Q&A: Anuja Gupta on the power of brand joy

The first sip of coffee in the morning. Booking a well-deserved summer trip. Listening to the new album of your favourite artist. Brands deliver many joyful moments to consumers throughout the day, and as BAMM Global came to find, joy is the most powerful emotion in marketing.

MediaCat Magazine’s Selin Ozkan sat down with BAMM’s Strategy Director, Anuja Gupta, to dive into the company’s new report on the power of joy.

BAMM just released a report on the power of joy for brands. Can you talk about how this research began and some of the important findings?

Sure. We do our cultural insight report every year. Each year the aim is to find something relevant, new, fresh, but also robust and usable for brands, marketing people and clients. Alongside that, we want something that is interesting culturally as well. That’s where the topic of joy came up. We are in a real economic, cultural, political flux at the moment around the world for various reasons. As we were brainstorming through different possible areas to explore, joy and happiness came out as a big area that people are not only struggling with in terms of the traditional version of what we think joy means, but also with the definition of joy and how we interpret it. That’s what provoked us to dive deeper into the topic. One of the biggest things that came through is the way people can interpret joy in so many different ways. But no matter how you look at joy, it’s always going to be one of the most important emotions that guide our life and our decisions. Those decisions are not just life decisions. They also trickle into brands and marketing, which is what makes joy so important for brands.

The other big thing were those three rules of joy. If you’re a brand and you’re wanting to play in that joy space, you need to firstly be credible in terms of the type of joy you’re choosing, because the way people define joy is very different. The same person can feel on the same day different types of joy. So really understanding the nine types of joys within the joy wheel is super important. And then as a brand, taking a step back and thinking about what are the different types of joy that we as a brand can credibly, relevantly own. Another big thing for brands in general, but specifically in joy is keeping up with the changing codes, cues, symbols and language around joy and making sure you’re using those within your comms, brand identity, positioning. Then finally, the third rule of joy, which is all about understanding where, when, how people are feeling joy.

Another big thing was about not being manic. If someone is always joyous, always happy, always positive about everything, they lose credibility and you start to trust them less. The exact same is true for brands. We had consumers talk to us about some brands where they feel the joy quotient is a bit too much. So that regulation between joy and competence as a brand and striking that balance right is another big learning that we took away.

You talked about how people have different definitions of joy. In the report you touch on on what joy means for different generations. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Yes, I think that was an extremely interesting learning as well. We saw it first come through in the qual, in the generational triads, to be more specific. And then we actually started getting that in our quant as well, quite clearly. We spoke about the different types of joy, and then we looked at it from a generational perspective. What we saw in the quant was that when we’re looking at Gen Z, they speak a lot about experiencing joy as amazement or playfulness. These are more active, more energetic joys. Amazement would be anything like celebration and quirkiness, being surprised. When you talk about playfulness, that’s all about joy through mischief, energy, lividness. Whereas, when we looked at our boomers, they spoke a lot about joy around serenity – that more calming, more mature joy. They derive a lot more joy from just being content or finding meaning.

One of the examples that we talk about in the report is Annabelle. She’s 10 years old, and when we asked her, ‘Hey, what brings you a lot of joy,’ one of her top things was sharing sushi with her mom, which we thought was quite grown up. We saw that trend amongst the younger people where they wanted to feel a bit more grown up, whether it’s getting that PlayStation that everyone in their senior year has, etc. Annabelle’s dad, who is 51, interestingly spoke about joy in eating Jaffa Cakes all by himself, [because] that helps to take him back to his childhood. So that’s more about an older person looking back and almost cherishing their childhood and stealing that moment when they can take a trip back memory lane.

How strong are the associations of joy with particular brands instead of, say, the activity itself? Is the insight here that brands can associate themselves with certain activities to increase the amount of joy they give to the consumers?

Yes, exactly that. As a brand, we need to be humble and remember that in this particular space of joyfulness, the memories that people make, the experiences that people have, the activities that people are doing, that’s what will give them the joy. It’s not the brand Coke. Looking at a logo of Coca-Cola isn’t going to give someone loads of joy. It’s Coke’s association with those memories, activities, people, emotions, life stages that gives joy.

Interestingly, when we were talking about Annabelle and her dad, the brand is intrinsic in the joyous moment, but it’s not like Annabelle is saying, ‘Hey, itsu gives me joy’. She’s very specific about wanting to have the sushi with her mom from itsu, and her dad is very specific about the Jaffa Cake brand, but it’s not like Jaffa Cake gives him pleasure. It’s that stealing of that moment. The whole experience, the whole memory gives them the joy. Brands then need to be able to associate themselves with the right, more credible memories and joyful moments and almost be humble enough to realise it’s not the brand logo which gives the joy.

