The Joy of Emotional Marketing

In early year 2018, Coca-Cola launched a very unique campaign in Brazil - “This Coke is a Fanta”, by designing Coke cans with Fanta inside them. Apparently, “this Coke’s a Fanta” is a common insult to describe gay men in the South American country. The TVC states - “A single can turned a homophobic expression into a symbol of Pride.” The TVC got quite popular during the carnival of Brazil. As a result of the movement, the very expression that used to cause discomfort to the homosexuals all over Brazil, became a symbol of pride. 

This promotion is a unique and powerful example of ‘Emotional marketing’ - the concept Coca-Cola always aced at, like a true brand leader. Though emotional marketing has been in use since decades, the term drew more attention of marketers when Marc Gobé in 2001 talked about it in his book “Emotional Branding: The New Paradigm for Connecting Brands to People”. Most of the top brands across the globe now focuses on emotional marketing. The questions, therefore, in front of us are, what exactly is emotional marketing? How does it impact a brand? And, why is it gaining so much significance in recent times? 

“Emotional marketing” can be defined as “influencing the attitude and buying behavior of customers towards a brand by establishing an emotional connection between the customers and the brand”. In order to truly understand the concept of emotional marketing, we need to dive a bit into the psychology behind consumer behavior and understand what motivates a consumer to choose one product over another. Though a big area of research in itself, “the psychology behind consumer behavior” is based on two fundamental drivers of human behavior – Emotion, and Logic. Without getting into the complex science of how our brain works, these two terms can be defined in simple terms as follows:

Emotions: Emotions are the mental responses (to the stimuli) that occur at the sub-conscious level of the mind and cause biochemical reactions in the body. Emotions are physical, and can be measured by brain activity, blood flow, facial micro-expressions, and body language. Though there is no concrete theory on types of emotions, the best known one is from the American psychologist Paul Eckman, who identified 6 basic emotions human beings are born with – “Happiness, Sadness, Anger, Fear, Surprise, and Disgust”. He suggested that all the emotions of humans are blend of these basic emotions. Another theory suggests that human emotions occur in hierarchy – like primary emotions such as ‘love’, can be broken down into secondary emotions such as affection and longing. Affection can be further broken down into tertiary emotions such as liking, caring, compassion, and tenderness.

Emotions also cause the release of neurotransmitters essential for memory consolidation, which is why emotional memories are generally much strong and long-lasting. 

Logics: Logics are the mental responses (to the stimuli) that occur at the conscious level of the mind and involve deductive, inductive and abductive reasoning based on memories, observation and imagination. 

At this point, it is also important to understand the difference between Emotion and Feeling, and between Logic and Thinking, the terms we often tend to use interchangeably despite they having different meanings.

Feelings: Feelings are originated by our brain by perceiving and assigning meaning to the emotion. Feelings are subjective, being influenced by personal experience, beliefs, and memories; and cannot be measured precisely.

Thinking: Thinking is the process of mental evaluation of stimuli based on logic. Though many theories contrast thinking against emotion, it actually shall be compared with “Feeling”. 

Emotions and Logics: Driving factor of Consumer behavior

Emotions and Logics are the two fundamental elements that drive human behavior. In the context of marketing, we can say that “Emotions” and “Logics” are the two fundamental factors that drive consumer’s attitude and behavior towards a brand. We can, therefore, state that, “Marketing is all about influencing the ‘Emotions’ and ‘Logics’ of consumers”.

In order to decide on the marketing approach, it is important to understand the relative importance of Emotions and Logics in driving consumer’s attitude and behaviour. 

• Logic is the language of the conscious mind, while emotion is the language of the unconscious mind. Conscious mind is responsible for short-term memories, while Subconscious mind stores long-term memories. Therefore, ‘emotion’ is more important for long-term relationship between the consumer and the brand. Impact of ‘logic’ is comparatively short-lived.
• In most of the situations, consumers react based on the combined effect of emotion and logic. Either, consumers decide based on the emotion and then justify their action with logic, or decide based on the logic and then justify the action by emotion. However, ‘Emotion’ always wins over ‘logic’ when pitted against each other to affect the consumer behavior. e.g. if the two brands offer same value (logical+emotional) to a consumer, the consumer tends to purchase the brand s/he feels more emotionally connected with.
• The relative importance of emotion and logic is also dependent on the category of the product. For Business products, logic takes the lead in driving Consumer behavior. However, in order to influence the Consumer’s attitude to ensure long-term relationship, logic must be combined with emotional connect (e.g. through Customer relationship) in order to have brand preference at sub-conscious level. For Consumer – Convenience, Specialty and Unsought products, emotion takes the lead in driving Consumer’s attitude and behavior. However, in case of Consumer - Shopping products, the logic and emotion play equally important role in deciding consumer attitude and behavior.

