The Re-emerging ‘It Quality’ of Branding: Emotional Resonance
The re-emerging ‘it quality’ of branding: emotional resonance
What actually drives conversion in a dopamine-driven world
Apr 24, 2026
In the era of rapid consumption, there’s undoubtedly an evolution in how the mind processes and retains information. As a result, the way we make purchasing decisions and how we’re sold to has subsequently evolved. This presents an interesting new challenge for brands and marketers whose primary objective is to keep our attention and monetize it. That is, they must change how they position themselves in order to “pull on the right strings” within this new age.
Consumer brands, especially, must now tailor their positioning for an era of endless consumption, constant context switching, and most importantly, a new wave of dopamine hits. This “feel-good” hormone is what we’re all after, and serves as a precursor to get humans into a desirable state to drive a set-out objective, whether it be your time and attention, or your money. Firing dopamine receptors creates opportunities to keep us hooked, and brands have developed strategies around optimizing these neurotransmitters.
Tech giants have created (and perfected) this loop, which has forced brands into finding their place within it. The key dichotomy between the two is that tech giants optimize primarily for dopamine reinforcement, largely because their main objective is to keep our attention, which on the surface costs nothing to the consumer. Whereas brands require deeper commitment, which is why the emotional component is key. This is largely because time is not given the same level of value as money (even though we know it is just as valuable, if not more). Therefore, it’s easier to hook us and use attention as currency, and why brands need something deeper.
However, as fast consumption has become more pronounced, our reward system has become more rewired, and our baseline for what creates a dopamine hit has evolved. While tried-and-true advertisements of flash promotions or beautiful visuals can create a dopamine boost, they are no longer enough to generate sustained sales, largely due to these attention-grabbing dopamine hits being everywhere. Beyond the initial attention grab, initial conversion and ultimate brand loyalty are driven by something deeper: emotion. It’s about how the content makes us feel. Especially in moments of continuous context switching, it’s emotional activation that makes you pause and creates the opportunity to explore what is being marketed.
Brands must pull on our heartstrings when the mind is already occupied, as it’s arguably an area of ourselves that hasn’t been reprogrammed to consume, filter, and switch in the way our minds have. Perhaps the archaic nature of the soul is simply something that can’t be overly engineered. And perhaps modern marketing has neglected the importance of the heart, as brands have been so caught up in just keeping attention in the era of swipe, swipe, swipe.
This often means creating a compelling vision, product, or narrative that evokes feeling, as opposed to purely focusing on the quality of the creative.So while dopamine may be the hook, emotional resonance is what makes a message and/or product stay.
This is best illustrated in a study on short-form video and purchase intent, which found that high-quality content triggered emotional resonance and brand trust, but not necessarily perceived value. These emotional and trust-based responses then increase perceived value, ultimately driving the decision to purchase.
It’s evident that emotional resonance is becoming increasingly powerful, as it requires a level of careful curation throughout content. It cannot be achieved solely through the quality of the creative. Our attention spans have become so accustomed to constant filtering and processing that it now takes an additional layer to make something “stick,” which is why emotional resonance is so crucial. As the data shows, it is a key factor in driving perceived value and purchase intention.
In addition, we don’t retain most information due to our constant mode of consumption, as the brain defaults to short-term memory. So that layer beneath needs to be accessed. Think about how often you remember an ad or creative you saw in a sea of content that’s being thrown at you, versus the things you remember because of the emotion they evoked.
In 2010, Google debuted a Super Bowl commercial called Parisian Love — 60 seconds of search queries that follow a journey of an American falling in love in Paris, with Google acting as a companion throughout this journey. It’s a commercial with no images or voices, just text and space to elicit emotion. At the time of its airing, Google was already a dominant player, but this campaign is often cited by marketing experts as a turning point that contributed to humanizing the brand. It helped Google maintain a near-monopoly on search during a time when Microsoft’s Bing was spending millions of dollars trying to look “cooler” and win more users. Marketing like this often stays in our minds far longer after the visual is gone. And though this example is over 15 years old, it’s more relevant than ever, especially as the time to capture a consumer’s attention continues to shrink. Even watching it now, you feel something — maybe even shed a tear (at least I did).
As I wrote about previously with our changing attention spans, the way we consume information has radically changed over the past decade. And now there’s a deeper layer to truly understanding this from a brand’s perspective. Emotional resonance is a new standard, and it changes what “good marketing” actually is. Though systems are designed to sustain engagement, brands must tailor their creatives beyond just capturing attention. As a result, we’ll continue to see a stealthy play on emotions, as opposed to logic, as a step beyond simply capturing human attention.