The Very Important Difference Between Emotion & Emotional in Marketing

Marketing must go through a dramatic change. This is not a superlative statement to garner interest or generate hype. It is the truth and still so many brands refuse to admit how weak and complacent they have been with their marketing efforts. Are brands really keeping up with their customers and their target audience behaviors?

The Internet, mobile, digital, and social are not over blown, new regime scare topics to create a marketing civil war. They represent the future and a growing number of marketing executives are not ready for the future. “A recent Forrester report surveyed 1,200+ global business executives and … [found] while 74% of global businesses have a digital strategy, only 33% believe it’s the right strategy, and beyond that, only 21% – or less than one-fourth – believe they have the right people setting the strategy.”

One comment that really got me thinking was something Seth Godin said in a recent interview – “The Internet is the first medium invented in 100 years that wasn’t invented to make advertisers happy. The connection between running ads and making money is broken, probably forever. As soon as you take that out of the equation, everything we understand about marketing, manufacturing and, distribution–it all goes away. The new era of modern marketing is about the connection economy. It’s about trust, it’s about awareness, and it’s about the fact that attention is worth way more than it used to be. Attention doesn’t come in nice little bundles anymore.”

For me, yes the connection economy and trust are extremely important. But awareness and attention are just scratching the marketing surface. Awareness and attention often come from hitting on people’s emotions and being content with that “lead generation state.” But hitting people’s emotions is only the beginning. We actually want to create an emotional bond between the brand and the consumer/client. If we continually feed our customer with meaningful content/communication/engagement, then we might actually create an emotional bond rather than just stirring a few one-time hits of emotion.

Consider this correspondence (excerpt from an actual email going back and forth) I had with a sharp entrepreneur in my professional network I have great respect for. He said, “Lots of brands have been targeting our intentions by tricking us with emotions, (selling cars while showing us a hot babe…huh…) but the truth is that if you manage to reach emotions while actually targeting emotions (not intentions), then you win. It’s hard and most people/brands don’t manage to do that (for the past 40 years we’ve had the same lame ads about luxury and fragrances with good looking people in absurd pauses or celebrities with semi-moronic slogans..). They remain on the surface. They don’t go under the skin, and so to speak, to the heart. They tinker with emotions but they don’t grasp the fullness of it.”

I agree with his position and I responded, “With regards to emotion – do not mix this up with emotional bond. A brand should aim for getting their target audience emotionally connected to them. This has to happen over a course of time by continually playing to the audiences’ emotions. A good brand appeals to its users by tapping into their emotions … This is a one-time event. But a great brand does this continually to not just drive an emotion, but to obtain strong loyalty and an emotional bond.”

Our digital world has made our audience skeptical of advertisement. People can get real information across the Internet. And at the same time, the Internet/digital/mobile/social world presents an opportunity to continually disseminate valuable information and interact with the target audience.

So in essence what the new digital world has really created is a detriment for marketers that look for quick hits just to stir emotions. But at the same time the digital revolution creates an opportunity of great success for those that are committed to longer-term communication and engagement to build an emotional bond with a potential audience.

Short-term play with emotions = failure.

Long-term commitment to build an emotional bond = success.

Make It Happen,
Social Steve