Emotional Marketing — The scientific way to sway buyers through advertisement
Building an emotional connection with your audience is very important if you want your marketing efforts to bear success. Emotional marketing is a powerful way not just to elicit purchases but also to stand out as a brand and increase loyalty in your customers.
As per studies, advertisements that have emotional content perform twice as well as those that have only rational content.
Most purchasing decisions of people are taken from the heart. The only way you can touch the hearts of your target audience is through emotional marketing.
Dove did it through their #LikeAGirl campaign that won many awards and recognitions apart from millions of hearts.
Through its “Perfect Isn’t Pretty” Ad Gillette highlighted the various personal as well as professional struggles that athletes go through to shape up their strong characters.
P&G came up with an entire series of small stories from the lives of different athletes whose respective mothers protected them from dangerous and traumatic situations, calling it “Thank You, Mom — Strong.”
It was not all about their products. It was about engaging the subconscious of their audience and creating an emotional connection with their brand. Storytelling and narratives seem to be the best way to do this.
As per science, storytelling stimulates the production of dopamine in the brain, linking the story with the memory. Through emotional branding you can create an emotional and psychological impact, making your consumers remember your story, and hence your brand.
92% consumers expect brands to make ads that feel like stories and there are brands that meet these expectations.
Airbnb came up with a story while creating a campaign in New York City in 2014. Through a 30-second YouTube Video, Airbnb showcases the profile of Carol, an Airbnb host who has been making a living hosting people, since she lost her job.
By letting people know how Airbnb can add value to their lives, the ad has managed to appeal to many whose universal desire is to help others.
Videos that add value are very popular on the internet. Not only do they appeal to people they are also highly engaging and very much shareworthy.
There are different kinds of emotions such as happiness, sadness, anger and fear you can target, through emotional marketing, depending on the goal that you want to achieve.
If you want your target audience to share your ads and increase your brand awareness, happiness is the emotion you should choose.
When people come across content that makes them smile, they will automatically share it on social media. In 2009 when the sales of soft drinks had sapped out due to a weakened economy, the “Open Happiness” Campaign of Coca-Cola had worked wonders.
If you are a service that helps people and adds value to their lives, you should choose sadness as the emotion in your marketing. Sadness creates feelings of empathy that motivate people to act on behalf of others.
The Brave and Beautiful Campaign of Dabur Vatika is an effort to salute female cancer survivors. The bald woman in the video is a cancer survivor who is getting ready for her first day at office post treatment.
She has doubt written all over her face as she looks into the mirror. What happens when she enters office will leave you in tears, not of sadness but of hope.
In case your goal is to increase your brand loyalty you will have to make your audience cling to what seems comfortable to them. That can only happen when you make them experience fear.
But you have to make your brand seem as the only good thing that exists in the dark world. The quit smoking commercials do elicit fear to a great extent.
If you want to increase your followers on social media and make your videos go viral, you have to make them elicit anger. Anger, like happiness, is a strong emotion that makes people share content and comment. The #LikeAGirl campaign of Always is an example.
The emotions that you target depend a lot on whom you are marketing to. Nevertheless, here are a few emotional marketing strategies for you to adopt…
Understanding your audience
The first ever step for any business to take when it comes to any kind of marketing is to know their audience. Find out what they like and what they respond to. Understand their general desires, dreams, and their pain points.
Use color to lead
Colors are closely tied to emotions and hold more influence on the responses of your audience. Most organizations use brand color psychology techniques to evoke the right emotions in their audience. The red of Coca-Cola evokes joy, excitement and love, while the green of Starbucks represents nature, growth and health, evoking feelings of harmony.
Narrate a story
Storytelling is the best way to evoke the right emotion in your audience. Make sure the story that you tell connects your audience with your brand.
Instead of generalizing, make it specific and appealing. Focus more on the Why rather than the ‘What’ or the ‘Who’.
Create a community or movement
Try and establish a movement or community around your brand by using emotional marketing.
Not only will it create a sense of brand loyalty, it also helps keep your audience engaged with your brand on a constant basis.
Once you have a community or movement going, it becomes very easy to promote your brand activities.
Tap those dreams
Everyone loves to dream; but not all of those dreams come true.
Through emotional marketing you can actually tap into the dreams that your audience are craving to reach. Tell your consumers how they can realize their dreams by using your product.
In “Red bull gives you wiiings” campaign, the commercials feature a few intense moments of athletes reaching their dreams.
By evoking feelings of hope, excitement and elation, these ads make you feel that you can realize your dreams too.
Project an Ideal Image
Old Spice ad focuses on the ideal way a man should smell like. Raymond’s ad shows what a complete man is. They convince the customers that the product is actually a complete solution. It can make them what they want to be.
Putting emotion into your marketing mix can help you achieve any goal, no matter how complicated it might be. All that you need to know is which emotions to resonate.
Focus on the value that you can add through your products or services. That should help you come up with a successful emotional marketing strategy.
