Emotions & Digital Marketing – Check this out !!

Introduction:

#Digital Marketing:

How can #emotions be leveraged by #Business for driving Sales?

(burningred.co.uk, 2020)

Identifying the #emotions and utilizing them for a successful digital marketing campaign has been of paramount importance for Digital Marketers. Digital Marketing became even more powerful than before, with more companies increasing their budget and Digital Marketing investments.

Research organizations have done many studies on how evoking the right emotions can bring more Dollars to the sellers and how evoking a wrong emotion can create havoc to the brand's image. Brand's face backlash when they evoke the wrong Emotion. Hence the emotions need to be handled very precisely in digital marketing to be perceived in the same way as they were thought by the digital marketeer or organization who has created the campaign.

Storytelling and linking it to the right emotions is the core of digital marketing based on emotional persuasion as compared to rational persuasion. Identifying the target audience and identifying the right Emotion that needs to be evoked to convert the prospect into a customer needs a deeper study of the target customers' behavior and psychographics. The audience wants to get inspired and feel included. Love drives most of us; hence we need to create content such that it gives love back to the audience. We need to show or reflect how they may think of a love which they have not done in the past or thought of. 

(mriganshgupta, 2019)

Emotions

Emotion forms a critical part of storytelling and connects with the target audience, and generates the right engagement model to give the target audience an immersive experience. There are four basic emotions which even a newborn child carries when he or she lends in this world, and as the child grows, he starts understanding and feeling more variants of emotions. These four basic emotions are:

Happiness, Sadness, Anger, Fear.

Three core effects distinguish these four basic emotions: reward (happy), punishment (sad), and stress (fear and anger) and are combined to form other variants of emotions.

The basic emotions are evoked by sensing the basic bodily instinctual needs, while the "complex" emotions, including love, aesthetic emotions, are evoked by the higher cognitive needs of the human being. The emotions are internal states evoked by sensing for instinctual bodily needs, and underlined by neuromodulator release, and will promote some behaviors: (Fushun Wang , Jiongjiong Yang , Fang Pan , Roger C. Ho and Jason H. Huang, 2019)

• Dopamine – Reward
• Serotonin – Punishment
• Norepinephrine – Stress

Few of the studies show that these emotions lead to below responses from a Digital marketing perspective: (Matson, 2020)

• Happiness – More Shares
• Sadness – More Clicks
• Fear – More loyalty
• Anger – Viral Content

The brain's central part responsible for processing emotions, the limbic system, is called the "emotional brain."

Experience of pleasure is related to Dopamine. Serotonin is associated with memory and learning and linked to easing depression. Norepinephrine works to moderate the person's mood by controlling stress and anxiety. (UTTLEY, 2020)

(Fushun Wang, Jiongjiong Yang , Fang Pan , Roger C. Ho and Jason H. Huang, 2019)

Linking Emotions to the success of Digital Marketing

Emotion-based Digital Marketing:

Digital Marketing that mainly focuses on Emotion to make the audience aware, inspire, persuade, and purchase using any single emotion, like happiness, sadness, anger, or fear is Emotion-based Digital Marketing. Out of 1,400 successful advertising campaigns, those with purely emotional content performed about twice as well (31% vs. 16%) as those with only rational content. (Hubspot, 2020)

Robert Plutchik's "wheel of emotions."

• Brands using marketing ads with an 'above average emotional response' see an average 23% increase in sales.
• Emotional storytelling plays a crucial role in viral videos and social media posts and is a key factor in virality.'
• Audience who are emotionally attached to a brand are worth two times value of the average customer.
• A consumer having a positive emotional association is 8.4 times more likely to trust and 7.1 times likely to purchase more, and 6.6 times likely to forgive a company mistake.

(Unlimited Exposure, 2020)

In 2018, HP launched a digital video on the occasion of Diwali as part of HP India's #TuJashnBan campaign, Umeed ka Diya. The video strikes an emotional cord to society and encouraging people to buy products from local artisans and street vendors during Diwali. It resonates with the message even a small help taken by all of us can bring along a big difference in some hand to mouth or poor people’s Diwali and encourages the viewers to support the street vendors. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPqUQrCSMi0 

Super Emotional AD by #HP #india! #happydiwali. The campaign beautifully highlights how a product can elevate the joy and happiness of social sharing. (ETBrandEquity, 2018)

HP's this years campaign ads are as under:

To create an Emotional Digital Marketing campaign, Psychographics play a big role in the customers' demographics. Positive Emotion in geography can be negative in another geography. The organization needs its STP (Segmentation, Targeting, Positioning) very precisely before arriving at an emotion. The buyer persona shall be crystal clear before we set the stage for further digital marketing steps.