You mentioned this, but in the report there’s a section about cynicism towards brands that are overdoing their emotions. You call this mania. How can brands balance this equation between overdoing joy and being representative of what they want to be associated with?

There’s a few things within this. The first thing that every single brand should think about is that marrying of competence and joy. Just talking about joy doesn’t cut it. That’s when it becomes mania. While you talk about joy and play within those joy spaces and territories, it is extremely important that you think about being competent and actually being able to deliver that experience. For example, if you’re a brand that talks about people being able to enjoy drinking the brand during summer, but the brand is too thick or the actual delivery of that experience doesn’t cut it, that’s when the credibility goes out. That’s why joy and competence have to go hand in hand.

The other thing to think about is that first rule of joy, which is all about choosing the right type of joy where you can credibly play. For example, in the US, we saw a lot of people talking about, negatively, about medicine or medical-related pharmaceutical brands showing in their advertisement, joy as loads of people singing and dancing loudly as a group. And maybe you’re talking about a diabetic medicine. Just accepting those boundaries and playing within the boundaries that are credible for each brand.

Based on this, what tangible next steps would you recommend to brands? How can they build their joy associations or joyfulness?

The first step is to understand where they sit in the joyfulness space. We’ve come up with what we call the BAMM Joy Index. This index has a way of measuring where brands stand within the joy space. We’ve got four different metrics which are equally important in feeding into the BAMM Joy Index. The first one is joy salience. That’s all about how top of mind you are when people think about joy as a brand. Joy delivery, which is all about how much joy the brand is currently delivering to people. Joy depth, which is about different types of joys your brand is associated with. When we talk about brand positioning, we always talk about choosing a space and sticking to it. But joy is different. When you think of joy, if you can choose multiple types of joys to play in, it just means you’re touching people more frequently in their joy journey. Finally, there’s joy distinctiveness, which is all about how good you are in delivering a unique joy experience as a brand.

What we found is a very strong correlation between the BAMM Joy Index and purchase intent, as well as the BAMM Joy Index and NPS, recommendation of the brand. It’s quite a strong metric and we’ve measured about 27-28 brands against the BAMM Joy Index. First step would be to see if as a brand, you’re already in the study. If you are, then where you stand, how deep and salient you are when it comes to delivering joy to people’s lives, understanding what the nuances are, where there are opportunities to play further, and then trying to do a bit of tracking over time. If you’re not on the Joy Index right now, then the best way to go about it is to try and measure yourself, or if nothing, try and look at the report and think about where you would place yourself on that index.

The report also includes some stuff around where and when people find most joy, almost like cluing the brands or giving signs as to where they can incorporate themselves. Do you think there’s a danger in trying to optimise joyfulness in this way?

I think the bits around when and where people are feeling joy, that’s interesting because there are choices that brands can make. For example, one of the things we found, not surprisingly, there’s a lot of joy being experienced [on] and up to the weekend. However, does that necessarily mean you have to play in that crowded space only? It depends on which category you’re playing in.

The lowest joy is experienced, as you might think, [are] mornings and Mondays and Tuesdays. Those are the no joy spaces. If you’re a coffee brand, I would not try to play in the crowded weekend space or the evening space, right? I would take that as my cue to go and play up joy in a currently not very joyful space. That way you stick in mind more because you’re not competing with 200 different categories, products and brands in that space. You’ve taken a space that’s currently got a white space when it comes to joy and made it your own.

Can you give me some examples of brands that do joy really well?

Yes, absolutely. One of the biggest winners we found was Amazon. That’s not surprising, but it is interesting to see their journey and how Amazon plays across so many different types of joy in consumers’ lives. They are all about anticipation, freedom and indulgence. They’ve built a space which reaches consumers across various touchpoints in their everyday journey. So as a result, people look at Amazon as a brand that gives them the freedom to get to anything they want, anywhere they are, at lightning speed. But it also brings the anticipation of, oh, I’m going to open that Amazon package and find my favourite pen or clothes.

Another brand would be Coca-Cola. Coke is a bit more interesting because they have a very specialised space within joy that they’re playing in, which is all about indulgence. And again, the joy type indulgence is not one size fits all. Indulgence can mean different things when it comes to different contexts. For Amazon, it’s the ability to get whatever you want globally at your doorstep. For Coke, it’s that moment of stealing and having a cheat meal with Coke. They are very salient and consistent about talking about happiness and joy across all their touchpoints and comms, which then makes them extremely salient when it comes to the joy spaces.

Featured image: nappy / Pexels