How Your Brand Can Build Trust and Make an Emotional Connection

What triggered our conversation was Will’s weekly Mindstate Messenger. If you want to make your marketing more focused, effective, and written with relevant words to the people you’re trying to reach, I recommend it. Every week, he sends a short, five-minute video that gives a fantastic insight into how you can better connect with your audience. 

In this particular email, he digs into why the Volkswagen Darth Vader commercial and the Budweiser Clydesdale commercials made such a successful impression on people. It wasn’t because they had top-of-the-line production. There was something else. 

Brian: Will, in your mind, what did those commercials do that resonated so strongly with people?

Will: Ultimately, they made a very fast emotional connection. Making a quick emotional connection is essential in any kind of marketing and advertising. Even if you’re talking about a shelf display selling a product in a grocery store, it has to make an emotional connection first. There’s a lot of deep behavioral psychology and neuroscience behind the importance of making that initial emotional connection.

Brian: The actual phrase you used to describe it caught my eye because it’s one to which I refer often: The words and design should resonate with your heart and mind.

Will: Yes, and I used that order deliberately. Every day, we see thousands of advertising messages, and it’s only getting worse. I recently read a study that said we see 6,000 - 10,000 advertisements on average every day. That’s an actual advertisement of some kind, not impressions. Because of that, our unconscious psychological filters are getting stronger, eliminating the majority of marketing. Messages that only appeal to the brain, like convincing people to buy products or engage with a website, can’t get through that filter.

In neuroscience, we find that your brain makes a judgment on whether it wants to interact or avoid something in the first one-20th of a second. Your rational brain doesn’t work that fast, but your heart does. So messages have to connect with the heart immediately. Then, over time the message can tap into the brain and confirm what the heart is feeling. 

Brian: Yes, that’s it. In my first book, I also wrote about creating a quick emotional connection. It’s so hard, though, because, what you’re suggesting, is we get numb to it. It’s almost like our brains are developing calluses that keep us from sensing and feeling. The message gets lost unless it’s meaningful and touches on what we believe in or value.

So then, is leading with facts or selling features and benefits relevant?

Will: I believe it’s relevant, just not as important as it was back in the ‘60s, ‘70s, and maybe even the ’80s, where you only had a couple of different channels, like billboards, radio ads, and very little direct to consumer advertising. But today, that world has changed. We’re so inundated with communication. You need to start your message with something other than features and benefits, especially in this economy right now. 

We have the highest growth in business start-ups ever because of the high unemployment rate and entrepreneurs needing to feed their families. Many businesses are starting small or as a side hustle, which means they don’t have enough time to establish a brand. They just need to sell a product that people want. In my book, I call those functional goals. For example, let’s say a small restaurant opens up in my neighborhood wanting to sell pie and advertises that they use “Mom’s Recipe.” That’s great.

They need to sell pie, and everyone wants to eat yummy pie (functional goals), but the problem is, there are three other restaurants around the corner also selling pie made from their mom or grandma’s favorite recipe. Now four restaurants in my neighborhood are all selling pie with similar features and benefits. What happens? We tune out. They need something else to break through the clutter. And that is where we get into the emotional side of marketing.

Brian: Yes! You mentioned earlier that we see about 10,000 ads a day, but I think it’s higher. Studies I’ve seen suggest we see as many as 35,000 a day. If you read anything like news on your phone, you go to the site, get one short paragraph, and then a huge ad. It’s not worth reading the news anymore. And those ads aren’t getting through. People are looking for something else that’s going to meet the emotional need or a question they have at that moment.

Will: Very much so, and I don’t mean to say, and I want to make this clear, you can’t talk about features and benefits. You still have to tell everyone your pie is yummy, and it’s a great value. That’s important. But what you’re doing, so we have a term in behavioral psychology, is a cognitive heuristic. It’s called confirmation bias. And confirmation bias happens after you make an emotional decision, often within the first one-tenth or one-twentieth of a second (even within a second), whether you’re going to buy the pie or engage with a website. You make it that fast. 

Many times the rational brain wants to confirm that this is a good emotional choice. So that’s why you have to say, this is my grandma’s recipe, and it’s only $1.99. Those rational things matter. Because if you’re only talking about emotion, and people will purchase on just emotion because they get excited, they will also feel they should justify the purchase to their wife or husband or themselves.

People need those little proof points, but they’re just looking for you to validate what they already feel. So it’s not very hard, but you have to have those in there. If you lead with features or benefits first and then try to bring in emotion, you’re doing it backward. But if you bring emotion first and don’t confirm, you’ll get fewer sales.

