Humans by their very nature are emotional creatures. No matter how practical or rational you may be, ultimately, we are all a slave to our emotions. This is why most of our decisions are based on emotions. It doesn’t matter how logically you think, once the heart wants something you settle for it. The truth is that the emotional part of our brain confronts sensory information quicker than the thinking brain. Hence, we feel before we can actually think about something. Since emotions play such an important role in how our cognitive brain perceives something, a lot of marketing experts use it as a powerful marketing tool.
Emotional Marketing – An Introduction
Before we talk about how emotional marketing works, it is important to know what it even means. Our feelings play a huge role in our decision making, hence, marketers use certain tactics to influence our feelings. By appealing to the consumer’s primal needs and wants, you make it hard for them to resist the urge to buy. This is why ignoring the emotional aspect of human nature can ultimately have an adverse impact on your business.
According to studies and research, people with impaired emotional performance who are able to think logically, are still unable to reach a decision because they can’t understand how they feel about the different options available.
This is why marketers play with our feelings and try to target the four major emotions we feel i.e.: Happiness, Sadness, Anger, and Fear. While the human mind is a complex structure, these four emotions are the determinants of all other emotions.
Emotional Marketing – A Powerful Marketing Tool
Marketers use emotional marketing to create a connection between the consumers and the brand in a personal way. With the advent of technology, the world is becoming more and more digital. Some argue that due to mainstream technical devices, media channels, and online platforms, people are becoming more rational than emotional. However, for marketing experts, it has become a new opportunity to connect with the audience and share the brand story on a much broader yet personal level.
Emotional Marketing is a powerful tool but you should know how to use it right. Every action we take is backed by some sort of emotion(s). This is why to induce a reaction among the audiences, marketers use emotional manipulation through marketing and branding campaigns. Once the audience feels emotionally attached to a certain brain or product, it will be hard for them to not buy it.
This leads to a very important question: How do you emotionally connect with the audience?
Emotional Marketing – How to Connect?
There are three different approaches that allow you to connect with your audience through emotional marketing campaigns. These are:
Inspiration – Using certain strategies and tactics that inspire the consumer to form an emotional connection with the brand/product will most likely turn the casual audience into brand fans.
Aspiration – By targeting the desires and aspirations of the audience, you connect with their needs and wants. You can manipulate them into believing that you are selling what they need.
Expressions – By appealing to the rawest and personal emotions of audiences you will create an expression of a brand that cares about them. Hence, work on humanizing the company to make it appear more expressive and relevant.
Emotional Marketing – Emotions that Work
To make an emotional marketing campaign successful, it is important to ensure that you are using the right emotions for the right target group. When you look for emotions, you will find that there are many different emotions humans feel with hundreds of different words describing them; Happiness, lust, apathy, joy, overwhelm, disgust – the list goes on and on…
Now how do you combine all these different emotions into a successful marketing campaign that the audience can relate to? It is actually quite simple! As stated below, all our feelings emerge from four core underlying emotions i.e., happiness, sadness, fear/surprise, and anger/disgust. By using these four emotions, you can create a powerful emotional marketing campaign to influence your audience.
Now, let us take a look at how you can do that.
Happiness
Happiness is a powerful emotion and something all human beings have been searching for since the beginning of time. Happiness reflects positivity, encouragement, motivation, calm and fulfillment. This is why all businesses want their brands to be associated with happiness. As long as your customers are happy, you will be happy, right? Since happiness gives birth to other positive emotions, it has a knack for increasing want for the thing generating that happiness.
If you notice around you, people like to talk about positive things and promote things that encourage positivity whether it is a social media post, an inspiring story or a self-help book. “The Subtle Art of Not Giving A Fuck” by Mark Manson, is an international bestseller for two consecutive years. A simple yogi, Sadhguru from India, is one of the biggest mystics in the world today. Jay Shetty, an ordinary social media influencer, now has millions of followers around the world. Hassan Minhaj, a common Paki-American, is a world-famous comedian and influencer today with his own Netflix show. The reason behind the success of all these names is Happiness – all of them talk about how humans can reach happiness and satisfaction in everyday life. Imagine if someone starts preaching racism, misogyny or poverty… we would be disgusted and appalled.
This tells us two things:
- Positive things generate positive emotions that will lead to happiness.
- Negative instruments attract negative emotions which make us repel.
To put it shortly, happiness is a powerful emotional tool in marketing which can lead you to become successful.
Sadness
Here comes the tricky part – if all brands want to make customers happy then why make them sad? The reason being that different emotions induce different reactions. Hence, even by using negative emotions tactfully, you can generate a positive reaction. The most common way of using sadness in emotional marketing is by making the customer sad and then presenting a solution that will take away that sadness.
Once you have stirred negative emotions like sadness, rejection, abandonment or atonement in your customers then you can counter those feelings through a positive proposal. It is a common practice in marketing campaigns related to mental and physical health products and services. For example, an ad for a therapist will first make you feel bad about all the issues you are facing such as depression, anxiety, emotional abuse, etc. and then present itself as the solution that will take away your problems.
