make bigger more complex decisions. If we had to use rational, logical thought processes to make every decision our brains would simply crash under the strain of the cognitive overload.
Our brains have to make so many decisions every day that we therefore rely heavily on our right brain to cope, including decisions about brands. This means that much of the time we make rapid, unconscious decisions, based on emotion, feelings and instinct. More conscious, rational decision making (which happens in our left brain) is also a factor, but often post rationalising fundamentally emotional decisions. To fully understand your brand you therefore need to understand how it influences both sides of the brain.
Thinking, fast and slow
Daniel Kahneman’s groundbreaking and Nobel Prize winning work about decision making (summarised in his best-selling book ‘Thinking, fast and slow’) showed that our brain has two operating systems, which he called System 1 and System 2. His work demonstrated the dominant role that System 1 plays in our day to day decision making, accounting for 98% of our decisions.
You may well have come across his work already, but if you are not familiar, here is a quick summary of the different role each system plays.
- System 1 (the right brain) works at a sub-conscious, automated level. It makes rapid (very rapid) decisions based on intuition, feelings and emotion. It’s what gives us our built-in survival instincts in potentially life threatening situations. It also helps us make lots of smaller, simpler decisions on autopilot often using heuristics, or mental shortcuts. These may not result in perfect logical decisions every time, but sufficient for the immediate task in hand.
- System 2 (the left brain) is more rational, logical and analytical. It involves more conscious thought but works much more slowly than the right side of the brain, accounting for just 2% of our decisions.
Why does it matter?
The brain doesn’t have a special operating system when it comes to which brands you buy and use. Brand choices are just a small subset of those 35,000 decisions we make each day. System 1 kicks in automatically unless there are exceptional reasons to do otherwise, such as a highly complex decision, a purchase with large price tag, or with exceptionally large consequences.
For example, with an average supermarket stocking 30,000 products, shoppers have to rely on heuristics, habits and being on autopilot just to complete a normal weekly shop. Online, the number of choices available may be even greater.
With a more complex and important decision like a mortgage or buying a car, rational comparison is likely to play a much more significant role, although implicit emotional associations may still influence the decision, either when narrowing the initial field or when making a final choice between the main ‘satisfactory’ contenders.
Building implicit associations
System 1 relies on rapidly processing the collection of implicit associations we hold that may be relevant to a decision. The more positive and relevant associations your brand has built up in someone’s mind over time, the more likely your brand is going to be ‘mentally available’ to them at the moment of purchase. Your brand may not be ‘the best’ solution on paper, but if it is available and instantly triggers sufficient positive associations it has a better chance of being chosen.
The challenge for any brand owner is therefore to use every means available to build strong and diverse positive associations that can be brought automatically to mind when it matters, including:
Measuring the implicit
The role that emotion plays in shaping a brand is clearly something that every brand owner therefore needs to understand. Yet the rapid nature of System 1 processing means that we need the right tools for the job. By definition, considered feedback based on rational questions is likely to draw on ‘System 2’ thought processes and therefore risks painting a picture biased to rational thought rather than emotional response. Genuinely sub-conscious, gut-level responses are made much more rapidly in the real world.
Luckily, there are a host of techniques in the researcher’s toolkit that can help by-pass, or at least minimise, the slower conscious rational, logical and analytical type of response.
A variety of techniques and measurement tools enable us to understand the existence or intensity of emotion. These include biometrics such as heart rate, skin conductance or facial expression analysis, as well as summary indicators such as Brand Love.
Other approaches and tools enable us to understand the nature of emotional response. Amongst others, these include Implicit Response Testing (IRT), Emotional Response Profiling, Projective Techniques, Brand Personality, Emotional Brand Equity attributes and Derived Importance Analysis.
Whilst these approaches vary in how straightforward they are to deploy, and the kinds of objectives they are best suited to addressing, combined they have the power to lead us to a more reliable and deep understanding of the emotional side of our brand.
The bottom line
Emotional responses to your brand will shape how consumers feel, remember, and connect with it. A strong emotional bond can drive decision-making, loyalty, or word-of-mouth, and enhance marketing effectiveness, making emotional insight vital for building lasting and impactful brand relationships.
By measuring and analysing the strength and nature of emotional engagement, companies can refine marketing strategies, improve user experience, and predict purchase behaviour more accurately than they can with traditional survey techniques alone. The good news is that the tools required to provide the deep understanding of emotion that brand owners need already exist, and simply need applying in the right way, at the right time.
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