Author: Jamie Schwartzman

Flux is a brand transformation studio. We take brands from now to next by crafting identities that catch eyes and touch hearts. Your brand identity is more than your logo. It’s more than descriptions of your offerings. Your identity is what connects your brand to your audience on a much deeper level.

When a brand has an authentic identity, we feel it.  

Strong brands make us laugh, make us cry. They tug at our heartstrings, light a spark in our minds. By playing on our emotions, they push us to engage and entice us to return. They draw us in the brand. 

After decades of branding for hundreds of clients, we’ve created a graphic representation of how brands use emotions to communicate their identities: it’s called the Brand Feel Wheel. Last year, we wrote a series of essays on the Feel Wheel and took a deep dive into the 4 different brand feels–  Safety, Spirit, Imagination and Adventure brands. This year, we’re focusing on the 12 Essential Influencers.  

• What: Each Feeling Quadrant has three emotional motivators that brands use to fuel engagement and inspire loyalty.

• How: The motivators are universally understood and immediately impactful. They are the tactical tools that communicate the overall brand feeling, whether Spirit, Adventure, Safety, Imagination.

• Why: Products and  services are elevated by associating them with achieving a desired emotional response, forging a powerful and memorable connection.

For January, we’re talking about joy. How do brands use joy to resonate,  inspire and influence? Read on to find out. 

Joy: A feeling of great pleasure and happiness. 

Delight. Elation. Glee. We all need more joy in our lives. It’s what brings a smile to our face. It inspires contentment, optimism and confidence. It’s immediate, addictive and infectious. It makes us giggle, jump, dance. It’s the sunny side of things. When something brings us joy, we want to return to it again and again. 

Joy is a motivator used by Spirit brands. Spirit brands create an atmosphere of belonging, happiness, compassion and possibility.  They exist at the Traditional-Discovery intersection of the Perception Axes, meaning they take a traditional position while offering an exciting or somehow transformative experience. Often grounded in craft or history, these brands seek to help their followers discover new emotions and ideas to expand their lives. 

Joy communicates this sense of spirit. Think of lifting your spirits, but also that joy connects us to something bigger than ourselves. When we feel joy, we’re happy to be part of humanity. We are more likely to feel connected to ourselves and each other. The grass looks greener, the sky bluer. Nothing can rain on our parade. It changes our whole perspective, making us feel like we’re right where we’re supposed to be. 

Joy is an incredibly powerful motivator. It’s instantly gratifying, uncontroversial and universally desired. It doesn’t promise anything long term, but it’s a quick burst of positivity that we crave to get ourselves through the day. People want to feel good. They will gravitate towards brands that make them smile and willingly return for more.

How do brands communicate joy? Brand identity is a combination of visuals and voice. There are several strategies that brands use to bring joy. 

1. Make it Funny

> Strength: Humor is a shared experience between audience and brand, communicating personality, forging a connection and humanizing the company. 

> Weakness: Humor can backfire if it’s seen as snarky, exclusive or cringey. 

> Brands: Snickers, Dollar Shave Club, Old Spice

2. Pop of Color

> Strength: The brain processes visual information before words. Bold colors are a surefire way to brighten the moment.

> Weakness: Colors are one of the first things people recognize about your brand. Too many colors weakens brand presence. Bold colors are a powerful tool, but they must be used consistently and intentionally across communications. 

> Brands: Target, Coca Cola, Dunkin Donuts

3. Be Bubbly

> Strength: Joy is infectious. Brands with bubbly personalities that show their customers and employees as joyful will draw people in. They want to feel that happiness too.

> Weakness: Authenticity is key. Discerning consumers will be turned off by brands that over promise or that feel like they’re trying too hard. Make sure the joy you’re showing actually resonates with your offering.  

> Brands: Old Navy, Red Bull, Gap

Joy is an extremely effective motivator. It’s universally appealing, and brands that tap into it stand to forge lasting connections with an unlimited audience. But to be used to its full potential, joy must resonate with your brand personality. A clear sense of your identity– who you are, what you stand for and why you do what you do– is the foundation for determining the emotions that your brand should evoke. 

Are you serious and authoritative or playful and silly? Does your brand crack jokes or is your voice more subdued? Are you bright and loud or soft and neutral? No matter where your brand falls on the spectrum, there are powerful emotional motivators you can use to communicate with customers on a deeper level. We’ll talk about all of them in this series, so stay tuned. 

Deeply understanding who you are is the first step to creating a brand with emotional resonance. But it can be hard to look from within, which is why finding the right branding partner is critical. Flux specializes in seeing from new perspectives– we view both internal culture and external dynamics to reveal the authentic identity that will bring you maximum returns. 

Ready to take your brand to the next level? Let’s talk. 

Who do you trust: Government? Science? Tesla?