Brian: Interesting. One thing I always think of is finding the right balance for your audience. We haven’t done the in-depth research on this, but we know from working with one of our clients for over three years they do not respond to emotional triggers. They are very fact-driven and make 90% of their decisions based on facts and easy follow-through plans. It took us about two and a half years to figure that out. We know when and where we can speak to them emotionally, but it’s on something different. It’s on a values-based system that aligns with the work they do.

There we inspire them, they love it, and we get a lot of engagement. But it’s harder to lead with that kind of content and then drive them to decision making. So, asking them to join a webinar because it’s going to help solve problems they experience every day in their business versus, get inspired by this speaker who’s going to help teach you how to solve these problems. We don’t even mention the speaker. We just give them the 1-2-3 on how to participate.

Will: Well, I also suggest that it depends on where they are on the journey with you and building trust, which isn’t easy. I just did a webinar about winning trust - not earning trust, winning trust. But either way, you look at trust; as people become more familiar with you and trust you, they’ll allow you to lead with more emotion. I’ve worked with surgeons on my research projects and even government officials, who have large bureaucracies to navigate to get my client’s products through the system.

Whether it’s consulting services or medical services, these are rational people who have systems behind them to eliminate the emotion out of their decisions. But frankly, we’re all people. So as you establish greater trust, and I’m not saying that’s easy, and I’m not saying that you can do that in a short period, but as you build trust, I believe you’ll have more leeway to lead in heavier with emotion because they trust you. They know you’re going to give them what they need.

Brian: Right. So I think we’ve figured that out with our clients, and we are there in terms of building trust and moving them forward. We also talk about knowing the right balance between the rational and the emotional. For instance, we can all think back to the commercials that are for pet causes. The ones with the songs and the sad puppies and how those commercials drew people in, or they completely turned people away. I remember watching one come on T.V., and whoever had the remote said, "I’m not watching this" and changed the channel immediately. It was too emotional. 

I want to segue and talk about your tool, the Mindstate Blueprint. I’m thinking about how we use this to understand the customer, position the brand as a trusted voice, and how empathy and authority lead to credibility and trust. I think that flows out of what the brand’s motivation is. What’s the best they want for their customers they’re serving? And how are they approaching that? Ideally, then, a brand is always going to be positive.

In working through your blueprint, I had an "ah-ha" moment when I realized I could apply this to brand voice and the motivation to the mission. This process helps to position the brand, so when they know who they want to be, they can drive there more quickly.

That leads me to position that brand effectively as the guide, and something we’re both familiar with, the StoryBrand framework. I flipped your model to turn it inward. I see it serving the external messaging and the internal brand building process, which I’m excited about.

Will: I’m digging it. That’s the first time I’ve heard that. 

For those of you who don’t know, Brian and I met after I went to a StoryBrand workshop in Nashville last February. I was sitting in a large conference room going through the framework for my brand-new business, Mindstate Group, when I realized Don Miller was saying many of the same things I was, but in a slightly different way.

That realization inspired me to think about how my model focuses on understanding people’s aspirational goals, what motivates them to reach their goals, and then what approach to use - overlapped with StoryBrand because there’s a lot of behavioral science behind it all. I just wasn’t exactly sure how it all fits together until you and I met and had a conversation. I started writing an article for Forbes on the way home from Nashville.

And this is why I like what you’re doing, Brian, is it’s the way to win trust – by being a trusted guide.

Right now, we have so much advertising vying for our attention that brands need to win trust. A way of winning trust is to make a deep human connection, which is all about understanding someone’s aspirational goal. 

If a brand understands its customer’s aspirational goals, then it demonstrates they understand their purpose. If a brand can communicate in an essential way to its customer, it will generate greater trust because it is more intuitive and natural. In my book, it’s called either being optimistic or cautious. If you’re more optimistic, your language will be different from being more cautious in nature. 

Brands need to become trusted guides versus just a guide who has empathy and authority. If you understand somebody’s goals and aspirations, you understand their purpose, motivation, and intuitive approach.

If you have that, then you have a much stronger human brand that you can rely on to be a differentiator from another company that says, “I understand you because I’ve been where you’ve been,” or “I’m also smart, I have authority.” I think there’s a more profound connection you can make.

Brian: I believe that. Because I always push past empathy and authority and say that what we’re doing is those two components combined to create credibility. 

Credibility is what either earns or wins your trust because you’ve proven competence.

