We make sure great businesses and customers supporting them receive the value they both seek and both need.
We call this win-win relationship "we together.” It’s a business paradigm shift where businesses and their customers solve human problems, make human lives better and stand together for something greater than both of them.
We specialise in the secret ingredient critical to win-win “we together” relationships, human emotional connection. With this connection forged, businesses and their customers get excellent, rewarding relationships they both seek and both deserve.
Customers gain long term meaningful value well beyond one-off transactions, while businesses gain emotionally invested customers that not only love, appreciate and advocate, they’re categorically proven to spend more and stay longer.
Our mission is to work with businesses and build “we together” emotional connections with their customers. We know it makes business and customer lives better. If all businesses did this, the world would be a better place for everyone.
So how do you take a business from status quo to “we together?”
First you must separate the functional (e.g. price and product features) from the emotional connection conversation. Functional value is where businesses lose sight of or dilute the reason they matter to people. The emotional, human problems they solve is how they make real human lives better.
All customers approach businesses with human lives and human problems that carry emotional weight. Your business must know the human problems you solve.
Once you do, this becomes your utmost value, why you truly matter. It becomes the core of your “we together” relationship.
Now you bring the functional back in. Embed your “we together” across all your functional products and sales so they deliver the solution to your customers’ human problem.
Lastly, treat every second of customer engagement as a precious opportunity to build emotional connection, trust and affinity.
“Not knowing the emotional conversation inside your customer’s head is Don’t Pass Go. The better you understand why you matter in someone’s life, everything you do, everything you say - your customers’ entire experience - will be infinitely better.”
Callum Robertson
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Finding and calibrating your “we together” is not easy. It takes real brains to boil down the true essence of what your brand and business does with its customers that's greater than both of you. You have to know the right emotional connection to make too - it can’t be over-the-top or underdone. You have to let go of product features and benefits, go nowhere near price and money, and remember that “we together” is entirely about human connection.
It is essential that you understand how much customers want a “we together” relationship with your business. All humans want and need to feel part of something. And with customers under 35, operating this way isn’t optional, it’s the bare minimum.
When customers are connected in a “we together” way, they feel it’s their duty to help businesses and brands successfully help more people like them. With digital connectivity at their fingertips, customers help their “we together” businesses grow faster and become more profitable than their competitors. It’s being proven in real time all around the world.
One last last thing!
Why is “we together” absolutely essential for customers under 35? Easy answer: YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, TikTok etc. Young people have followed and supported online content creators for years now, and have learned that by supporting their favourite people, they play a “we together” role in the content creation process. They now expect this dynamic with everyone they support, which means businesses. There you go. Simple answer.
Here’s how:
Hardwired helps businesses tackle the challenges they face acquiring and retaining customers by focussing on human emotional connection.
Hardwired has a proprietary toolset for understanding modern and rapidly-changing consumers that focuses on what never changes - human emotional drivers. To build emotional connection, you must have customer data that deeply uncovers the emotional state of consumers.
We gather and decode consumer emotional state data to unlock strategic opportunities for building emotional connections and your “we together” relationship. But we don’t just give you data and leave you to figure it out on your own. We work in partnership to ensure your business can implement easily across your functional sales pathway.
What changes when we work together?
Deep understanding of consumer emotions plus strategic decoding allows your business to radically improve every customer engagement immediately.
Understand what consumers emotionally want and need within the context your brand operates
Know how to be the brand that meets their emotional wants and needs
Create the inspirational spark that ignites emotional connection and forms the foundation of your “we together” relationship
Make your customers stick by building a lasting “we together” relationship
How does this work in the real world?
Just ask MitoQ.
By focussing on building emotional connection with customers at every available opportunity, MitoQ has been able to continually optimise its marketing and eCommerce. Despite 2022 being a tough year all round for businesses, MitoQ achieved 4% revenue growth with:
27% reduction in digital media spend
40% increase in overall return on advertising spend
53% increase in website traffic
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MitoQ is a New Zealand business selling a unique, newly invented product in the global health and wellness market. Hardwired has worked with MitoQ for over 6 years tackling the challenge of educating global consumers so they understand MitoQ’s value and connect emotionally to the brand.
2022 proved to be a very challenging year for all businesses, faced with navigating some tough economic headwinds, fuelled by high expectations of a recession, low confidence in a fast recovery and rising inflation.
For brands driving direct engagement with customers, this translated into greater competition for consumer eyeballs – which drove up the cost of advertising; coupled with a low propensity to purchase – which drove down conversion rates, resulting in a negative double whammy.
In the face of these market conditions, MitoQ figured out how to buck the trend, achieving 4% revenue growth with:
• 27% reduction in digital media spend
• 40% increase in overall return on advertising spend
• 53% increase in website traffic
Increased reach and growth with reduced ad spend – the positive double whammy!
How did we do this?
• Understanding how to build a personally relevant, highly valuable, deeply meaningful connection between customers and the brand
• Understanding the key points of friction/confusion in the purchase pathway and removing them
• Understanding how to escape the transactional product trap and build enduring, profitable customer relationships, with an overarching advocacy strategy
Right now, more people are understanding MitoQ’s value and this is the result of more satisfied, trusting, emotionally invested customers spreading the word.
*MitoQ kindly co-wrote this case study with us
WHY EMOTION?
Because every decision you make is driven by how you feel.
Welcome to being human.
While human beings are all very different, we are all hardwired for emotional connection - we love it and need it to survive. Decades of psychological research proves that emotion is the fundamental driver of human decisions.
Every cultural seismic shift and success within our society has been driven by the emotional connection it forged with large groups of people. When applied correctly, emotional connection can have the same impact on the success of businesses and brands – think Apple and Tesla – and locally, AllBirds or Whittakers Chocolate.
Without emotional connection, it’s a lose-lose.
You are a good business with a great brand. Even though you operate with passion, integrity and strong values you feel it has become an uphill battle to acquire new customers and grow the value of existing ones. Meanwhile, consumers are looking for brands who care about them, have a sense of self, a purpose, passion and values – but say brands like these are very difficult to find. This is very frustrating for both parties!
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Businesses often compete on unemotional, functional conversations: price, value for money, what competitors do or don’t have etc. This creates a customer experience centred around one-off short-term purchases with little other engagement. With so little to connect with, consumers default to what’s on offer, such as the lowest price, thus reinforcing the paradigm.
This only allows business to function within a transactional product economy, an increasingly turbulent, red ocean, where you only exist as a price-taker and the big guys always win (they try to uphold this paradigm, because it ensures they win). Ultimately, function is the minimum value a business can provide, and consumers reply to this lack of effort and human engagement with complete and utter indifference, even if you’re the cheapest.
Why does the lose-lose dynamic persist? Simple.
Building emotional connection with customers is difficult. It requires a deep understanding of customer emotions and pinpoint accuracy to execute.