Emotions in Marketing

I have many fond memories from my childhood, we all do.

I remember the smell of the first rain and that of my grandparent’s house. Call me a romantic but I vividly remember my first kiss and the first date I went on with my wife. All these memories are filled with emotions which are supercharged once they are encapsulated in a form of nostalgia.

Emotions have a huge effect on our lives, whether it’s happiness, sadness or fear. Every single emotion has some sort of cognitive effect that changes our behavior and influences our decision making. They affect the way we perceive people, companies and brands. Yet, when emotions are mishandled, they can turn against us, our brand or product.

By way of example, think of Oscar Pistorius, you know the South Africa sprinter with amputated legs. The entire world idolized him for his determination to compete against able-bodied athletes. He was so great; he won a medal in the 2011 world championships (happy – we loved him). Unfortunately, the guy went on to murder his girlfriend and overnight turned into a person most despise (sad and angry – hate).

Another example would be that of BP’s huge oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The mishandling of the tragic event rippled across the digital media and crashed the brand.

If you look up “Emotions in Marketing” on Google, you’ll find over 227,000 scholar articles that cover the topic. There’s so much science around it that we’ve decided to take a more scientific approach with this post.

FEELINGS AND EMOTIONS DEFINED

Not too long ago, the University of Glasgow released a research, which concluded that humans have 4 emotions: happy, sad, fear/surprise, and anger/disgust. Robert Pluntchik, who was a professor emeritus at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, with a keen interest in emotions (and suicide and violence), defined the ‘Wheel of Emotions’. Which takes the basic emotion elements and turns them into feelings. For someone who is inspired by psychology and anthropology, this is quite fascinating.

THE PRACTICAL PART – HOW DO EMOTIONS AFFECT OUR MARKETING?

Focusing on the 4 main emotions, we’ve tried to outline some key ‘takeaways’ that you could use with your marketing.

HAPPINESS

Shawn Achor, a psychologist and the CEO of Good Think Inc, has a great TED talk about happiness and productivity.

According to Shawn, the science of happiness is the science of how our brains process the world. We as marketer’s can affect the way our customers’ brains consume our messaging by “simply” painting the right picture. In no way am I suggesting that you should lie about your company or product but there’s always a way to position things in a better light.

If you’re interested, there’s also a few tricks in the end of the video that talk about how you could train your brain and become a happier more productive individual. Interestingly enough, there are many other initiatives which have taken form in the recent past, such as 100happydays.com or happify.com which strive to achieve just that, being happy.

Now, if we look at happiness from the marketing standpoint, we want to encourage our users and readers to be happier. Not only because it will make them feel great, but it will make them want to share the happiness with the people they care about. Causing a “chain reaction” of social sharing of happiness with people they care about. So, if your brand, messaging or even a post you write makes your target audience happy, they’ll share it with the world.

Jonah Berger, a professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Contagious: Why Things Catch On, published a study about why content becomes viral on the web. In his research, he looked at over 7000 articles in The New York Times along with various other data points. Concluding that the more positive a piece of content was, the more likely it was to become viral.

Takeaway #1 – People share happiness!

Takeaway #2 – Use feelings which are linked to happiness (amusement, interest, surprise, pleasure, joy, hope, excitement) in your content.

Takeaway #3 – Paint a ‘Happy’ picture. Whether you’re a B2B or a B2C company, paint a happy picture for your users.

SADNESS

In continuation from the previous emotion, happiness, we’ll take a look at sadness. As most people would consider them to be exact opposites, it’s quite surprising that they light up the same regions in our brains (the left prefrontal lobe). The difference between the 2 emotions is that when we feel sadness there are other hormones which our body releases. Mainly cortisol (aka “stress hormone”) and oxytocin (a hormone that promotes connection and empathy), changing our happiness into sadness.

Oxytocin has been found to increase generosity in humans, as detailed in a research by Paul J Zak. Not surprising then is the wide use of sadness in campaigns targeted at raising money for health related purpose.

I’m sure you recall the amazingly successful and super viral, “Ice Bucket Challenge”, by far the most successful campaign of the last few years. The secret to its success, whether planned for or not, is the unique mixture of emotions encompassed in it. There’s just the right amount of sadness (ALS is a terrible disease) and happiness (it’s always funny seeing Bill Gates gets flushed with a cold bucket of icy water). Another, maybe slightly less popular example, is the no-makeup campaign to raise awareness for cancer.

We all connect to sadness; it makes us compassionate and motivates us to help others. We connect to people in a distressed situation and our willingness to help is unquestioned when we feel we can really support a person in need. With brands, sadness and the oxytocin hormone specifically, have been proven to build trust between brands and customers.

This too resonates from Paul J Zak’s research –

“Our results show why puppies and babies are in toilet paper commercials,” Zak said. “This research suggests that advertisers use images that cause our brains to release oxytocin to build trust in a product or brand, and hence increase sales,” he said.

