Like most decision making, our purchasing behaviours are driven by emotion. This is true even in categories that are seen as purely functional, or the dreaded ‘commodity’ type! Even when the product benefits for the customer seem purely functional, there is an emotional payoff that he receives from that functional benefit.
Brands bridge functional and emotional needs
There is a very interesting framework of Bridged Positioning that we have used for years now for brand development. It seems like a complex framework but essentially it is based on three simple insights
- Customers derive a few key functional benefits from an offering (product/service and the brand offering them). These benefits depend on what the product or service is designed to deliver as well as the customer’s own priorities. What this means is that even the functional benefits are defined by customer’s perceptions.
- Each functional benefit, as perceived by the customer, has emotional payoffs. These emotional payoffs may be different for different groups of customers and depend on their life circumstances, motivations and anxieties.
- A powerful brand positioning needs to straddle these two worlds of functional benefits and their emotional payoffs.
It is critical to recognise this duality, the twin forces of function and emotion feeding customer decisions. For certain categories, like luxury goods, apparel and accessories or even soft drinks, the role of emotion in guiding customer behaviour is recognised and emphasised upon.
Certain other categories are considered purely functional where the customer seems to be be guided purely by logic and rationale in his purchases. The case for brands in ‘commodity’ categories is even weaker. It would appear that customer is guided purely by price and there is very limited scope to appeal to his emotions in these categories.
This, however, has not proven to be true when we have worked on brands across categories, many of them considered purely functional and near ‘commodity’ categories.
Emotions behind commodity brand purchases
We worked on insights for brand development of leading cement brands in India. The cement category is considered a commodity category. It is also believed that customers make mostly rational decisions, evaluating price, availability and product features among the available cement brands.
However, building a house is a highly emotional period of a person’s life. He contends with huge expectations, lifelong desires and a constant fear of things going wrong. We were able to chart the emotions of a person building a house as he goes through various stages of the planning and construction. How can the purchase of cement, which goes all over his house, be a rational decision?
For instance, when the customer looks for ‘strong’ cement, he may be looking for the functional benefit of durability of the house. This durability goes beyond just being an unemotional, functional benefit as it meets his emotional needs of being recognized as a capable and knowledgeable man. He may also be looking to overcome his fear of being embarrassed by cement peeling off from the walls of his new, expensive and carefully constructed house. Even when he selects the best priced cement brand, he may be led by his desire to be recognized as a pragmatic and worldly wise man rather than only buying the ‘cheapest’ cement.
This insight has emerged across categories that we have worked on – from motor oil and lubricants to adhesives used by blue collar workers. The customer’s purchasing journey and ultimately the decision is impacted by his functional needs as well as a myriad of emotions related to his identity, aspirations, fears and anxieties. Understanding them opened up many possibilities for distinctive propositions for brands in categories considered purely functional or even commodity.