(brandingcompass, 2020)

Basic steps which can be followed in creating an emotional marketing campaign are as under and can be modified as per organizational strategy:

• Do the basic STP
• Identifying the right persona of the target buyer by various means of interviews, feedbacks, studies of behavioral patterns etc.
• Identify the basic Emotion that shall be the base emotion and identify the action that the emotional campaign shall be inducing in the target audience.
• The Emotion shall match with the buyer's persona.
• The emotional content shall be inspiring, engaging, inclusive, and shall be shareable easily over social media and can be tagged.
• The emotional campaign shall gel with the brand's image. It needs double work to really create an emotional content for a macho image brand.
• The colors of the content shall be appropriate.
• Even highlighting CSR activities and goods done to society when highlighted adds to the brand's positive or emotional image.
• Can use any of the below common social milestones:

o  First birthday

o  First day of school/college

o  Last day of school/ college

o  First date

o  First Marriage anniversary

o  First child's birth

• Measure the performance of the emotional digital marketing campaign
• Engage regularly with customers via various social media platforms. Take corrective actions in case of any negative feedback and acknowledge the issue rather than running from the same.

A few more examples of Emotional Digital Campaigns are: (Matson, 2020)

• P&G 'Thank You, Mom' Campaign Ad: "Strong" (Rio 2016 Olympics) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdQrwBVRzEg&feature=youtu.be
• Always #LikeAGirl Campaign
• GILLETTE - PERFECT ISN'T PRETTY - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06BZeqnUAiQ
• Gatorade | The Boy Who Learned to Fly | -  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIDUfSQ32jU
• Lysol "Protect Like A Mother" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQLj9KQyVNA

·      AFL's "I'd like to see that" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1UEy5Lv20U

In today's scenario, the audience has become focused on relationships in buying decisions. People usually buy a brand which resonates or reflects their personal values and speak their emotions. Emotions play a big role as 90% of the decisions are heavily affected by emotions. It is a glue that binds customers to their loving brands as we human beings are a slave to our emotions. (Harvey, 2018)

References

brandingcompass. (2020, Oct 18). Define Your Ideal Customer: Demographic and Psychographic Segmentation. Retrieved from brandingcompass.com: https://brandingcompass.com/ideal-customers/define-your-ideal-customer-demographic-and-psychographic-segmentation/

Drechsler, K. (2019, Jan 23). Digital Marketing in B2B – Don’t be scared of emotions. Retrieved from evernine-group.de: https://evernine-group.de/en/digital-marketing-in-b2b-dont-be-scared-of-emotions/

ETBrandEquity. (2018, Nov 6). brandequity.economictimes.indiatimes.com. Retrieved from brandequity.economictimes.indiatimes.com: https://brandequity.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/marketing/hp-lights-up-local-street-vendors-diwali-through-its-new-ad-campaign/66521845

Fushun Wang , Jiongjiong Yang , Fang Pan , Roger C. Ho and Jason H. Huang. (2019, April 24). A Model for Basic Emotions Using Observations of Behavior in Drosophila. Retrieved from https://www.frontiersin.org/articles: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00781/full#:~:text=There%20are%20four%20kinds%20of,stress%20(fear%20and%20anger).

Harvey, S. (2018, June 27). fabrikbrands.com. Retrieved from The power of emotional marketing: Once more with feeling: https://fabrikbrands.com/the-power-of-emotional-marketing/

HEINE, C. (2016, Dec 2). 7 Intriguing Digital Marketing Stats From a Week Dominated by Holiday Retail. Retrieved from www.adweek.com: https://www.adweek.com/digital/7-intriguing-digital-marketing-stats-week-dominated-holiday-retail-174927/

Hubspot. (2020, Oct 18). emotion-marketing. Retrieved from hubspot.com: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/emotion-marketing

Matson, M. (2020, Oct 19). Make Them Cry (And Buy) With Inspiring Emotional Marketing. Retrieved from referralcandy.com: https://www.referralcandy.com/blog/emotional-marketing-examples/

mriganshgupta. (2019, April 23). Emotions: The Powerful tool for Branding. Retrieved from mriganshgupta.home.blog/: https://mriganshgupta.home.blog/

Patel, N. (2020, Oct 25). Emotions-for-content-marketing. Retrieved from neilpatel.com: https://neilpatel.com/blog/emotions-for-content-marketing/

Unlimited Exposure. (2020, Oct 18). Why Is Emotion Important to your Digital Marketing – Authentic, Real, and Human Emotion. Retrieved from unlimitedexposure.com: https://unlimitedexposure.com/basic-digital-marketing/1132-why-is-emotion-important-to-your-digital-marketing-%E2%80%93-authentic,-real,-and-human-emotion.html

UTTLEY, C. (2020, October 18). 5 Ways Your Brain Influences Your Emotions. Retrieved from science.howstuffworks.com: https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/human-brain/5-ways-your-brain-influences-your-emotions.htm