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Brands rest in our hearts and minds. Familiar products are instantly recognisable and understood, triggered in our brains by heuristics (signals or shortcuts) that summon up past experiences and knowledge to guide our choices and purchasing. The favoured ones earn our trust and loyalty, often through their rational qualities such as distinct and consistent product performance. Some evoke strong emotions too which influence our behaviour and which competitors will struggle to replicate.

At a 2017 seminar at the in London, David Golding, co-founder and chief strategy officer of communications agency , producer of iconic campaigns for the likes of John Lewis, Volkswagen and Lloyds Bank, explained how his agency works to build and deepen emotional connections and responses.

“What we try to do is to build emotion for these brands,” says Golding.  “Not every brand needs a great big tearjerker, because that’s not right for that brand.  We have to work out what is the best emotion for each brand and try and create some emotional connection in almost everything that we do.”

In linking a brand to a particular emotion, he explained, it is important to understand what preoccupies people.   For example, many people are feeling a little uncertain at present and they want to hear how a brand can provide some certainty and reassurance. This therefore is a good time for that particular message.

A company’s employees can be a good resource in figuring out what a brand stands for. “If you’re unsure, do a focus group with these people and they will give you a very quick response” on whether a piece of work fits with the brand, says Golding.

Golding described and gave examples of 11 elements that his firm has learned in building brand emotion for clients in its campaigns:

1.Tell stories – narratives are better than vignettes. The idea of having a lot of different vignettes in an advert in order to talk to a lot of different people in one’s target audience does not work, says Golding.  “The truth is, they won’t feel anything.  Vignettes are just a way of cutting up a story that then no one will have feelings about.”  Golding’s personal favourite ‘story’ campaign was John Lewis’s ‘

2. Think small – the more real and intimate the insight, the more emotional the response. “What you have to do is find a very small, very real, tiny insight, and turn that into a big campaign,” says Golding.  Volkwagen pioneered a ‘think small’ advert in the late 1950s and 1960s, and has continued to pursue similar ‘small insight’ brand

3. Change the emotional direction. “Try to find an emotion that isn’t the typical one,” says Golding, “and you might unlock a different way of doing it.”  Golding pointed to the Harvey Nichols 2013 Christmas campaign , which played to the emotion of receiving rather than simply giving at Christmas.

4. Use laughter. “Laughter is still the best and strongest emotion, and the industry could do with more funny ads,” says Golding.  He mentioned the Fosters Beer as a good example.