Harnessing the Power of Brand Warmth and Competence - An Advisory Services White Paper
Groundbreaking research in customer behavior has revealed that the way humans respond to brands is simply an extension of the way they spontaneously perceive, judge and behave towards one another. That insight could revolutionize your brand strategy.
For our ancestors who lived thousands of years ago, the ability to recognize people, to correctly judge their intentions, and to build trusting relationships was crucial to their survival. Today, hard wired by evolution, we repeatedly judge others when we interact with them, assessing them along the same two key social dimensions that our ancestors did: warmth and competence. People also make the same judgments about brands – spontaneously assessing them for warmth and competence.
To explore the impact of brand warmth and competence assessments on customer behavior, The Relational Capital Group in collaboration with world renowned social psychologists Dr. Susan T. Fiske and Dr. Nicolas O. Kervyn of Princeton University conducted a series of research studies with over 5,000 U.S. adults and 41 leading brands. We found that customers not only perceive companies and brands in the same way that they do people, assessing them for warmth and competence, but also that these assessments strongly influence purchase interest and loyalty behavior.1
The implications of these findings are enormous: By understanding how customers judge brands through the same social processes they use in their human interactions we can unlock the social- psychological power of brands, making them far more compelling and attractive as relationship partners for customers.