Enhancing your brand’s value
When most of us think of the term, brand, our minds tend to gravitate toward some of the most prolific brands in history, ones that have become common household names, such as Amazon, Coca-Cola, Apple, Starbucks; the list goes on. But what is it about these particular brands that have compelled us to reference them with such predominance? The answer: Affinity.
“Great brands are like friends—you encounter a huge number of them every day, but you only remember the ones you love.”
—Luc Speisser
Brand affinity describes the belief consumers carry that a particular brand shares common value with them. It can also be identified as an individual’s brand preference given a product category.The concept of brand affinity thrives on the basis of the unwavering trust the customer has built with the brand, and it is the highest kind of customer loyalty that a customer can display toward the brand and its offerings. Rather than being just a habit or routine the consumer is stuck in; an affinity will lead a consumer to view a certain brand as inherently superior due to the connection they have with it.
All brand experiences are a combination of emotional, rational and behavioral decisions. When a customer experiences an affinity to a brand, the emotional aspect will play a stronger role in the decision-making process. Strengthening brand affinity means understanding your clients and the traits they currently associate with your brand and then making sure each part of the business is reinforcing the message of your brand’s personality. Brand personality should be central to who a brand is. Rather than saying, “here is the personality type that suits our product or service,” it should be “this is our personality; therefore, we made the best possible product or service for people like us, and you”.
There are four stages of the branding process: awareness, affinity, preference and attachment. When trying to build a reputable brand, no matter what the business, brand affinity may be the most valuable to you in all of the brand phases. Here are a few ways to improve your brand affinity:
- Attract more of the right audience
Think about your most profitable clients. The people you connect with best and who show the greatest loyalty and love for you today. How can you deepen the bond with them? How can you expand that core group or leverage them to attract others who will love you just as much? Take advantage of social data that allows you to research your clients to build the most accurate picture as possible. Find out their occupation, household income, demographics, communications channels, influencers that they connect with. Every piece of data you can get will help you flesh out who you are selling to.
- Use social media to find and create impactful stories
Brand affinity also increases the likelihood of consumers sharing content on social networks. A New York Times Insight Group study on why people share content revealed that 68% of people share to give others a better sense of who they are and what they care about. As a result, more of those people who are interested in the same topic, will come into contact with your brand.When you’re looking for content to create, you reverse engineer this process. If you look at what your audience is currently participating in on social media, you can identify the stories and topics they care about. From there, you can create social media posts that are more likely to get the same engagement and will reinforce that same affinity with your own brand.
- Provide a consistent brand experience
To truly build brand affinity, your brand personality needs to match and also be embodied by the brand. Every encounter clients have with your brand through all of the communication channels, needs to display a consistent brand message and personality. When it comes to creating brand affinity, it’s the story that gets people in the door, but consistency is what makes it stick— and keeps them coming back for more. Doing this will increase the likelihood that you will foster trust, driving them to feel genuine affinity towards your brand.
Building a brand doesn’t happen overnight. At FiComm, we help you strategically place the fundamental blocks that a brand needs to truly thrive and continue along the path to create long-lasting brand affinity for every brand we work with.