When advertising on social media, you instantly get data on the number of people you’ve reached, their demographics, their location, and whether they’ve clicked through to your website. This makes it easy to calculate your ROI. Did your ad generate enough return for the investment? But what if you invest in a deeper connection with your customer? How can you track that? How can you measure if customers find your brand appealing?

Connections and associations in the brain

Our brain is made up of associations. Things your senses pick up, memories, and corresponding emotions are linked to them, things you are taught, values, norms, and things that are socially accepted or not… All associations.

The same applies to brands. When you think of a brand, various associations arise in your brain.

For example Starbucks is associated to: coffee, bar, trendy, cozy, personal, cups, wrong name, green, mermaid… But also, whether you’ve ever had a handsome barista serve you or had a failed date… All kind of associations make how you feel about a brand.

Strong brands have easily identifiable and recognizable associations in the human brain:

• These associations trigger the brain to think of the brand. (Triggers)
• These associations add value to the brand, making a consumer more likely to buy. (Drives)
• These associations create recognizable links in a sales process, making a customer think of your brand faster than the competition when a need arises. (Cues)

How to track the effect of associations

Neurobranding measures the status of your brand and the associations linked to it. Specifically, it measures brain activity when people come into contact with your brand. This can be done using RIAT or fMRI.

Fun fact: Focus groups are less suitable for this type of research because they always create a kind of “group pressure” or the feeling that people have to justify the connotations they make. As a result, the outcomes are not representative.

Storytelling and branded entertainment improve the associations

Branded entertainment and storytelling in general aim to create recognizable associations. Moreover, by incorporating these methods into your marketing mix, you link emotion and memories to a brand, thus creating a deeper connection. In addition to sensory associations, emotional associations are the most important triggers. What feeling does the color blue give you, for example? Or what do you feel when you smell lavender?

This combination of sensory perceptions and emotions ensures that a brand is associated in a recognizable and strong way in the consumer’s brain, making your brand more relevant.

Add emotions to the neurological associations, and you will definitely stand out among your competitors.

And now you know why!