Some institutions that were once commonly considered the bastions of trust and authority are currently being called into question. But trust in brands remains strong and steady.

 • According to Pew Research Center, public trust in the government has been steadily declining since 1958, and it’s currently at an all-time low.

 • The 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer found that trust in media is historically low across all information sources including search engines, traditional media and social platforms.  

• Four automakers — Ford, Toyota, Tesla and BMW —  were rated higher in trust level among consumers 18 or older at the same time faith in institutions plummeted.

Mistrust around the outcome of the 2020 election, mistrust in the police, mistrust of the vaccine– trust is on the forefront of our collective mind. Trust in traditional institutions is declining. But trust isn’t disappearing: brands are still trusted by the same consumers who question institutions.

As humans, we’re predisposed to trust. It’s the basis of our relationships. Without trust, we’re on our own. It’s what allows us to collaborate and exchange, to rely on our fellow citizens, specialists and organizations to get even the most basic things done. Trust is fundamental to our survival.

We trust that the organic produce is safe, instead of growing it ourselves. We trust our cars are made correctly by engineers instead of building them on our own. It begs the question– are brands the last place where we can all agree to put our trust? 

Asking the question, who do you trust brings up wildly different answers.  The variety stems from the fact that trust isn’t a rational decision. It’s rooted in what we believe. Belief is emotional and subjective, formed from your personal background, experiences, community and more. Objective facts aren’t enough to make you believe. But things that touch your feelings can earn trust fast.

Digital media is manipulating what people believe. While we are interpreting the things we see, hear and read according to our own personal experience, but we’re also now working from different information. There’s no longer a few trusted sources– social media has exploded the landscape. When you can find fact, opinion and fiction across your feed, it takes effort to thoroughly research what’s real and what’s not. 

What you decide to believe from the cacophony of voices depends, for most of us, on our own biases. Researchers have studied our decision making processes, and we all have cognitive biases that influence how we choose who and what to trust. Here are just a few:

1. Default to Truth – The idea that our natural reaction to new information is to believe it. We innately want to trust– if we were sceptical of everything and everyone, we wouldn’t be able to live our lives. 

2. Confirmation Bias – Confirmation bias, also known as myside bias, is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one’s prior beliefs or values. You’re more likely to believe something you already agree with.

3. False Consensus Effect – People tend to think that their own beliefs and actions are common, while other people’s behaviors are more deviant or uncommon, regardless of what “side” they’re on.  

These biases long predate the digital era. But online communications and technology are magnifying them to an unprecedented degree. 

We already have an innate tendency to favor information that supports our preconceptions and overestimate the commonality of our beliefs, but algorithms are changing the game. The algorithm shows you information that you’re more likely to be interested in based on your viewing history and the habits of your network. 

While it’s an effective tool for engagement, algorithms exploit our confirmation bias and the false consensus effect. 

• We’re not only cherry picking  information that supports our beliefs– information we’re more likely to agree with is privileged in our search. 

• We’re not just imagining consensus, but actually seeing more posts that agree with our views. No matter which side we take, we’re always right.

• It’s becoming increasingly difficult to change our beliefs, meaning trust is harder to earn.

On top of this, our pattern of defaulting to truth is becoming more and more complex. A recent 60 Minutes segment profiling the advancement of synthetic media makes this clear. So called “deep fakes” use machine learning technology to map the face of one person onto another. Combined with technology that recreates the speech patterns and tone of any human voice, the resulting videos are incredibly realistic. They show politicians and actors in places they’ve never been, speaking words they’ve never said. Ready to be spooked? Check out these viral videos of a deep fake Tom Cruise. 

The level of trust we place in traditional institutions like the state, experts and the media varies widely across the population. On the whole, it’s waning. Is there anything we still have faith in?

Think about buying a Porsche. If you buy a Porsche, you trust that it’s worth the money. You know that Porsche makes a great car. You would not  take your Porsche engine to a mechanic to get it verified, or interview the engineers and designers of the car to make sure it’s the real deal. You believe that Porsche will deliver on its promise. You trust the Porsche brand.

If we don’t believe a brand, we feel scammed. But when we do, something magic happens: we trust. Trust is the basis of the brand relationship and an incredibly powerful tool for building brand loyalty. Today, there are countless options for any sort of commodity or service we could desire. We’re always making choices of which brands we support. While price is certainly a factor, you might pay a little more for something from a brand you consider well-made, or ethical, or whatever else aligns with your beliefs. You choose the brand you trust. 

Brands build trust through a combination of 3 major strategies. 

1. Unity: Unlike the differing voices of news media and political factions, strong brands represent a united front. With a clear messaging strategy, brands state and reinforce who they are and what they stand for. But cohesive communications must be authentic in order to be believable. 

