The Consumer’s Emotional Need is Key to a Great Rebrand: Lessons from Lego and Walmart
Key points for revamping a brand strategy with the consumer’s deeper, emotional needs
The core questions of brand strategy are what do we deliver, and who do we deliver it for. The key to a successful brand (or in some cases, a rebrand) is linking these two based on the consumer’s deeper emotional need
Lego completely revamped their brand by questioning their basic assumptions about why their consumer’s enjoyed their product and brand. Playing with legos is much more complex, than simply being “fun”
Walmart modernized its brand by reframing its classic competitive advantage in deeper, more emotionally resonant terms
At the core of a brand's strategy should be the emotional need of the consumer. This core element informs everything the brand does, from it's design, to its brand assets, to its products and overall tactics.
That's a mouthful, so let's first unpack this and then examine a few examples of this in action from Lego and Walmart.
At its foundation, brand strategy is about two, closely related things: what you deliver (the value proposition), and who you provide it for (the target market). The brand isn't all things to all people. It needs to be something specific, to someone specific. Especially for small brands, the essence of brand strategy is about honing this down.
Doing this well means not treating these two elements as completely distinct, but understanding their crucial interplay. The "what", and the "who" of brand strategy are interconnected; two sides of the same coin.
In practice, this means baking consumer insights back into the brand's core. And this brings us back to where we started: brands need to find the consumer's deeper, often unspoken emotional need that the product taps into.
This may sound abstract. So let's make it concrete by examining two big brands that have successfully done this in their own rebrands: Lego, and Walmart.
How LEGO Reinvented itself with Ethnography
Lego is one of the most well-recognized and beloved brands in the world. They have a healthy, highly profitable business, and are the most valuable toy company in the world.
But it wasn't always smooth sailng. In the early 2000s, they found themselves in a fog. Their attempts at innovation had fallen flat. Their new products, which included Lego-branded action figures, were sitting cold on the shelves. They were hemorrhaging cash to the tune of about a million dollars a day.
What was going wrong? When you peel back the hood and examine the brand's core, we can see their ideas about why their products were valuable, and their assumptions about the customer's emotional need.
Their core belief here was simple enough: kids played with Legos because they were "fun." With this idea at the core of the brand strategy, they naturally tried to scale "fun" - to different product types, with new technologies, and to other demographics.
But it turned out that this was a false assumption. And a brand strategy with a faulty core is destined to fail.
Flailing their arms in desperation, they turned to an unlikely source: anthropology. Lego partnered with a Danish agency named ReD Associates which conducted a series of deep ethnographic investigations on children, play, and their deeper relationship with their Legos.
The discovery took everyone by surprise and shook Lego to it's core. Playing with Legos wasn't about "fun." It was about something much more complex and exciting than just fun. When they probed deeper, they found that playing with Legos was about creativity and craft; about testing the limits of your ability and imagination. It's about developing your confidence in your ability to create.
It wasn't merely about fun, it was about the creative pursuit of mastery. Lego had discovered their consumer's deep emotional need.
Aligning Lego's Brand Strategy with a Deeper Understanding of Play
This was a crucial insight. They were flailing not because of poor excecution, but because there were the wrong things to execute on. When they removed this faulty assumption and replaced it with the consumer's need, it completely revamped the brand, and charted an entirely new strategy.
They trimmed the fat on their new product innovations, and retained only what embodied the creative pursuit of mastery. No more dabbling in "fun"; that's never what it was about.
With a newfound confidence in who they were and what they stood for, The Lego brand branched out into entirely new ways. They began investing in Legoland theme parks. Unlike their counterparts at Disney, these parks aren't merely about "fun and happiness", but are hubs of interactivity, creativity, and imagination.
Lego's revamped brand strategy also led them into moviemaking. Launching The Lego Movie series engaged consumers in an entirely new way, and enabled complex brand storytelling not otherwise possible.
As Red Associates partner Michael Rasmussen has written, "The Lego Movie was the greatest (and certainly the most mass-market) reflection of these attributes. Its overall message—that one need not follow the instructions, or build exactly according to plan, and keep everything in its finished, perfect form—might be the best representation of the company's ethos"
Lego's turnaround was nothing short of dramatic. In a matter of years, they went from a crumbling empire to a thriving, confident, and highly innovative brand. This reversal is owed almost entirely to their willingness to question the assumptions at their brand's core. It wasn't about fun but about play, creativity, and craft.