Will: I like it, and I think that’s because there’s some natural behavioral science in there. Ultimately, I think it comes down to that one-20th of a second. Maybe it takes somebody eight seconds to look at your website, and if you haven’t established a connection or empathy within eight seconds, you should assume they’re never going to read it. They’ve already created avoidance or at least resistance. When I think about StoryBrand and reflect on my experience, I think about a rocket ship.

If you propel a rocket ship, you need two things. You need propulsion to push, and then you have to have lower resistance. StoryBrand does a great job at lowering resistance because it uses narrative psychology to make you feel like your brand is living within the story. We all live within stories. And if you get your message wrong by being too complicated in your language or not simple, you create resistance. So, I think it does an incredible job on the resistance side of the rocket ship. 

What I didn’t feel it did a great job on was the propulsion side. It assumes somebody has the desired need to engage with your brand or company. And that’s a big assumption. I don’t think we can assume or wait for somebody to desire what we’re offering in today’s world. We need to fuel that desire. And so that’s where I think my model starts to play. And why I wrote about this in Forbes and how someone can incorporate my model into the propulsion side, and where motivational psychology fits in.

Brian: And that’s getting to the point of understanding what you call triggers, and where resistance is lowered. To find that point of least resistance and use that trigger to push people to make that decision.

Will: I like how you said to push people through; if we’re going to keep the analogy, it’s being pushed through the atmosphere, bam, and you’re in space. It’s the trigger that will do that. I like that.

Brian: Right. And we have to remember that a propellant creates propulsion. In space, you need propellant to move an object from point A to point B. Even with a solar sail, it’s photons pushing that sail, which become the propellant. 

Brian: In talking about marketing, one thing that always comes up is the difference between branding and marketing. I love to ask my guests, which one should come first? Because branding doesn’t have a widely accepted definition, how do you define branding?

Will: I think of branding as a series of associations, good and bad, that a brand has created over time with people - psychological associations. But the vast majority of those associations are unrelated, which means something three steps removed from your brand could be associated with your brand.

For example, suppose somebody had a bad experience with a company, and you just interacted with my brand, psychologically. In that case, your brain will associate the negative story about a different company with my brand. Brands are just a series of these associations you can’t control. However, marketing allows you a mechanism of control so you can create as many positive associations as possible. When somebody is considering your products, you at least positively come to mind.

Brian: Absolutely. We all have brands we love, dislike, and most of them we are ambivalent about. A brand owner should always strive to create a brand that people love, and that’s a phrase I use a lot. One coined by Marty Neumeier can sum up your explanation of branding. A brand isn’t what you think it is. It’s what your customer says it is.

Will: I was in the brand/marketing world for a long time. I worked at PepsiCo for 20 years and other major global brands. What I figured out over time is when you spend 18 months launching a brand, you become so enamored with all the great things your brand does you live in that world.

A long time ago, we worked on a brand called Flat Earth, and it failed miserably. Flat Earth was a fruit chip that was going to taste so good. It was a whimsical brand with a flying pig mascot. It was beautiful. We were so enamored with this idea of our brand being more than just a chip brand. But when I gave it the mom test, she laughed and asked home much? When I told her $5.49 a bag, she laughed harder.

Now my mom is from East Tennessee, in the Smokies, and as much aspiration I was giving the Flat Earth chips and how great they were, she knew people couldn’t afford a $5.49 bag of chips. I remember thinking my mom didn’t know what she was talking about. And then it died.

Why? Because we were internally talking about a brand, but we didn’t own the brand. Our customer owned the brand. And the associations they had with it were whimsical and cute, but it was also a very high priced snack. That’s one of the first indications when you realize you don’t own your brand. You can pretend you own your brand. But ultimately, your customers own it. And in this case, we didn’t own a very good value association.

Brian: Right. Exactly, value association. We refer to the Bain Value Pyramid to help people, especially in the goals/motivation approach and heuristics. Here are the functional goals people have. It sounds like that brand association missed the value part. People don’t want to pay $5 for a bag of fruit chips, even if the logo is beautiful. The other day I paid $2 for a bag of apple chips, but I wondered how much they would be at a discount store. It was more of an impulse buy, and that’s something you talk about in your book. If I eat Apple chips, I’ll be eating healthy even though they’re probably full of sulfur dioxide and a lot of other junk.

I appreciate this conversation. I think many people are going to enjoy this. I’ve had two or three conversations this week with prospective clients who wanted to work on their mission statement, which is really for their internal branding perspective.

 I felt what they needed instead was to drive leads to their business. Would you agree? Do people need to focus on marketing before they focus on branding? Or is there a way to pursue those concurrently?

