We hear more and more often about emotional marketing, but what exactly is it?
The word “emotional” itself makes it clear that this way of doing marketing leverages people’s emotions, with the aim of making them feel certain feelings and needs, aimed at carrying out a specific action. Emotions have been shown to play an extremely relevant role in the path leading to the purchase of a good or service. In fact, it is estimated that 95% of the successful operations have seen a fundamental role played by the feelings experienced by the user and not by the real need.
In fact, the emotional system is not controllable, but it is something that leads to an immediate and quick reaction compared to a trigger. On the contrary, rationality is that part of the brain that tends to carefully analyze everything, control reactions, and elaborate decisions in compliance with the timing.
Emotional marketing focuses precisely on this factor, i.e. triggering the right emotions to start the decision-making process linked to the emotional sphere and able to bring the user to make a purchase, fill in a contact form leaving their data or simply starting to follow a social account.
Strategic Experiential Modules: here’s how to convey emotions to the user
When it comes to emotional marketing, different situations and experiences are sold that could be experienced by the user within the mental journey oriented towards the purchase of a good and service. These can be summarized in 5 categories, defined as Strategic Experiential Modules:
- Sense Experience, those in which the 5 senses of the person are pulled in the middle, involve sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste with contents able to tickle each element. Like? Through images, detailed descriptions and inserted within a storytelling that allows the user a complete identification and the consequent desire to live a certain situation too
- Feel Experience, in this case feelings really experienced by the person are moved, emotional situations and conditions capable of triggering a direct connection to a specific product
- Think Experience, when the creative and cognitive sphere is triggered. Here the result will be more long-term and will lead the user to re-enter the circle of loyal customers
- Act Experience, in which both the physical and mental spheres are involved, leading to different actions than the usual ones. Persuasive and motivational messages, used to modify the user’s lifestyle
- Relate Experience, based on relationships between individuals, on getting in touch with others, creating a sense of belonging to a group and affirming one’s social status.
What are the emotions that provoke a greater emotional trigger?
Scholars have highlighted how there are some emotions that are more capable of involving users. Here are what they are:
- Fear, considered absolutely the most powerful emotion. In a marketing strategy it can be used both to offer the customer the solution to a problem, but also by leveraging any timing or deadlines, making haste in the conclusion of a negotiation or a purchase
- A sense of guilt, the one often used to sell items and services that can turn things around in an apparently negative situation. The typical example is that of products and consultations to get back in shape, where you take advantage of the guilt that arose, for example, after eating too many sweets or for having binged during the holidays in order to offer phantom slimming products and diets
- Trust that usually implemented by energy and service distributors, telephone or video production companies in Dubai and TV subscriptions, which aim to offer advantageous conditions in the long term to enthrall a circle of eligible customers
- Necessity of belonging, where, following the proposal of an article, dedicated forums, communities and groups are created in which to involve the user, making him feel an integral and important part for the manufacturing company
- Immediate gratification, a typical example would be Amazon Prime. In this context, it is possible to leverage the possibility of having what you want, with a simple click, in a few hours and directly at home
- Value, i.e. triggering in the user the feeling that a certain good or service have a certain value, important and exclusive
- Desire to appear and competition, typical example of communication by famous testimonials and influencers who aim to entice the user to own something that they have or wear
- Desire to be a leader, arousing the desire to get something first compared to others to whom then show the conquest made
- Lack of time, where the creators of a given campaign try to leverage the fact that the frenzy of today’s life leads to neglect themselves, their family and friends.
Emotional marketing: from theory to practice. Here are the useful tools
In other words, it seems simple to understand the mechanism by which emotional marketing works, but not as much the path to implement it within a strategy. To do this it is in fact necessary to involve the user, whether through an article, a video, a post published on a social network, an image, positive feelings must be triggered. With the content it is essential to be able to create a bond with those who view it, develop unconscious desires, and lead them to believe they have the need to have that sponsored product or service.
The first tool to obtain this result is to invest in effective storytelling, capable of giving life to persuasive stories, capable of bringing the user to identify himself, becoming the protagonist himself, and therefore making him feel emotions so strong to the point of bringing him to take a certain action. Once this emotional reaction is aroused, the solution will be proposed, that is, the product or service offered by the brand, which will represent the lifeline for the user, the one he needs immediately, the one that will inevitably be linked to a specific condition.
Therefore it is essential to choose the right language to use, which must be able to involve the five senses, speak to people and their hearts, not to soulless search engines. The need is to create a compelling story, capable of arousing real feelings in those who view the content, bringing it to identify with it and becoming its protagonist in the first person.
Finally, the last aspect not to be underestimated, is that related to the choice of images to associate, as well as any background music when it comes to videos. These contents must trigger an immediate reaction, as it is estimated that in less than 5 seconds a person’s mind develops a positive or negative judgment. In the first case he will continue in vision or reading, letting himself be transported in a parallel dimension, in the second instead he will immediately remove from his mind what he has seen and read.
Conclusions on emotional marketing
To summarize what is defined in this article in which we have deepened the Emotional Marketing topic, we can define the great power of this communication tool. The undisputed importance of feelings and the ability to arouse them in the user as a key weapon capable of transforming a simple campaign into a successful one.
In fact, when it is possible to emotionally involve the user, leveraging specific emotions and with the right communication means, both from a textual and visual point of view, there will be a much higher success rate than that obtained through the traditional marketing. Therefore, in the era where social networks, blogs, visual communication and the web enter people’s lives, studying campaigns focused on people’s emotions will be the real key to success, capable in a few minutes of conquering and realizing the sale of products and services.