Thus, by making your consumers feel sad and then promising a solution for their negative emotions, you will get a reaction out of them.
Fear/surprise
Fear is one of the basic human instincts and a powerful feeling which influences every decision we make. Whether you are shrieking about the lizard on your bedroom wall or fretting about the current n-COV 2019 state of the world – fear is everywhere. Fear or surprise influences people to act out of urgency and desire for self-care and preservation. The best example of this is how businesses are using the current global pandemic, Coronavirus, to create fear among the audience which will lead them to purchase the products which can protect them like hand sanitizers, masks, disinfectants, etc.
To be honest, fear is one of the most beneficial emotions for marketers as it induces immediate reaction. However, it is far more complex than any other emotion. If you take your fear-mongering too far then you can end up driving your customers away. So, only take up this one of you know what you’re doing!
Anger/disgust
A lot of businesses refrain from making their customers angry and rightfully so – Anger can be a useful emotional marketing tool. When used right, this negative emotion can have a very powerful impact on the audience under the right circumstances. Emotional marketing campaigns that induce anger among the audience can make people uncomfortable enough to make them think about it and take action. For example, when seeing injustice, we become angry and want to do something about it. Similarly, by stirring anger about the right thing, you can get your customers to react.
A great practical example of the use of anger in an emotional marketing campaign is the New York Times advertisement “The Truth is Hard”. By demonstrating how hard it is to believe people in the modern world of fake news and lies, The New York Times used the opportunity to portray itself as honest and transparent.
Emotional Marketing – Other Powerful Emotions
Some other powerful emotions that can be played within a marketing campaign are:
Lust – While humans as a whole are driven by their sexual desires, they are more prominent in men as compared to women. This is why men’s products are usually marketed to appeal to their lust. For example, the popular deodorant brand Axe, always shows a few hot girls being attracted to the man as soon as he sprays the deodorant.
Love – Love is something we all year for. By stimulating feelings of love among the audience you are ultimately provoking happiness. This leads to a positive affirmation and makes the audience like the product/brand.
Value – Any product that promises value is always better. Hence, by using emotions that deliver the value of your product, you can attract the audience to invest in the said product.
Emotional Marketing – Make it Appealing and Engaging
Whether you are running a small business or a large industrial unit, you can make your brand stand out through emotional marketing. Emotional marketing works because it appeals and engages the audience. What makes an emotional marketing campaign appealing?
Here the factors you should consider when you want to have an emotional appeal to the consumers:
Colors
Color psychology plays a huge part in emotional manipulation. Colors are said to evoke emotions in the consumers which influence and motivate their purchasing power. So, using the right colors will evoke the right emotions in your audience.
Content
In today’s competitive market, content is the king. Content is an extraordinary way to grab the attention of your audience and emerge as a brand. However, your stories are nothing without consistency. Consistent content marketing implies two things, i.e., consistent uploading and consistent quality. Your captions, product description, values, etc. should be written in a friendly and understandable tone of voice, and they should reflect your brand image. The audience should be able to rely on the quality and originality of the information and insights delivered through your brand.
Behavior
All words and no action will soon damage your reputation among the audience. Hence, whatever you say you should prove to become reliable and trustworthy. If your customers can trust you, they will never invest in you. By behaving in a way that supports your claims and content, you will form a long-term relationship with the consumers.
Emotional Marketing – Tips and Tricks for Success
Always aim to trigger an emotion within your audience. Humans are social and emotional animals. Our passions and feelings drive us. To create a long-term bond with your customers, you need to relate to them on a personal level by engaging them emotionally. Design your marketing campaign in a way that stirs up some sentiment in the audience. It should make them feel happy, sad, excited or even cringe-y! If your content is stimulating a reaction, then it’s engaging the audience.
Here are some simple tips you can adopt to enhance your emotional marketing campaigns:
- Create urgency and push the customers to do something like giving them a limited time offer, discount, etc.
- Create original and believable user-generated content in your marketing campaigns like reviews and testimonials.
- Surprise your audience and shake them out of their stupor to get a reaction.
- Use the power of nostalgia to remind people of the nicer, simpler days.
Emotional Marketing – Is it Worth the Investment?
By now you know the importance of emotions and how we perceive them. Despite being a ration and logical we are ultimately emotional fools. We make decisions based on our primal emotional instincts. The first impression we form is based on emotional cues rather than logical reasoning. This is why marketers around the globe are investing their time, energy and money in understanding how human emotions work and how they can be influenced.
Emotional manipulation has always served as a great tool to make people do as you please. By influencing our emotions, marketing experts try to sell different products and services. Hence, by the end of the day, emotion is what connects the brand with the customers. As the audience becomes more focused on the emotional appeal of a product/service, people from various backgrounds are starting to align themselves with humanized brands.
Thus, adding emotional marketing strategies to your campaign will make you thrive and get bigger profits and faithful customers. So, yes – emotional marketing is definitely worth the investment!
Conclusion
Stop wasting time and start studying your demographic to design a tailored emotional campaign that would stir them up and make them buy your product/service. You will reap the benefits for years and years to come!