Executive Summary

• Joy is a valuable asset in brand interactions with consumers, helping brands build stronger connections with their target audience and establish longer-lasting relationships.
• Brands can infuse joy into daily interactions by crafting unique content and building positive customer service culture so consumers experience positive emotions across multiple touchpoints.
• A joyful internal brand culture is another valuable facet in promoting joy and can be fostered through training and building a positive work environment.
• After implementing strategies to bring more joy into consumer interactions, brands should use key metrics to analyze the impacts on brand loyalty.

Infusing Joy Into Brand Interactions

Joy is an emotion we are all constantly seeking, whether it’s the routine morning coffee you enjoy from your local cafe or your favorite candy that you grab before checking out at the grocery store. Brands have a unique role in sparking and fostering this joy through their interactions with consumers.

Valuable consumer-brand interaction opportunities include customer service interactions, consumers browsing your website, and the content you produce for customers to engage with. Brands should view all of these touchpoints as opportunities to spark joy—this means using small strategies to invoke positive emotions so customers walk away associating your brand with joy and feel inclined to keep coming back for more.

If brands can use these opportunities to leave a lasting impression on consumers, they’ll be able to build longer relationships. Brands that make joy a common part of their brand interactions have a leg up over their competition with the potential for long-term customer loyalty. This guide will highlight how a brand can use joy to its advantage.

The Value of Joy in Brand Interactions

Joy is a valuable part of brand messaging and has tangible benefits for improving the customer experience. Brands that incorporate joy into their brand strategy can better engage and connect with their consumers. Joy has a psychological impact, as moments of joy elicit the release of dopamine, which taps into the brain’s reward center so that we want more.

Not to be confused with happiness, joy is less fleeting and can be fostered in everyday moments and interactions. When brands create moments of joy for consumers, they open up the door for sustained relationships, as consumers will come back in moments when they’re seeking joy.

At our Brand Joy Lab here at PETERMAYER, we’ve found that 74% of Americans rely on joy to get them through tough times. We also found that joy has a valuable role in increasing a consumer's likelihood of engaging with a brand, as our research showed 63% of purchase intent is related to the joy consumers experience through a brand’s marketing initiatives.

Examples of brands that infuse joy with customer experience include:

• Disney – Disney is known for creating memorable, joyful, and magical experiences for its audience through its theme parks, media, customer service, and more.
• Coca-Cola – Coca-Cola uses emotionally engaging marketing campaigns, like the Share a Coke campaign, to emphasize happiness, togetherness, and belonging.
• Ben & Jerry’s – The ice cream company combines celebrity partnerships and fun, delicious flavors with advocacy for social causes to create a feel-good experience when interacting with a brand.
• Southwest Airlines – The airline provides a casual, fun atmosphere in flight while every element of marketing focuses on the joyful experience, leading to its high rating in customer loyalty.

These brands exemplify the power of incorporating joy into their consumer interactions. By leading their messaging and consumer service strategies with joy, each has built a loyal following of consumers who turn to them when they are looking for moments of happiness.

How To Infuse Joy Into Your Brand Interactions

Including joy in your brand interactions will help you elevate your customer interaction strategy. The following efforts will support your brand in infusing joy into your brand strategy and operations.

Personalization as a Pathway To Joy

Personalization is a valuable element in building joy. In fact, customers desire personalization in their brand interactions—today, as much as 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions.

Creating personalized experiences for consumers can make them feel seen, valued, and important. It’s a positive feeling when consumers feel like a brand understands them. Consumers also simply love the joy of receiving things that are personal to them.

Brands like Amazon and Netflix are both experts in utilizing personalization to foster joy in their target audience. Amazon offers personalized product recommendations using algorithms that analyze past purchases, browsing history, and search queries. Consumers experience the joy of convenience as well as receiving new things.

Meanwhile, Netflix offers personalized show and movie recommendations based on a user’s watch history so they can experience the joy of watching shows they’ll love.

Generally, personalization often means creating targeted communications and advertising. To do this, it’s a good idea to collect relevant data about your consumers, segment your audience into targeted segments, and utilize customer relationship management software to organize data and automate communications.

Crafting Delightful Content

Creating engaging and interactive content can help to inspire joy in your target audience. Content can take many forms, including video content, blog content, and more—all of which can be used to pull in consumers.