2. Responsibility: In order to sustain belief and keep trust, brands must deliver on their promises. The brand voice is two sided– it’s made up of both what the brand says and what consumers say about it. The audience must be in agreement that the brand really lives up to their claims. Brands must continually prove their value by keeping their word. 

3. Emotion: Trust isn’t wholly rational, it’s emotional. Brands play on our emotions to get us to believe. As we discussed in our previous six-part series on the Brand Feel Wheel, brands use emotional motivators to elevate our experience from a simple transaction to something much more memorable. By making us feel safe, free, excited, or any number of other emotions, they give us something that we’re seeking. It makes us believe in the power of the brand, building our trust by reliably provoking a desired response. 

But trust is delicate, even for the most globally recognized brands. Let’s consider a brand that’s had some trust issues in the past. In 2015, Volkswagen was found to have been fudging numbers on the emissions tests and putting “clean” cars on the market that were not up to federal standards. It was a huge scandal for a car maker who had centered their brand on safety, presenting themselves as the most rigorously tested vehicle– the one you could trust. Many wondered if the brand could ever recover. 

In 2021, the company revealed a major pivot: Volkswagen aims to be carbon neutral by 2050, with 50% of its offerings to be battery powered by 2030. They call this the “Way to Zero.”

The strategy takes sustainability, the very concept that broke trust in the brand in the past, and makes it the centerpiece of what Volkswagen is all about. It plays on all three major points of building brand trust: it’s a unified message, it contains a sense of responsibility and a clear promise, and it plays on our emotions, including our sense of ethics and fear of the future. 

Will this strategy work? If Volkswagen can deliver on what they say, it just might. Only time will tell. But that’s the wonder of trust. It can be broken, but it can also be rebuilt. 

We’re divided on almost everything these days. We can’t agree on if we should trust the institutions that used to make up the foundation of our society. We’ve all got our own information and sources. It’s getting harder to be sure what’s real. 

But we still connect across brands. 

We trust that Coca-Cola will taste the same every time. That  Spotify will  have all the music we want and  that Amazon is the everything store. If we’re losing faith across sectors, it seems we’re not losing faith in brands. Trust is a strong bond, and one that should not be abused. Brands have power, which means they also have immense responsibilities. 

But that’s just our opinion. 

Do you trust us? 

Brands are selling more than just products and services. They’re selling us states of being.

Brands create atmospheres through written and visual communication, playing on our hopes, dreams, and fears to make us care. When brands make us feel, brand interaction is elevated from a simple transaction to a memorable experience.

There’s a whole range of feelings that brands play on. Whether they thrill us, delight us, or inspire us, brands are carefully engineering a particular response. This month, we’re looking at brands that spark our imagination. What are Imagination Brands and how do they use emotions to draw us in?

Imagination: the faculty or action of forming new ideas, or images or concepts of external objects not present to the senses.

Imagination brands give a sense of possibility, novelty and change. They invite us to rethink our opinions, discover new experiences and create different realities. With imagination brands, anything is possible.

On the Brand Feel Wheel, the Imagination Quadrant exists on the Discovery-Progressive side of the Perception Axes. Brands in this quadrant provide a new experience with a progressive position.

>Imagination Brands offer novel products and services that forge new markets and new industries.
>They’re doing something never seen before or so different from the existing market landscape that it becomes a distinct category.
>Imagination Brands are progressive companies, seeking to disrupt the status quo. They don’t follow the pack. They ask us to imagine a different way, world or future– then show us how to make it real.

Because they combine the new with the progressive, Imagination Brands are often innovators.

>Innovators are companies that create new offerings, or rethink the very premises that their industries stand on to create an irrevocable shift.
>They are aligned with the disruptors in the Adventure Quadrant, but with a key difference. Disruptors take an existing, known experience and do it better. Innovators are first movers, mavericks. They’re giving us experiences we’ve never had before.
>Some famous Imagination Brands that have innovated the way we live, work and play: Apple, Google, Nike, Impossible Foods, Instagram, SpaceX, Peloton, DJI.

Imagination Brands play on our dreams and desires. They ask us to rethink the possible, leading us into uncharted territory and new dimensions. They do this by tapping into three main emotional motivators: curiosity, lust, and enlightenment. When we engage with Imagination Brands, we’re engaging with a world of opportunity and novelty. It’s exciting, sexy, transformative.

Successful Imagination Brands correlate their product or service with achieving a desired feeling, providing an emotional incentive that proves much more powerful and memorable than the offering alone. Let’s look at three examples of campaigns created by Imagination Brands that play on these powerful emotions.

1. Curiosity: The Constant Search

What it is: The desire to know or learn something.

Why brands use it: Humans by nature are curious. It’s part of what sets us apart from other animals. It’s a universal motivator, making it highly effective. Curiosity is also a powerful incentive for action– when we want to know, do or see something, we’ll go out of our way to satisfy our interest. If brands can pique our curiosity, we’ll keep coming back for as long as they can hold our attention.

