Stealing Consumer's Heart (and Dollars!) with Emotional Marketing

Source: Marketoonist

Today, consumers are becoming more and more sophisticated with research. Googling things they don't know is just a few clicks away. In a world where we are constantly flooded with information, companies need to find a way to make their brands stand out. This is where emotion plays an important role in getting the consumer's attention and purchase decision.

There are many reasons why involving emotions in campaigns will help brands to thrive. To start with, studies show that instead of relying on rational thinking, people still considerably involve emotions in their decision-making process. Studies based on 1,400 successful advertising campaigns show that purely emotional ads gained twice profitability rate (31% vs 16%) compared to ads that relied primarily on rational content. This proves that ads that successfully built deep connections with audience are able to lead consumers into buying.

Moreover, emotionally charged events are found to significantly affect people towards having longer-lasting memory of those moments. That being said, brands that leave strong emotional impact may leverage having the content ingrained into their audience's memory. Finally, emotions inspire people to act. Happiness mostly draws people to share, sadness leads to giving, fear prompts people to be loyal, and anger leads to virality. Knowing the right emotion to cite in your campaigns will help brands to 'manipulate' activities that can help them in achieving marketing goals.

One successful example of emotional marketing came from John Lewis, a UK-based premium department store brand. Their meaningful adverts are well-known to involve sentimental approach and have auspiciously sparked social media traction every year. In fact, their adverts became somewhat an institution to the UK market and its annual ad release is perceived as a mark to the beginning of Christmas festive season.

This one below is one of of my favourite ads and I strongly encourage you to watch it:

Did you enjoy it as much as I did?

According to Unmetric, this 2013 ad you've seen above successfully earned 5 million views on Youtube just after its first-week release. What's more, their Twitter account recorded massive engagement with 7,000 retweets, 4,500 favourites, and over 2,000 replies. The hashtag #BearandHare gained 12,000 mentions and over 11,000 Twitter followers were added. If you assume that this was all just for awareness, well I assure you that it was not, since this £7 million advert evidently generated £101.45 million revenue, in only the first week after their ad release.

John Lewis' Christmas adverts set prime examples of how powerful emotional marketing is. They were able to impressively generate massive engagement and huge revenue, despite having little mention of their product's strengths through their ads. Instead, they took advantage of constructing emotional message that not only built deep connections with their audience but also amplified needs of sharing - and most importantly, hinted them to buying.

Questions to ponder

Does emotional marketing sway us from making logical purchase decisions, or does it improve our justification instead?

Before you comment, have one last go at this powerful ad.

Okay, okay, that's enough tears for the day. 😭

Updated 20/09: Shortened the post.