To create joyful and meaningful content, brands can utilize the following strategies:

• Create unique, innovative content – Using innovative and creative content formats like interactive quizzes, immersive videos, or augmented reality experiences can better engage consumers.
• Leveraging user-generated content – Featuring customer stories and contributions in your content can celebrate consumer experiences, foster a sense of community, and build a greater sense of trust.
• Utilizing story-telling – If you can elevate your content by crafting a brand story, you can personify your brand, relate to consumers, and improve your chances of making an emotional connection.

Infusing elements like humor, empathy, and light-heartedness into the content can boost its emotional impact even further. It’s important that your content is authentic to your brand and speaks directly to consumers by understanding their unique challenges and concerns. In doing so, you can build brand trust and brand loyalty for stronger consumer relationships.

Elevating Customer Service with Joyful Touchpoints

Customer-facing staff are a crucial touchpoint for consumers in building their perception of a brand. How customers are treated by a brand and its representatives leaves a lasting impression—if they walk away from interactions feeling a sense of joy, they are more likely to remember how well they were treated, come back for future transactions, and recommend a brand to friends.

Customer service teams help bring joy to consumers by leading with empathy, patience, and positivity. Managers should consider how to train their teams to bring joy and make this a priority in building the brand’s culture.

Some ways to elevate your customer service interactions include:

• Taking small gestures like writing follow-up thank you notes and offering personalized recommendations to customers
• Remembering customers from previous interactions and engaging in conversation
• Gathering feedback from customers to improve future interactions
• Finding solutions to customer concerns as they arise rather than allowing them to go unaddressed
• Offering deals and discounts to customers as a reward for loyalty or as compensation for service concerns

Building a Joyful Brand Culture

An internal joyful brand culture emanates outward and has a tangible impact on your brand’s overall perception. Some of the ways that a joyful internal brand culture can have a positive impact include improving customer service interactions between your team and your consumers, boosting employee output, and fostering greater creativity.

Leadership can model joy for the rest of the team by taking the following steps:

• Encouraging feedback and open communication
• Recognizing and rewarding employees for their accomplishments
• Promoting a positive work-life balance
• Investing in professional development
• Creating a positive and supportive atmosphere

Joy starts from within. A positive work culture that includes the above tips will lead to higher morale amongst your team, allowing them to realize their full potential in improving interactions with your consumers.

Measuring the Impact of Joy on Brand Loyalty

Once you begin taking efforts to infuse joy in your interactions, you should use relevant metrics to determine their impact on consumer loyalty. Finding the right performance indicators can help you assess the effectiveness of your joy-infused marketing efforts and whether they are driving an improved customer sentiment and fostering a more positive brand perception.

Some examples of metrics you can use to assess the impact of your new marketing approach include:

• Net promoter score (NPS) – A net promoter score measures consumer loyalty and satisfaction by understanding their likelihood of recommending a business, which you can gather from asking customers to respond to a prompt on a scale of 1-10.
• Customer satisfaction – Customer satisfaction shows customer sentiment toward your brand, which you can measure through online reviews, customer surveys, and repeat business.
• Repeat purchase rate – Measure how many customers are making repeat purchases from your brand to determine how loyal they are to you and your products.
• Customer retention rate – Assess how many customers continue to purchase from your brand by calculating customers at the start of a given period compared to the end.

The results you get from this analysis should guide your next steps—if you find that your strategy is working well, then you can move forward with it. However, if you find that your brand loyalty ratings aren’t as high as you might expect, you may need to boost your marketing efforts or shift your strategy.

Infuse Joy Into Your Brand Interactions

Joy is a valuable tool in strengthening brand interactions. By incorporating joy into your brand strategy, you can build stronger connections with your target audience for loyal, long-lasting relationships. Injecting joy into your consumer-brand interactions often involves increasing your efforts for personalization, crafting engaging content, and improving customer service interactions.

At PETERMAYER, our work focuses on helping brands unlock the inherent joy that they bring to customers. We’ll help you find the value offering in your brand and calculate your Joy Score. Then, using this information, we’ll help you build a comprehensive strategy for reframing your messaging and improving your relationships with your consumers using joy as the foundation.

Schedule a discovery call with our team at PETERMAYER to discuss how we can help you infuse joy into your brand interactions.

‍