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Research - 11.06.2010 - 00:00 

Emotional power of a strong brand

Strong brands have an effect on the stomach rather than on the brain. This is the result of a study conducted by the HSG’s Center for Business Metrics.
Source: HSG Newsroom

28 November 2008. Besides innovation, emotions are the most important success drivers for a brand. Strong brands trigger emotions that have a fundamental impact on our purchasing decisions, as an HSG study commissioned by the Swiss Brand Article Association has revealed.

Thus customers tend to be attracted by an emotional brand in spite of rational information about prices and quality. A high degree of brand emotionalization boosts identification and activates purchasing incentives which even push a product’s possible weak points into the background.

Activation of a reward center
The results of the study are based on measurements of test customers’ brain activities, explains project leader Prof. Dr. Andreas Herrmann of the HSG’s Center for Business Metrics. “The thing that makes highly emotional brands successful is their firm establishment in the human brain. They activate our reward center, which associates the product in question with positive emotions and joy.”

Brand attraction
This is why consumers are strongly attracted to such brands, irrespective of any positive or, indeed, negative rational information about them. Moreover, the part of the brain called the precuneus ensures that a brand identity becomes firmly established in us.

Articles with a low degree of emotionality and non-brand articles, however, show the same picture in reverse: in their case, purchasing decisions are strongly dependent on information and only to a small extent on emotions.

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