Will: I think right now, unless you’re already a large established brand, you should focus on marketing first. Now, I also agree as you’re going through this, you don’t want to be marketing to a company for two to three years before you start trying to figure out who you should stand for.

I know there are many books out there, and you’re a big proponent of finding your purpose; whether it’s your brand purpose or a personal purpose for starting a company, I think you should be working on that in the background. I wouldn’t spend $1 on branding in this economy.

There’s too much noise happening right now. I would make sure I’m driving enough sales to justify the cost, time commitment, and thinking commitment to building the brand. That’s my personal opinion. Behavioral science would also suggest that that’s the thing to do. It’s the easier thing to do. Building and controlling brand associations is very risky. 

There’s a lot of data showing the number of people with no brand loyalty right now. Companies have spent millions of dollars doing loyalty programs and establishing brands for many decades, and they have seen 40% – 50% of their customers try other brands. They did nothing wrong, but the environment changed to where they weren’t available.

If a grocery store delivery service can’t find your favorite brand, they’ll deliver a substitute. If you happen to like the alternate, there’s the switch. There’s no control. If you can’t control all the associations and brand loyalty, I would suggest another path. Rather than trying to build up a loyalty program, I would be spending as many dollars I could get people to keep trying my brand through marketing until you have enough volume, enough great brand experiences to justify the cost of time and effort to build a brand. That could be one year from now. I don’t think you should wait for three or four years. But I certainly don’t think you should be doing double-spend right now. 

Brian: I agree. We have to be sensitive to what’s going on in the market and the economy. 2021 is coming up, and I think we’re both advising our clients to be ready for it. You do some excellent research and short papers on three things that people should be aware of. I’ve certainly shared those with dozens of clients. People are focusing on safety and control, security, but also sensor release. 

Will: It’s still happening. We started looking at that data in March, and it’s still happening.

Brian: We were looking at homes going up in new neighborhoods, and there’s one particular company that sells a modular deck system. And I would see two or three signs on every block almost that somebody’s putting up a deck in their backyard all summer. It was incredible.

Will: Yeah. Think about Home Depot or Lowe’s. When you’re spending upwards of four or five days in your home without leaving, you start noticing things that you want, right? I hate this paint. I could see that because right now, your home is your restaurant, your school, your church, your work, and your entertainment space. When you’re living in your home and doing all these different things, you start looking at your home very differently. All of a sudden, a modular deck makes a lot of sense. It seems like an excellent investment. 

Brian: Right. Home Depot and Lowe’s sales are up over 20%. And we do know from talking to colleagues or friends who own appliance dealerships; it’s four to five months out on things like refrigerators, washers, dryers, stoves, and hot tubs. So you order it now, you’ll get it in February or March.

Will: Wow. Pent up demand, right? We’re spending a lot of time in our house with a lot of time to think.

Brian: It’s true. People are not only living at home; they’re living at work.

Will: Yeah, living at work. I like that.

Brian: Will, I want to thank you for your time today. Our conversation has been amazing to me. I’m all about motivational psychology and behavioral science. I think you’ve given us some great insights into applying this, which is what’s most important. We can talk theory all day. But if we don’t apply it, it’s meaningless. Thanks for your time, and tell us how people can get in touch with you to buy your book. Most importantly, because it is a great book, I would highly recommend it for anybody who’s doing marketing or brand development right now.

Will: Thank you very much. I appreciate that. My book is called Marketing to Mindstates: The Guide to Applying Behavioral Design to Research and Marketing by Will Leach. You can buy it on Amazon, or my website, mindstategroup.com, where you can also sign up for workshops.

Every month, we do a live workshop to train brand managers, marketing directors, small businesses on how to think about their customers and through the lens of behavioral psychology in my book. Over two days, we work through data to show you how you can identify your customer’s mind state, but more importantly, what do you do differently in your communication?

We have one coming up in just a few weeks, and pretty soon, we’ll be offering masterclasses where you can download this stuff. They’ll be video-based courses you can do on your own. So be on the lookout at mindstategroup.com. And at a minimum, Brian, as you said, sign up for my blog. I send out videos every week; I have lots of articles and white papers that I send out because ultimately, I’m just trying to help people become better and more successful marketers. And I think behavioral psychology is a great tool.

Brian: I agree. I’ve taken one of your workshops, and I’m using this Mindstate Blueprint with our clients to walk them through and help them think differently about their customers, and they’re getting it; they see it. 

Will: I think you have something with that empathy side. I like where you’re going with that. I want to put some more thought into that as well.

Brian: Let’s keep talking about it. Thanks, Will.