Or as they came to distill it with their brand motto, "the joy of building, and the pride of creation."
How Walmart Rebranded with Brand Heritage
On their surface, Lego and Walmart have little in common aside from being large, global brands. But Walmart too went through a similar rebrand around the same period, which holds important lessons for harnessing the consumer's emotional need.
When you think of Walmart, you don't necessarily think of a brand that tries to make a strong, emotional claim. Instead, the associations that likely come to mind are "America", "Retail", and, most profoundly, "Cheap".
It's undeniable. Wal-Mart has built its empire by out-competing the field on price. In its early days, it proliferated nationwide by being the one-stop shop for the most items at the lowest prices.
When we examine the Walmart brand, an emphasis on low prices has always been front and center. Consider a brief history of their brand motto:
1962-1988: Always Low Prices. Always.
1988-1994: Always The Low Price. Always.
1994-1996: Always Low Prices. Always Walmart.
1996-1999: Better Everyday Low Prices! Always.
1999-2007: Always Low Prices. Always.
Pretty consistent. We get it, Walmart - you have low prices!
While a consistent brand reputation for low prices has always been key to their success, by 2007, they felt the need for a rebrand, and a new motto. Walmart needed to modernize its brand and its promise to their consumer, while staying true to its history and reputation. Like Lego, they ultimately converged on the perfect solution: tapping into the consumer's emotional need.
At first blush, this seems like a losing proposition for a brand like Walmart. "We sell inexpesive stuff. You like inexpensive stuff." How could being cheap constitute a deep, emotional need?
Like Airbnb, they took what looked superficial, and went deeper. They asked, "why?". Consumers like us because we're cheap, but why does that matter? Why does that matter, emotionally?
They found the answer to this in their brand heritage.
Finding the Consumer's Need within Walmart's Brand Heritage
Wal-Mart has a long history of working to support working-class American consumers. In recognition of these efforts, Sam Walton was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom - the highest civilian honor, by George H. Bush in 1992. This was a proud moment for the Wal-Mart brand.
In his acceptance speech, Walton spoke from the heart about his life's work:
"If we can, we'll lower the cost of living for everyone, not just in America but we'll give the world an opportunity to see what it's like to save and have a better lifestyle and a better life… a better life for all."
The answer was there all along: Cheap prices mean a better life for your family. When you can afford the things you need, you can afford more joy with your loved ones. This insight became the heart of Wal-Mart's new, revamped brand strategy. And in distilling it down into their most recent motto, it borrowed directly from the acceptance speech of their founder:
"Save Money. Live Better"
The motto is a simple articulation of their relationship to the customer's need.
What's brilliant about this is that they took a longstanding competitive advantage - being "cheap", remained the same. Their rebrand wasn't about going in a completely new direction. Instead, it was simply about going deeper.
Linking the target market and the value proposition
As we’ve seen, uncovering the consumer’s deep emotional need is a crucial component of a brand’s core strategy. There is no way to discover this. Lego utilized an ethnographic approach, while Walmart dove deep into it’s brand heritage. As we’ve seen elsewhere, AirBnB used The True Why Test, while Serenitea harnessed qualitative psychology-based market research.
However this deeper insight is found, it’s power comes from being the connective tissue between brand and consumer. It links the two core questions at the heart of any brand strategy: what do we do, and who do we go it for? The answer to both of these comes down to understanding the customer’s deeper, and often unarticulated emotional need.
Photo by Nik via Unsplash
About the author
Matt Johnson, PhD is a researcher, writer, and consumer neuroscientist focusing on the application of psychology to branding. He is the author of the best-selling consumer psychology book Blindsight, and Branding That Means Business (Economist Books, Fall 2022). Contact Matt for speaking engagements, opportunities to collaborate, or just to say hello
References for Revamping Brand Strategy with the Customer’s Deep Emotional Needs
Rasmussen, M. (March 26th, 2015) Lego’s Serious Play, Strategy+Business
8th and Walton (May 31, 2022) Walmart Slogan: “Save Money. Live Better.” Meaning