Takeaway #4 – Sadness creates empathy and compassion.

Takeaway #5 – Feelings based on the sadness emotion build trust in our brains.

FEAR/SURPRISE

Fear, unlike the first 2 emotions is triggered by the Amygdala, which are almond-shaped groups of nuclei in our brain. The Amygdala controls the significance of events in our brains; it’s the part of our brain responsible for decision making and emotional reactions.

That significant connection between fear and decision making/emotional reaction is what makes this emotion so fascinating for marketers. Additionally, out of all the emotions covered in this post, fear is possibly the easiest emotion to ignite with our audience.

In contrast to the above, we have to remember that fear is actually a negative emotion. It is a distinct part of our evolutionary development and is a prominent emotion with all other mammals too. Therefore, staying away from the negativity of fear and utilizing it well, is key to the success of using fear in marketing. If we fail to do so, the negativity of fear may cause our audience to develop skepticism and distrust with our brand.

To better understand this point, I’d like to share an example from one of our customers (a Cyber Security company):

We wanted to use a much publicized, “well branded” example in a part of the company’s messaging. To do so, we chose Edward Snowden’s successful breach into NSA’s data (very saddening from a Cyber Security point-of-view). However, this was met with some discomfort from our customers as they felt uncomfortable presenting the NSA in such a negative manner.

The idea was to use the example as a title or an intro to a very descriptive document about their product. And so for the purposes of this post, here are 2 examples (negative and positive) of the text we intended to use:

“How NOT to use fear” (we wrote this just for the sake of this post):

Your network has been breached – You’re fired!

Why you ask? Well here’s just one example – Edward Snowden.

Following Edward Snowden’s breach of the NSA’s 1.4 million (top-secret) records, many people like yourself lost their jobs and some even got arrested. Will you be next?

If you were the person responsible for security within an organization, you’d be obsessively preoccupied with the possibility of this happening to you. Not the feeling you’d want to invoke in your audience.
Surprisingly though, this type of marketing, may work for first-time buyers/readers but in the long run, this will ruin your brand as it will build fear and distrust with your audience.

The right way to use fear in marketing:

The days of traditional network security systems are over!

Why you may ask? Well here’s just one example – Edward Snowden.

Aside from given the NSA their greatest headache to date, Snowden also managed to steal over 1.4 million of NSA’s top-secret files, using nothing but legit accounts to do so.

A much more subtle way of bringing the same message across to your audience.

Takeaway #6 – Fear is great for grabbing attention (email subjects, announcements, page titles, etc.)

Takeaway #7 – Use fear in a positive manner.

ANGER/DISGUST

The first thing that comes to mind when mentioning the words: Anger, Disgust, Marketing and Customers, is don’t put those together! Our initial take on anything to do with anger or disgust is to avoid letting our audience get anywhere near them. The last thing we want to do is associate the feeling of anger or disgust with our brand.

However… What about unified anger towards a mutual cause? Or, anger towards something that your product can resolve? This is exactly where the feeling of anger becomes magical for us marketers.

It turns out that anger does wonders for viral marketing on social media and also turns on a severe case of stubbornness within us. Think of the last time you took part in a debate (whether on or offline) that really aggravated you, do you recall how stubborn you were at proving your point? I personally gave up on many other things (which I’d much rather do in normal circumstances) to prove my point in a debate that aggravated me.

The biggest value of using anger is its virality power. Out of all negative feelings, the ones that relate to anger are the most powerful when it comes to virality.

Takeaway #8 – Identify a mutual cause that ignites anger with your audience and use it wisely

Takeaway #9 – If your product can solve a problem that aggravates your audience, USE IT in your marketing!

THE POWER OF EMOTIONS AND SOCIAL MEDIA

In speaking to many of our customers, I find 2 distinct observations which I’d like to bring up as a summarizing paragraph to this post.

1. Mentioning other brands in a negative manner – Some of our customers are somewhat concerned with mentioning other brand names in their marketing materials when emotions are at play. Their main concern is that it may be disrespectful and eventually turn into a legal battle.
   
   Takeaway #10 – Don’t be afraid to use other brands (especially when they’re bigger and more established brands) within your messaging. It will always have a positive effect on yours
   
   
2. Customers still question the effectiveness of social networks – If we only look at this post as an example, look at the amount of hashtags we’ve covered: #nomakeupselfies, #icebucketchallenge, #100happydays, #oscarpistorius, #BP, #Oilspill, #GulfCoastdisaster, #Greedyoilexecs.
   
   These have a ripple effect that will reach a very (very) wide audience.
   
   Takeaway #11 – Go social, engage your users and get your message out there.

Good luck and stay happy!

Found this post interesting? Read more on our blog.