When building your business you need to always keep one thought front of mind. People connect with and buy from people, even in a B2B situation.
To really connect it is important to move beyond the obvious product features and observations about your services to address the relevant emotional concerns of your target audience. Your business’ ability to handle customer relationships and be aware of emotions is called emotional intelligence. Harnessing your brand’s emotional intelligence requires you to step into your consumer’s shoes in order to understand how they feel and identify those key emotions that determine and drive their behaviours, particularly their buying behaviours.
Your relationship with customers is imperative to the success of your business and it takes two to create that healthy, happy and long term relationship.
Apply the principles of personal self-analysis to brand analysis keeping in mind that brand personalities can be transformed so if your brand is currently emotionally staid or deficient, that can be turned around. First you must understand your brand and your business – weaknesses and strengths.
Stand for something. All great brands and business stand for something bigger than their product features; they offer more on an emotional level for their target audience. They provide something to engage with, inspire to, believe in.
For example:
Apple don’t sell tablets, they sell connectedness.
The Coffee Club doesn’t sell coffee, they sell community.
Red Rooster doesn’t sell chicken, they sell convenience and family.
Employ strategies that increase your emotional intelligence – motivate your customers, be empathetic and display fantastic people skills.
An emotionally intelligent business is one that has evolved from the ‘hard sell’ to the ‘unique selling proposition’. People don’t buy products, they buy aspiration. Businesses don’t buy products, people do. People don’t engage with a business, they engage in a relationship. So what is your business selling?
To learn more about building an emotionally intelligent business contact the team at Website Design Centre.