The Joy of Emotional Marketing:

Emotional marketing is all about connecting with the emotions of consumers in order to influence their attitude and behavior. The reason it is gaining so much significance in recent times, is because of its numerous benefits in the world of intense competition. Some of its key benefits are mentioned as below:

1. Brand-differentiation in the times of no product-differentiation:

Logic plays more role in differentiating the “product”, while emotion does in differentiating the “brand”. With the product differentiation narrowing down among competitions (primarily due to globalization leading to easy accessibility to the new technologies and product compositions), more and more brands have started focusing on emotional aspect of marketing to differentiate itself from others. Packaging of FMCG products in different sizes, shapes and colors, emotional advertisements, and design & ambiance of buying locations, are few of such examples of emotional marketing. Ever wondered, why all toothpaste brands keep changing the packaging of their product? Or, why Coca-Cola focuses so much on creating emotional advertisements? Or, why Starbucks focuses on creating the experience around the coffee, rather than only serving it?

2. Influencing buying behavior:

As we discussed before, in most of the situations, the consumers take the buying-decision based on emotion. Even in the situations where they go by the logic, they use emotion in the last leg of the decision making (when they have to choose among the close choices). Factors such as behavior of salesperson, high-impact emotional advertisements, promises of the brand, are few of the examples in this regard. Ever encountered a situation like you enter a shop and feel mesmerized by the fragrance of the ambiance? You often end up buying some products from that shop. Or, like you got inspired by the advertisement of a product and now eager to buy it? 

3. Building stronger brand image:

A brand Image is the perception of the brand in the mind of the customer - Perception, in terms of, the brand’s real and imaginary qualities and deficiencies, both qualitative and quantitative. It is built over the time period through interactions and experience with the brand at various exposure points. Having a strong brand image directly impacts the consumer buying behavior, and hence top brands focuses a lot on building a strong and positive image of the brand. It’s easier to create the brand image by arousing the emotions of the customer, firstly because emotion engages audience easier and more than the logic does and, secondly because emotion sustains longer than the logic. When Reebok brings MS Dhoni to endorse its products in India, it easily creates the brand image of fitness and durability. Or, a when a life insurance company uses a heart-touching story of a father and his child to promote its brand, the effect on the consumer’s mind is stronger and more sustainable. 

4. Creating Brand Loyalty:

Emotions have a large impact on brand loyalty. That’s because of its influence on sub-conscious mind which stores long-term memory. According to a study by Temkin group, a leading customer experience research firm, when individuals have a positive emotional association with a specific brand, they are 8.4 times more likely to trust the company, 7.1 times more likely to purchase more and 6.6 times more likely to forgive a company’s mistake. Consider the example of Nestle getting into the trouble of allegedly high MSG and lead-content in its product - Maggi, in India in 2015. Because of the kind of emotional bond, the brand Maggi had developed with customers over the years, the situation hardly impacted the trust of the customers. Ever felt amazed about how ‘Apple’ developed such a massive base of obsessively loyal customer? It’s the brand’s passion for technology and the customer experience that translated into the ecosystem of its products and people. Can you imagine the impact of Coca-Cola’s “This Coke is a Fanta” marketing campaign (which we discussed in beginning of the article) in building loyalty of Gay community in Brazil? They may not ever switch to any other brand.

Mapping of top Global and Indian brands:

Upon mapping top global and India’s brands against the level of ‘Logic’ and ‘Emotion’ used in their marketing approach, we can substantiate how brands of different categories of products adopt different mix of emotion and logic in their marketing. Most of the B2B brands are in the left quadrant, while B2C brands are towards the right. The luxury and FMCG brands compete heavily to capture the emotional space of consumer’s mind. With more number of brands now focusing on emotional marketing to drive the consumer behavior, the right quadrant is observed densely populated. 

"Emotional marketing" will continue to gain importance in the time to come. As the brands get more competitive to grab higher mind-share of the consumers, they will focus more on building deeper emotional connect with the consumers by providing them unique, strong experiences, while engaging their logical mind through core products.

https://www.bandt.com.au/campaigns/coke-turns-fanta-new-campaign-fight-homophobia

https://campaignsoftheworld.com/digital/coke-fanta-coca-cola-busts-discriminatory-expression/

https://www.thebestbrainpossible.com/whats-the-difference-between-feelings-and-emotions/

https://marketing-insider.eu/4-types-of-consumer-products/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2018/02/26/lets-get-emotional-the-future-of-online-marketing/#67b436744d0c