409. Driving Microsoft Love Through Research and Strategy w/ Haley Swafford

In episode 409 of The Brainy Business podcast, Haley Swafford, Market Research Manager at Microsoft, shares her insights into emotional brand relationships and the effort to drive love for the Microsoft brand. Haley’s extensive background in market research, coupled with her passion for uncovering emotionally centered insights, shines through as she discusses the pivotal combination of functional and emotional components in understanding brand-customer relationships. Her emphasis on the significance of love as a focus for Microsoft, in contrast to traditional themes of innovation and empowerment, offers a fresh perspective on building emotional connections with the brand. 

Haley’s in-depth explanation of the research process and the subsequent decision to prioritize love as a descriptor for brand relationships provides a compelling reason for brand managers and marketers to tune in to this episode. Her practical insights, including the need to make research findings actionable and contextualize research learnings within the brand love model, offer actionable takeaways for businesses seeking to enhance their emotional relationships with customers. This episode provides a unique opportunity to gain valuable insights and strategies for fostering emotional brand connections.

In this episode:

• Uncover the secrets to building strong emotional connections with your brand and customers.
• Explore Microsoft's groundbreaking approach to cultivating brand love and loyalty.
• Discover the profound impact of emotionality on consumer decision-making and brand preference.
• Master the techniques for accurately measuring and analyzing the emotional resonance of your brand.
• Harness the power of AI to revolutionize and optimize your market research strategies.

00:00:00 - Introduction Melina introduces Haley Swafford and highlights her passion for uncovering emotionally centered insights to diversify and strengthen traditional research approaches. 00:06:07 - The Journey to Prioritizing Microsoft Love Haley shares the journey of prioritizing Microsoft Love, starting with the discrepancy between the company's revenue and brand value. This led to the creation of her role and a focus on understanding emotionality for the brand. 00:10:40 - Understanding Emotionality in Brand Relationships Haley explains emotionality as the combination of functional and emotional components in human decision-making. She emphasizes the importance of driving positive, memorable, and influential brand memories to shape the brand's relationship with its customers. 00:13:34 - Can You Love a Brand? The Microsoft Challenge Haley discusses the audience's response to the question of loving a brand, particularly a technology brand like Microsoft. The data reflected a neutrality problem, prompting the need to drive a more emotional relationship with the brand. 00:14:59 - Settling on "Love" as the Brand Emotion Haley shares the research process that led to the decision to focus on "love" as the brand emotion. Despite other contenders like innovation and empowerment, love emerged as the strongest model and a renewed focus for Microsoft's brand strategy. 00:17:16 - The Concept of Brand Love Haley discusses the two key aspects of brand love: identity and trust. She explains how people see themselves in a brand and the importance of building a brand that represents and supports them. 00:19:23 - Literature Review and Research Process Haley shares her approach to conducting qualitative and quantitative research and the extensive literature review she did. She emphasizes the importance of clear objectives and communication to successfully pitch a project. 00:26:02 - Emotional Inquiry and Research Findings Haley talks about the emotional inquiry technique used by the research partner, Brand Trust, to gather memorable brand experiences. She highlights the process of organizing the research findings and anchoring them to the brand love model. 00:29:34 - Commercial Audience Research Haley explains the challenges and rewards of conducting research with commercial audiences. She emphasizes the importance of bringing colleagues along on the research journey and the significance of understanding differences by products and audiences. 00:33:07 - Actionable Insights from Research Haley delves into the actionable insights derived from the research, focusing on the components of the brand love model. She highlights the importance of making love a part of everyday work and aligning it with business goals. 00:35:54 - Framing Learnings to Drive Love Haley emphasizes the importance of framing learnings to drive love as a source of truth and the need for sheer repetition for people to remember and implement the insights. Workshops with external partners have been helpful in deeply understanding driving love for the business. 00:37:53 - Emphasizing Actionability and Scalability Haley discusses the need for scalability in driving love at Microsoft and the support from the new CMO in emphasizing the priority of driving love in the context of AI. Actionable projects include workshops and generating emotive copy using emotionality learnings. 00:38:38 - Exciting Future Projects Haley shares her excitement about learning more about integrating love into the business, such as formalizing the intake process, prompt engineering using emotionality learnings, and creating a tactical step-by-step concept for business goals. 00:40:42 - Conclusion What stuck with you while listening to the episode? What are you going to try? Come share it with Melina on social media -- you'll find her as @thebrainybiz everywhere and as Melina Palmer on LinkedIn.

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Get the Books Mentioned on (or related to) this Episode:

• Playing with Reality, by Kelly Clancy
• Blindsight, by Matt Johnson and Prince Ghuman
• Neurobranding, by Peter Steidl
• What Your Customer Wants and Can't Tell You, by Melina Palmer
• The Power of Us, by Jay Van Bavel & Dominic Packer

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