Emotion could be a better way to measure brand value

• Marketing has long struggled to establish a standard measurement for brand value.
• Quantifying emotional impact in consumers, using AI, could be the next major marketing trend.
• Companies like Equinox have started leveraging emotion in their campaigns. 

The number one thing on the minds of CMOs in 2024 is proving measurable brand value.

There have been many ways of assessing brand value in the past including revenue, the value of future net earnings, and net promoter scores. But nothing has ever been precise enough to become a singular industry standard.

Net promoter score has come close, but having been invented over two decades ago, new times warrant additional methods of determining brand valuation. Gartner validated this shift in 2021 by predicting that NPS will be obsolete within 75% of organizations by 2025.

Recommending a brand is not a complex enough metric on its own to determine a brand's overall worth. Quantifiable brand trust and loyalty have been kicked around as more modernized ways to assess a brand's valuation, particularly as loyalty dissipated during the COVID-19 pandemic, usurped by convenience. Meanwhile as the cost of acquisition continues to rise, retention is a new mandate.

Developing the means to quantify a brand's true value is the most important part of a marketing organization that needs to evolve.

Some new disruptive thinking on brand value deserves consideration — the power of emotion. While we all know a lot about how customers behave or act, we know little about how they feel.

The power of emotion — the Equinox example

Emotion is the new currency driving quantifiable brand growth. So, what is emotion exactly? It's often defined as instinctive or intuitive feeling as distinguished from reasoning or knowledge. Conventional wisdom holds that thought precedes emotion but in fact, science has consistently proven that emotion precedes thought.

Imagine if you could take this thinking even further to precisely score how trusting of and loyal your customers are to your brand to get to a precise total valuation, that is inarguable, no different than the accuracy of a stock's price. One can debate if a stock should trade higher or lower, but what it trades at on a given day based on how the markets are performing is an uncontested benchmark.

A great example of a company that reinvented largely around having a deeper emotional understanding of customer needs and loyalty is Equinox.

Equinox is built upon getting a consumer to subscribe to them holistically — to derive joy from the brand in some way every day versus just purchasing a membership. The brand has used a mix of innovation and unparalleled customer understanding to do so. As a result, it has become not just a stand-out in the luxury space, but among the most highly regarded brands related to emotional understanding, trust, and loyalty in the world.

"Equinox pioneered a membership model that is set up to drive loyalty and engagement," Julia Klim, Equinox's VP of strategic partnerships told me."This is done in two ways. A top-down approach enticing emotion via wholly aspirational campaigns."

Equinox's "Want It All" campaign exemplifies its emotional approach. "It sold the theme of desire as the engine that drives us all," Klim said.

"There was also a complementary bottom-down approach, via sophisticated customer segmentation, that allowed us to create a personalized and entirely intuitive customer experience once you join," Klim said. "Another great example of how this played out was using deeper emotional intelligence of customers to help reimagine our personal training offer earlier this year."

AI enables new tools, new ways to measure

AI-enabled tools can deliver actual quantifiable scores around brand trust and loyalty, if they are used in combination with data science and direct human input. This can be done by enriching datasets or creating emotional lookalikes that highlight the "why" that is missing from existing segmentation and most first-party data.

At Brandthro, we have created a Net Emotion Score tool using a proprietary AI and data science model to gauge how much brand love customers are feeling at any moment. This calculation is based off of emotional scores that tabulate brand trust and loyalty.

Look for emotion to emerge as one of the most vital currencies that can solve the most common CMO pain points: de-risking investment, doing more with less, elevating loyalty, lowering the cost of customer acquisition and generating quantifiable brand value.

Billee Howard is CEO of Brandthro.