How to leverage emotional marketing to build positive associations with your brand and overcome stigma

Emotional advertising is particularly effective in helping brands overcome stigma because it can directly address and challenge negative perceptions. By evoking strong emotions in the audience, emotional advertising can capture attention and engage with consumers in a way that traditional advertising may not. This engagement can allow brands to communicate their values and beliefs, and to humanize themselves in the eyes of their audience. By doing so, emotional advertising can help to build trust and credibility, which is crucial for overcoming any negative stigma associated with a brand or industry.

We'll explore how to leverage emotional marketing to build positive associations with your brand, with examples from brands like Coca-Cola, P&G, and Unilever, as well as metrics to measure the success of your emotional marketing campaigns.

Identify Core Values

Coca-Cola has always been known for its core value of happiness. The brand has consistently created emotional marketing campaigns that tap into the emotions associated with happiness, such as joy, love, and nostalgia. One of Coca-Cola's campaigns in India, "Small World Machines - Bringing India and Pakistan Together," encouraged consumers to connect and share a Coke with someone from the opposite side of the border. India and Pakistan, have historically had an acrimonious relationship and have had multiple military conflicts since their independence. The stigma has been reinforced over time, and yet, Coca-Cola tackled this head-on by leveraging its brand values of connection and happiness. They also leveraged their distinctive brand assets - the Coca-Cola vending machine, the red can, and the branding at the end of this commercial. Brands can create emotional connections with customers that reinforce the brand's identity and foster brand loyalty.

Types of Stigma: Public Stigma, Perceived Stigma, Structural Stigma

Understand Target Audience

And here's another recent example from India when P&G created the "Bridging the InvisibleGap" campaign to tap into the emotions of young children who need extra support in school to learn. The campaign aimed to re-enforce the need for early childhood education among underprivileged communities. This campaign has already garnered more than 7.2M views within 7 days and early indications suggest its resonating with its target audience.

Types of Stigma: Self Stigma, Perceived Stigma, Public Stigma

Tell Stories

Unilever's Dove brand has always been known for its emotional marketing campaigns that tell stories of women's beauty in all shapes, sizes, and colors. The brand's "Cost of Beauty" campaign addresses the unrealistic standards set by the beauty industry and how it impacts young women from an early age. The campaign's emotional impact resonated with its target audience and is helping differentiate the brand from competitors.

Types of Stigma: Self Stigma, Perceived Stigma

By telling stories that resonate with your target audience, you can create emotional connections that foster brand loyalty.

Here's another example from Adidas in Germany that speaks to ageism. Older consumers are perceived to be past their prime, and some move into elder facilities. That doesn't mean they are not able or capable of doing or accomplishing things in their lives today. This poignant video speaks to this issue of ageism and it generated amazing responses online.

"Thank you so much for making this! This is what advertising should be--something that touches the heart and inspires. I wish you and your team the best of luck!"

"I remember watching this back when it only had a thousand views and instantly fell in love with it. I showed my family and friends immediately and, man you could see that it touched every single one of them. It's amazing to see you now have over 11 million views and I really hope you guys continue creating such masterful and powerful videos!"

Types of Stigma: Self Stigma, Perceived Stigma, Structural Stigma, and Health Practitioner Stigma

5 Principles for Creative Development Process

By tapping into consumers' deeper values, beliefs, and emotions, brands can create more meaningful and lasting connections with their audience. However, brands should be mindful of the types of emotions they use and ensure that their emotional appeals are authentic, relevant, and credible. Hence, in the creative development process, brands should consider the following principles:

1. Identify the target audience and their core values and beliefs.
2. Determine the emotional tone that will resonate with the target audience.
3. Choose emotions that are authentic, relevant, and credible.
4. Align the emotional appeal with the brand's core values and purpose.
5. Ensure that the emotional appeal is consistent across all marketing channels and touchpoints.

Metrics

Measuring the success of emotional advertising campaigns is crucial to understanding their impact and improving future campaigns. Brands can use a variety of metrics to measure the success of their campaigns, including:

1. Brand Awareness: Tracking changes in brand awareness, recall, and recognition can provide insights into the campaign's effectiveness in increasing brand visibility. These metrics, especially recall and recognition, tie directly to your brand's distinctive assets too (see Coca-Cola example).
2. Brand Perception: Surveying consumers on their perceptions of the brand, such as brand image, personality, and reputation, can provide insights into how the campaign is changing consumers' attitudes toward the brand. It's critical to invest time/effort to ensure that the right attributes are being measured (functional and emotional) alongside metrics like brand trust, and Net Promoter Score.
3. Engagement: Measuring the level of engagement with the campaign, such as social media shares, likes, and comments, can provide insights into how the campaign is resonating with consumers and whether it is driving engagement.
4. Sales: Tracking changes in sales volume, revenue, and market share can provide insights into the campaign's impact on purchase behavior and financial performance. Since multiple factors can impact these measures, it's important to look at media mix/marketing mix modeling tools to create the correlations between marketing and sales.
5. Social Impact: Measuring the social impact of the campaign, such as changes in social norms, attitudes, and behaviors, can provide insights into the campaign's effectiveness in driving social change and promoting positive social outcomes. This is much harder to measure meaningful changes on an ongoing basis.

By using these metrics to evaluate the success of emotional advertising campaigns, brands can refine their strategies and improve their impact over time. It's important for brands to remember that emotional advertising is a long-term investment in building a strong and meaningful relationship with their audience.

Emotional marketing is a powerful tool for building positive associations with your brand. By identifying core values, understanding your target audience, telling stories, using visuals, being authentic, and using social media, you can create emotional connections with customers that foster brand loyalty.

What emotions did you feel watching these commercials? Would this move you to purchase these brands? Share in the comments below.