Summary

As organisations scale, likes and impressions mask weakening attachment. What once felt clear becomes noisy and indecisive. Brand strategy restores shared clarity by measuring emotional connection through behaviours and a composite connection score. From there, decisions move faster, pricing holds firmer, and loyalty compounds.

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Our Perspective

What this means for leaders navigating growth, change or transformation in their organisation.

The Risk Of Thin Metrics

It’s easy to mistake visibility for value. Likes, impressions and claimed sentiment say something about attention, but very little about attachment. Leaders sense this. They’re asking where emotional connection actually shows up in behaviour and, by extension, in revenue resilience. That’s the right question, because connection is a felt shortcut that reduces search, speeds choice and earns forgiveness when things go wrong.

Capgemini notes that 82% of customers buy from brands they feel an emotional tie to, compared with 38% when that bond is weak — a stark reminder that affection without action is not the goal.

Behaviour Is The Proof

Emotional connection reveals itself in what customers do without prompting. It appears when buyers search for you by name, come straight to your site, accept fewer comparisons, and come back on their own. These are not soft signals; they’re practical precursors of loyalty, pricing confidence and steadier demand.

What to measure now:

• Momentum to your brand: growth in branded search, direct traffic share, and time-to-choice.
• Stickiness after purchase: repeat rate, usage depth, and recovery after service issues.
• Breadth of preference: referral rate, cross-sell uptake, and share of search in your category.

Build A Connection Score

The simple move is a composite “connection score” that blends leading indicators (discovery and choice) with lagging ones (retention and expansion). One number, updated monthly, owned by the executive team. It should be transparent, diagnostic and tied to decisions on pricing, service design and communication cadence.

Most organisations we work with find that once the score is visible, debates shorten and accountability clarifies. Teams can spot where emotion breaks — onboarding friction, unclear promise, tone-deaf recovery — and fix the cause, not just the symptom. Over time, the score becomes a strategic early-warning system, not a reporting ritual.

Implications For Leaders

Three practical shifts help the score create real value:

• Define the emotional outcome: name the 2–3 feelings your brand must evoke, then link them to behaviours you can track.
• Rebase targets: optimise for quality signals (direct paths, repeat intent) even if it means fewer shallow interactions in the short term.
• Tie investment to learning: fund experiments that increase unaided choice and post-issue recovery, and retire spend that only inflates noise.

The Next Advantage

As channels fragment and algorithms reshape discovery, the durable edge won’t be louder messaging; it’ll be measurable emotional clarity expressed through behaviour. Organisations that design for, and measure, that connection will move faster, hold their price with confidence, and earn loyalty that compounds rather than fades.

Sources:

Further Resources

1. Cultivating Emotional Connections to Drive Loyalty
2. Why Emotional Connection Drives Customer Lifetime Value
3. Proof-Led Employer Value Propositions that Drive Candidate Engagement

Brand clarity often begins with the right questions — we’d be glad to explore them with your team. Start the conversation.

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