EMOTION IN ADVERTISING
It’s no
secret that emotions play an important role in successful advertising campaigns.
We all know, for example, that sugary snacks and soft drinks
are bad for you, but ads for Mountain Dew, Sprite and Coca-Cola don’t talk
about fat, calories and diabetes. Rather the focus is on youth, strength and
good times. Chocolate is associated with luxury, pleasure and sensuality. And
other positive emotions are used to sell everything from laundry soaps to
shampoos, butter, watches oil and life insurance
Studies
show that emotionally charged events create powerful memories in people’s minds. In turn, these
memories motivate us into taking
action. Strong emotions in advertising may drive us to make an
expensive purchase or donate money for a cause.
Not
surprisingly, the goal of marketers everywhere is to tap into the emotions of
consumers in
order to make sales!
The
Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) analyzed 1400 case studies of the
most successful and effective advertising campaigns over the last three
decades.
Their
analysis compared campaigns that relied most on emotional appeal versus those
which used rational persuasion and information.
Advertising campaigns with purely emotional content performed about
twice as well as those with only rational content.
The reason for this is because our brain can very easily
process emotions and even more important: emotions are remembered for longer
periods than facts.
Unfortunately, it’s not that easy to set up an
effective, emotional advertising campaign.
The authors of the study argued that while it’s
relatively simple to base a campaign on a fact, it’s far more difficult to
grasp the right emotion — the right
feeling — and translate this correctly in communications.
So where do you start?
Emotions should always be hard-wired into the fabric of
your brand. More than anything, this requires a good understanding of consumer
motivation.
Do your customers purchase your products based on facts or based on
a certain feeling or emotion?The authors of the study mention Nike as a brand
that communicates very effectively through the use of emotions. Nike has been
tremendously successful in the sports category, largely due to the fact that it
understands the emotional drivers in the category very well. They then build on
these emotional drivers with communications and sponsorships that are relevant.
Now, you might think that emotional marketing only
applies to the Nike’s, Unilever’s and John Lewis’ of this world, but that’s
certainly not the case. The approach to emotional marketing is just different
for a large brand than it is for a smaller brand.A large brand might zoom in on
an emotion that many people feel. And they have the budget to then claim this
emotion through advertising. But the smaller brand is in a different position
as they don’t have that type of budget. So the smaller brands need to be smarter.
As advertising magazine AdAge puts it: smaller brands need to ‘prioritize until it
hurts’ and uncover opportunity costs that make the most sense for their
business. While prioritization is important for any business, it’s critical to
the survival for companies with lesser budgets where there’s less room for
error and much less wiggle room.
So for all brands, small and large, capturing emotions
is the gateway to effective advertising. And effective advertising gets
results.
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