What does your brand feel like?

What Does Your Brand Actually Feel Like?

Three quarters of brands could disappear tomorrow and most people wouldn’t notice. It’s a research finding that should sit uncomfortably with anyone responsible for building one. It points to something that gets discussed a great deal in brand strategy but addressed less often than it should be: the difference between a brand that is visible and a brand that actually means something.

That gap is largely emotional, and it’s more commercially significant than it tends to get credit for. Emotion drives up to 70% of purchase decisions, even in sectors we consider fundamentally rational – B2B software, financial services, professional procurement. In even the most considered purchasing decisions, how a brand feels carries more weight than most organisations think. Get that layer right and you build something that compounds in ways that are genuinely difficult for competitors to replicate.

The truth underneath the feeling

What distinguishes brands that genuinely resonate from those that merely perform is the presence of something consistent underneath the surface – a core truth that remains stable even as everything built around it evolves. It’s the difference between a brand that knows what it stands for and shapes everything around that, and one that adapts its positioning to whatever the market or the moment seems to require.

Patagonia is a useful illustration of why this matters commercially. When they pulled advertising from Facebook and Instagram in 2020, the decision carried real financial risk for a consumer-facing brand. Annual revenues held above $1 billion regardless, because their commitment to sustainability and environmental activism was the organising principle of the entire business, and customers understood that. The advertising spend turned out to be less load-bearing than it appeared, because the emotional connection was doing most of the work.

Apple’s trajectory tells a similar story from a different angle. The core truth of the brand – beautifully engineered technology that integrates naturally into people’s lives – hasn’t changed across decades of product evolution. Revenue from wearables has more than doubled since 2014 and now accounts for over 10% of total sales, because it extended a consistent promise even as it ventured into new territory. LEGO’s recovery from near-bankruptcy in the early 2000s followed the same logic. Rather than repositioning, they returned to what had always made them matter, the idea of sparking creativity across generations, and built steadily from there. 2024 marked another year of double-digit growth.

What connects all three is an emotional truth consistent enough to guide internal decisions and recognisable enough to be felt by customers across every interaction over time.

What feeling is actually made of

The way a brand feels accumulates across every point of contact – the tone of written communications, the weight and texture of physical materials, the behaviour of the people representing the business, the things the brand chooses to say publicly and the things it doesn’t. Innocent Drinks built an entire brand personality out of handwritten packaging copy and an offbeat social media presence, but the warmth and irreverence those things communicate work because they’re consistent with a genuine underlying belief about making healthy choices feel easy. Aesop achieves something entirely different – considered  quietly intellectual, sensorial – through the same principle of consistency. Both are distinctive precisely because the feeling they create is the same whether you’re reading a label, walking into a store or opening a package.

The brands that struggle emotionally tend to do so because the feeling is inconsistent across touchpoints, or it doesn’t connect to anything deep enough to be credible. A tone of voice that sounds warm in marketing communications but transactional in customer service. Values stated in an annual report that don’t survive contact with how the business actually behaves under pressure. These inconsistencies don’t go unnoticed, and over time they erode the trust that emotional branding is supposed to build.

What this requires in practice

Building a brand that people would genuinely miss starts with finding the truth that’s already present in what the business does and believes, and then being disciplined enough to express it consistently across everything. That work starts with leadership having a clear and honest answer to what the brand actually stands for beyond its category, and it extends all the way through to how the brand behaves in the situations that test it.

A strong brand understands what they mean to people, and takes that responsibility seriously enough to protect it across every decision, every communication and every interaction – which is ultimately what separates a brand that endures from one that simply exists.