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 emotionthe right feelingand 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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