How Businesses Use Customer’s Emotions for Marketing

As humans, we all make some decisions from our hearts. We put together our thoughts and feelings on the table to make that decision. The same thing happens when you are purchasing a product. Studies have shown that people rely more on emotions than information to make brand decisions.

“The most startling truth is we don’t even think our way to logical solutions. We feel our way to reason.” - Douglas Van Praet, author of Unconscious Branding: How Neuroscience Can Empower (and Inspire) Marketing.

According to him, emotions do not constrain your decision to buy. It actually lays down the foundation on which decisions are made.

Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, Advertisements were more bitter, humorous, or sarcastic. This kind of advertisement became a trend, and soon people got sick of this trend. People didn’t find them funny anymore. Ads with emotional content popped as an opposite of this trend, and customers reacted to that.

According to the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology, human emotion is based on 4 basic emotions: happy, sad, angry/ disgusted, and afraid/ surprised.

Based on these emotions, a brand drives connection and awareness with its customers.

Happy:

Positivity can increase the number of sharing and engagement for an advertisement. Brands want to align their ad content with smiling, happy, and laughing customers. It is a fact that positive information is shared and engaged more than negative information.

A real-life example of this is when Coca-Cola changes its tagline from “Open Happiness” to “Taste the Feeling.” This way, Coca-Cola was still promoting happy images of people connecting and engaging one another.

Sad:

In recent years, brands have started to embrace the importance of moving or emotional content. Now, more brands are focusing?

on creating ads that are motivational or moving. The focus of these ads is to trigger the emotional feeling that will inspire you to buy their products.

In 2014, P&G re-used its theme of recognizing mothers and their support with a line in the ad, “For teaching us that falling only makes us stronger.” They promoted the campaign with the tag #BecauseOfMom.

Metlife Hong Kong took it a step further by producing an ad featuring a girl explaining all the good things about her father. The ad starts to break down when she starts to explain how her father lies to her.

Afraid/ Surprised:

Survival is what every living being has been doing since the beginning of their life. Fear is the natural instinct that boosts our survival instinct. It makes us react accordingly to increase our chances of survival.

Use for fear can be seen in some ads to deliver messages to improve society. WWF (World Wildlife Fund) is known for its fear-inducing ads. But using fear for marketing can be a risky move. In 2015, Nationwide released a super-bowl advertisement addressing child safety and preventable injuries. But audiences took it as depressing and insensitive. After a few months of this, the CMO of Nationwide resigned from his position.

Angry/ Disgusted:

Anger is usually taken as a negative emotion. That’s why people ignore it to use for an advertisement to avoid negative associations. But, anger can influence people to take a stand for something good. It can wake people up and make them take some action.

Always’ Like A Girl campaign grabbed people’s attention by using the famous insult “Like a Girl.” This ad won an Emmy, a Cannes Grand Prix award, and the Grand Clio award.

Now you know how emotions play their role in marketing and selling a product or a service. It is up to you how you utilize these emotions without associating any negative engagement.