Basics of Emotional Marketing

Brands that sell chocolates mostly focuses on the feeling of joy and sharing.

Brands that sell luxury and real estate mostly focus on envy and accomplishment

Brands that sell soft drinks and burgers mostly focus on youth, friendship, and good times.

The list goes on. Have you paused ever and thought why?

The answer is something you should comprehend and feel at the same time. The answer is — Emotions.

In a book published in 1994, Descartes’ Error, on neuroscience by Antonio Damasio studied individuals who had brain damage in the prefrontal cortex that generates emotion. These individuals found it difficult to make even simple routine decisions, such as what to eat (pasta vs. sandwich).

Emotions are all-pervasive. Human beings are more emotional than rational To quote Zig Ziglar, “People don’t buy for logical reasons. They buy for emotional reasons.”

Hence emotions help marketers initiate goal setting, drive a viewer’s response to ads, influence his / her processing to persuasion, and subtly control much more than what meets the eyes.

Yet many fail to address this primal driver. Some simply unconsciously ignore this. While most consider this tough or do it the wrong way.

The simplest yet profound way to tackle this has been advocated by Talia Wolf through her framework. She’s the Founder of Getupift and Conversioner. Her LinkedIn bio reads, “Emotion is the ONLY way to get people to realize they need your solution.”

In course on the CXL CRO mini-Degree, she outlines her framework that explores the emotional triggers and behavioral principles which influence a customer’s decision-making process.

Her approach is simple and targeted. The framework delves with the ultimate goal to understand one’s customers better. Which is what CRO is all about!

With a focus on an area that many marketers miss out on i.e. mobile view. Also, the reason responsive outlay fails.

Talia guides us through the 4-step framework in the context of case studies on online dating platforms.

The 4 step process includes:

Emotional Competitor Analysis — This is step requires researching 15–20 competitors to understand their emotional targeting approaches. How similar would a brand want to be with their competitors or should it take a risk in order to stand out.

Eg. for a dating app covering what how competitors are triggering an emotion of trust, simplicity, and hope

Emotional SWOT — This step is focused not on analyzing prices, specs, and technical features, but identifying a competitor’s emotional appeals and draw insights about the overall industry using polls, surveys and customer interviews

Eg. if you’re Nike and you’re selling footwear, the SWOT’s going to tell you how are the customers feeling about the brand and also about the footwear industry

Building an Emotional Content Strategy — After covering steps 1 and 2 i.e after a detailed analysis of the competitor’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, the next step is to develop a responsive emotional content strategy for the brand.
Eg. ask yourself many pertinent questions like “What do you want your customers to feel? What’s in it for them?”

Testing — Once all the above steps are completed, the next step is to test constantly on the metrics such as elements, words, visuals, and colors.

Eg. say you want to build trust and use the color blue, going overboard with it could lead to triggering of depression, coldness, and aloofness

What’s in it for customers?

While following the steps of the framework, the question of utmost importance is what’s in it for customers.

Now since most brands will be trying to reach the same target audience. The need to stand out and connect at a deeper level is the essence.

Why should they choose you over others?

To answer this question two very common emotional triggers would help us. These triggers would also help a brand convert visitors into customers.

1. Belonging — Humans are social by nature. Everyone want to belong somewhere be it a group, a team, a community, a tribe, a family or peer-validated networks. The feeling of belonging triggers a sense of security and peace in us. It also highlights the fact that you’re not alone there’s a bigger community of people trying out a product or reposing faith in service.

This feeling satisfies key psychological needs and therefore many brands use this emotion to make customers feel part of the brand-loyal group.

This creation of a sense of affiliation results in motivation for the customers to act and lead to purchase or carry out the desired goal.

Creating a deep sense of affiliation between viewers and individuals in your post has been proved to motivate them to act. Well-crafted content that achieves this feeling of community can spur purchases and increase the ROI on your Instagram ads.

2. Scarcity — This emotional trigger plays into the minds of customers are most humans are risk and loss averse. Most of us have a desire for instant gratification. Patience is not a virtue for many, leading to a sense of cognitive bias that takes advantage of people’s tendency to prefer avoiding losses than acquiring gains.

We just hate missing out. So in case, someone tells us the “Don’t lose this once in a lifetime deal” or “Just 2 items left in stock” and “Offer lasts for today only”, there’s a surge in impulsive checkouts.

3. Fear — One emotion that has a tremendous capacity to cloud rational thinking at lightning speed is — Fear. A very colloquial term in the common millennial lexicon is FOMO which is the fear of missing out. Similarly, there’s a fear of not being enough, not doing enough riddled with human insecurities.

Fear can have many a time greater brand attachment that positive emotions like happiness, sadness, or excitement.

This is the reason many baby care, healthcare, and insurance brands use this time and time again.

Apart from these three major emotions, there are other emotions like freedom, local pride, thrill, dreams, happiness, sadness, values, leadership, gratification, trust, and guilt, among others. These emotions too have a major impact on the triggers that they can prompt.

The goal is to use them powerfully to what’s best for the brand keeping in mind marketing ethics before goals. The means are as important as the ends.

Thanks for reading this article! Leave a comment below if you have any questions.