Branding consultancy Creston Unlimited in conjunction with ICM carried out a research, which figured out that most of people’s brand purchasing choices in the UK are influenced by just eight emotions. Brands do not only give people actual goods and services, but they also can make them feel happy, confident, part of a group, and so on.

As the research shows, 83% of all consumer brand purchasing decisions are driven by the following emotions (see the hierarchy):

• Pleasure 23%

• Confidence 17%

• Status 14%

• Responsibility 14%

• Effectiveness 11%

• Individuality 9%

• Saving 7%

• Belonging 5%

Over 3,500 UK adults were surveyed, and as it turns out, the hierarchy changes in different adult sub groups. “When indexing men and women against the total sample, the emotional value with which brands enrich women’s lives was greater across every dimension compared to men. This suggests that a brand targeted at men has to work harder to enrich men’s lives than a female orientated one,” writes the paper. Table 1 of relative importance of brand dimensions for men and women in driving brand decisions goes below.

Table 1, click to enlarge

Status for young male aged 18-24 is 34%, so it’s more important than for an average man. This dimension is closely connected with the other dimensions on the list, and before the launch of a new brand on the market, company should analyze to which group it will be appealing “as consumers whose Status is fuelled by Belonging to the cool group, is quite different from Status fuelled by Individuality, for instance.”

Women want to be protected, they want to feel safe, which is vividly reflected in the research. Brands targeted at women are delivering safety (meaning Сonfidence) on at least one of the three levels—functional, social and emotional. For instance, Volvo and Domestos are focused on providing physical safety and cosmetics or air freshener brands, etc. offer emotional safety, making a woman feel confident, i.e. confident in public and family. The third kind of confidence is social conformity and acceptability, so some brands are focused on delivering female consumers a feeling of being a member of a group, being accepted by others, for example via “offering the right choice of breakfast cereal when guests come to stay.”

The hierarchy of dimensions depends not only on a gender, but on the marital status and presence of children as well. Brands have a less enrichment effect on people who are married or co-habiting and have no children at home. But for single parents this is reverse. “[For them] brands bring above average levels of enrichment, especially on dimensions such as Pleasure, Status and Belonging, suggesting a need for escapism, or reconnection with the wider world,” state researches. In fact, today there are few advertising campaigns targeting single parents, and marketers should consider using the findings above to build their advertising efforts around millions of single moms and dads to pull on their emotional strings.

The team behind the research also have analyzed the level of enrichment brands provide by income of individuals, and it turns out that people earning £15,000 or less get much more emotional value from buying brands than those who earn more. According to the results, for women earning <£15k Pleasure, Status, Responsibility and Belonging beat Saving, which is ‘should be’ on the top. For men with £50k+ in general, brands provide little brand enrichment, and the highest dimension is Effectiveness, which means that adverts should explain how exactly the mechanisms work. Table 2 shows the index comparison of men and women according to individual earnings.

Table 2, click to enlarge

John Crowther, Managing Partner at Creston Unlimited, says, “These days, the amount of choice available to consumers is mindboggling. In a typical large supermarket there are 20-30,000 different products and the average person sees over 1,000 ads a day. People therefore no longer consume brands; they edit them and their communications, choosing a select number to interact with. To make it through the editorial cut, brands need to reward consumers in a way that enriches their lives. With brands all effectively competing for the same pound, we carried out this research to identify whether there was a way to measure brand enrichment that would be universal across brand categories, providing a long-term platform for brands to overcome consumer editing. That’s what the eight dimensions do. Using these dimensions through our brand measurement tool CUBE (Creston Unlimited Brand Enrichment), brands can see how well, or badly, both they and their competitors enrich consumers’ lives.”