The Importance of Emotional Connection in Fintech Branding: Creating a Bond with Customers

In today’s advertising landscape, building emotion is the most important driver behind consumer experience and engagement, regardless of the industry the company operates in. According to the results of Iterable’s Holiday Shopping Trends survey, 83% of those surveyed were more likely to purchase a product or service from a brand they had an emotional connection with. This is especially transferable and crucial in the financial services and the financial technology sectors, although with banking institutions, this aspect of branding is much harder to build. Many fintech brands are finding that a positive emotional connection is often more important to customers understanding the specifics behind a financial product or service or customer satisfaction.

Positive emotional connections are so important that clients and consumers are often more lenient to company mistakes and errors if the emotional connection is strong enough. Even as far back as 2016, research from the Harvard Business Review indicated that overall customer satisfaction levels have already tended to be extremely high and were rarely a competitive differentiator between companies. This means that it is essential to move past customer satisfaction and focus on connecting with clients and customers on an emotional level.

So how do financial technology brands utilize emotional connection in their branding to engage and connect with their audience?

Emotions are a significant driving force behind most buying decisions, including which fintech service providers to use over existing competitors. Creating a positive emotional connection between customers and the business, otherwise known as brand intimacy, can be vital in retaining and acquiring new clients. Financial technology companies have shifted their focus on establishing the exact criterion for how customers make purchasing decisions and why clients prefer brand loyalty or choose to stay with a particular fintech brand for long periods of time rather than hopping from fintech to fintech.

In essence, fintechs are able to determine brand loyalty by examining and analyzing the degree of overall positive satisfaction the particular customer has towards the fintech brand and to what extent that person associates the fintech brand with positive attributes. These patterns of intimacy include fulfillment, identity, nostalgia, indulgence, ritual, and enhancement. By looking at and using these various stages of intimacy, fintech brands are able to bond with consumers and build trust and acceptance between the user and the company:

• Fulfillment: The extent to which a fintech brand delivers on its expectations. Is the brand exceeding expectations?
• Identity: The act of creating an aspirational image or message that represents and resonates deeply with consumers.
• Enhancement: Enhancing consumers physically or mentally to allow them to become better versions of themselves and more capable through one’s brand.
• Ritual: Making one’s brand become a part of the daily routine for one’s consumers.
• Nostalgia: Evoking existing positive memories customers may have of the brand.
• Indulgence: Creating a relationship around fun and gratifying experiences built within one’s brand.

Some of these aspects of brand intimacy are not as prevalent in fintech as in other industries; however, many of these archetypes play a role in fintech brand marketing.

Other attentive ways fintech brands are able to build emotion and consumer connection is by creating a space of authenticity. Clients can often smell disingenuous products or services, especially in the financial technology industry. Building trust can already be difficult, but losing it can be easy and can make it an even greater challenge to regain once again. The best way to stand out from other fintech brands is to be unique and connect with one’s clients in a more human, interactive, defined way. Financial consumers want to understand complex financial products and services, and rewording corporate financial marketing copy to a far more accessible and simple terminology can help fintech brands relate more to their consumer’s knowledge levels. Consumers want to understand the values and message of the company clearly to see where they stand with the company’s overall brand. This can be highlighted further by identifying the needs of the consumer and delivering on their expectation to connect even further with them.