Why Is Emotional Marketing The Key To The Consumer’s Heart?

Sense or sensibility? Well, no matter if you are targeting a reasonable person or a sensitive one, emotions do play a huge part when it comes to responding to advertising. Today more than ever, emotional marketing is a powerful tool that any young entrepreneurs and digital marketing experts should learn to master.

While making a decision, most people experience a conflict between their logic and their feelings. Emotional marketing triggers the emotional side of the decision-making process in order to win the consumer’s heart.

Emotional Marketing: Everybody Wants To Be Part Of Something

Emotional Marketing represents all of the marketing activities that rely on generating emotions that will influence consumers’ decisions. The goal is to make an impact on the consumers by triggering some emotions and therefore making an emotional bond between them and the brand.

Let us not forget that humans are social creatures (yes, even the most introverted ones!) It’s in the basic needs of human nature to want to be part of a group. By creating a feeling of belonging, a brand can gain the consumers’ fidelity. Think of how Apple has managed to make its product appear indispensable, or of the Disney Parks that call their customers ‘guests’.

Storytelling is a must when it comes to emotional marketing and creating a bond with your consumers. Adding narrative elements around a product or a brand makes a greater impact on the consumers than cold facts. Like a story, it also triggers the memory and helps the consumers remembering the product or the brand. If people can get so heavily emotionally involved in their favorite series or book, why couldn’t they feel the same way with a brand?

Why Are Emotions So Important When It Comes To Branding?

Humans, even reasonable ones, are driven by their emotions. When those emotions are triggered in the right way, they can play a huge part in the decision-making process, including buying a product or clicking on a certain link.

Researchers have proven that the emotional response to an ad influences the consumers more than the ad itself. Relatable contents like a video presenting an average woman struggling with average problems and shot as if it was an unscripted interview create empathy and therefore make the brand appear more trustworthy.

It is important to know when applying emotional marketing to an advertisement campaign, that some emotions are stronger than others: happiness, love, disgust, anxiety, and anger are felt more passionately. Those 5 emotions will make a bigger impact on the consumers than shock value or a sad montage. And when in doubt, humour is always a great way to make an ad campaign memorable.

How To Create Emotions Through Digital Content?

It takes less than one second for a human to get a first impression of something. Basically, your brand needs to make a quick impact to catch the consumers’ attention and to keep them invested in your products. The use of specific colours and visuals is a great way to nail that first impression: for example, yellow or orange will easily trigger some feeling of happiness and playfulness while red is perceived as a more action-oriented shade. Colours will set your consumers in a certain mood, it is therefore important that they align with your brand.

Once you have caught your consumers’ attention, here are the type of contents that you can use to create emotions:

• Videos: videos have the ability to trigger both emotions and senses. It’s the number one choice when it comes to emotional marketing. A one-minute-long video is as effective as a 1.8 million words text.
• Photos: even if it’s a bit less impactful than a video, photos are still a useful way to keep your consumers engaged, especially with a good color choice and design.
• Events: events make the consumers be part of something. It gathers people and makes them live a true experience within the brand. Above all, it creates good memories that the consumers will associate with the brand.

In order to be a champion in emotional marketing, you also need to understand how feelings work and develop soft skills such as empathy and critical analysis capacity. Business schools such as EMLV put the learning of soft skills at the core of their pedagogy.

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