How to tap into it: Brands that play on curiosity usually seek to satisfy our constant search for answers. They’ll take us to new places or expose us to new information. They pose themselves as bearers of knowledge who help us on our journey for whatever we’re looking for.

EXAMPLE:

Brand: Google
Campaign: Parisian Love

Google has built their brand around the concept that information is powerful. When we have the tools to ask questions and access information, we can create a different, better world. Google’s tagline, “Search On,” is a brilliant idea that poses Google as our collaborator, our guide, and our champion in the pursuit of possibilities.

Their 2009 Superbowl ad “Parisian Love” showcased their use of curiosity as a motivator for brand engagement and loyalty. The ad tells the story of an American and Parisian falling in love told entirely through search questions, from “how to impress a French girl” to “how to assemble a crib.” The story tugs at our heartstrings, telling us that our curiosity is the driving force of experience. It poses Google as much more than a search tool– it’s how we make our dreams into reality.

2. Lust: Tap Into Your Deepest Desires

What it is: Having a strong desire for something or someone.

Why brands use it: Everyone knows the cliche “sex sells”. Because it taps into some of our most basic human desires, lust is an incredibly powerful motivator. Often playing with taboo and rebellion, brands that use lust are usually very memorable. It’s a way to make a big impression.

How to tap into it:  Brands using lust typically promise us a kind of transformation. Engaging with their product or service will render us more desirable, helping us fulfill our true potential. But lust can be controversial. Brands must recognize the risks and use this motivator in a way that resonates with their audience.

EXAMPLE:

Brand: Axe
Campaign: The New Axe Effect

The men’s fragrance company Axe has undergone a major rebrand in the last few years. Axe became known initially as a brand that was all about lust. Their early ads showed “The Axe Effect,” in which beautiful women were unstoppably attracted to average looking guys once they sprayed themselves with Axe. It sold a dream of transformation to their audience– use this perfume and women will find you irresistible.

But times have changed. Axe has repositioned themselves as a much progressive company, one that’s about desire in all its forms.  “We’re a brand that’s all about attraction,” they write on the website. “We know that we didn’t always get it right in the past, but we are trying to move on from that. It’s pretty simple really: We believe in inclusivity, mutuality and progress.” The newest campaign, “The New Axe Effect,” shows this updated direction. After using Axe body spray, a guy enters into a dream world in which men, women, and animals fall in love with him. The psychedelic trip communicates that using Axe opens up a new world of possibilities where life is full of attraction.

3. Enlightenment: Change Your Mind

What it is: The action or state of having achieved knowledge or insight.
Why brands use it:   Brands using enlightenment are often trying to change preconceptions or dispel culturally ingrained notions. Because they are bringing audiences over to their side, they offer a sense that people who are aligned with them are special and in the know. Enlightenment can thus inspire deep brand loyalty.
How to tap into it: Brands using enlightenment typically position themselves as answers to complicated questions by looking at a problem in a totally new way. They use elements of surprise to make us rethink our judgements and biases.

EXAMPLE:

Brand: Impossible Foods
Campaign: We Are Meat

Impossible Foods is on a mission to rethink the meat industry as we know it. Committed to being just as good as real meat, they want to change the way we eat to save the planet. From their name– Impossible Foods– to their tagline “meat made from plants,” you know right away this is something you’ve never seen before.

Impossible has built a brand that’s totally distinct in the plant-based protein market. Their whole idea is that they’re as good as meat. Not just for vegetarians, they’re trying to change the minds of die-hard meat lovers. Their recent campaign “We Are Meat” features close up shots of Impossible burger patties, with a narrator talking about how delicious meat is. The concept is that once meat lovers taste it, they’ll change their preconceived notions about where meat comes from. With Impossible, meat comes from plants. It’s sold as such an enlightening experience that it piques your interest, drawing in a much wider audience.

Imagination brands are one of the 4 primary feel quadrants. Other brands use different emotional triggers to inspire a sense of spirit, adventure or safety.

After decades of branding for hundreds of clients, we’ve created a graphic representation of how brands use emotions to make their way into our hearts and minds.

We call it the Brand Feel Wheel. Locating brands on the wheel allows us to take a deep look at how today’s most influential companies are shaping our consciousness.

The most influential brands are able to communicate more than the goods they’re selling. They’re offering us something far less tangible and yet much more powerful: a feeling. They play into our base human desires, influencing our every move.

All brands have the potential to resonate on this deeper level. But it requires a clear understanding of who you are, what you believe and what you represent. Locating your brand on the Feel Wheel helps you draw out these big ideas, providing a rich set of emotions that can be used to inspire loyalty, action and memorability. Next month we’ll explore another Feeling Quadrant and dive deeper in the brand.

Are you an Imagination Brand? We’d love to find out.