Emotional Marketing, does this lexicon ring a bell to you? Is your drive to choose a product sometimes merely emotional? Is it the fact that this product stirred the emotional center in your brain and marinated it with an emotional sauce that prompted you to buy it?
In fact, emotions play a role not only in our unconscious, but also shape our conscious thoughts about brands, products and services. Let me say that again, emotions actually shape our conscious thoughts and not the other way around. Sensations evoke emotions to erupt.
Interestingly, the imagery that surrounds words and their meaning (like a song, a photo, the script of the logo) is more important than the words themselves. You can see this in action-successful brands evoke valuable meaning through associated images, metaphors, myths and legends that induce a particular emotional state and sense of psychological well being. There’s no ‘single message’ that goes with a brand. Everything communicates something.
Consumer psychology is fairly a newly published science, but for hundreds and even thousands of years, business people have used the psychology of consumer emotions to promote their products. From TV ads to your supermarket’s product placement, you can see these emotional marketing cues tapping into pocketbooks every day. Can you think of one now? I bet you can.
Emotional marketing is simply the ability to communicate powerfully through the use of different techniques that evoke emotions. Developers of an emotional marketing strategy can focus on diverse issues to transfer an emotional marketing message.
Turning Wants into Needs //
The product you are marketing should stir a sense of “needing” rather than “wanting” in your target customers. There is a substantial difference between a “need” and a “want”. There is a huge difference between wanting what you want and needing what you want, and both are just emotional states that you need to be aware of when marketing your product.
The state of needing is an emotional state that causes your target customers to become attached to the specific idea or outcome that your product infers.
Use of Fear in Marketing //
Fear describes an emotional reaction to threatening imminent danger with a strong desire to escape the situation. Many marketing messages transfer an alarm to its target customers making the fear center in their brains, the amygdala, aroused, hence inducing an emotional trigger that prompt the consumer to feel a “need” rather than a “want” for your product,
Build Trust //
It takes years to build up trust, and only seconds to destroy it. Prior work has conceptualized trust as a product of two factors: an individual’s propensity to trust and an individual’s expectations about a trustee’s future behavior. An individual’s propensity to trust is one’s general willingness to rely upon others in situations where opportunism is possible. Your product should be there to increase oxytocin levels in your target customers’ brains, for research have shown that people who trust more have higher levels of oxytocin in their brains. Why some brands seem never to put their lights off? It is because of trust; customers have built a coherent relationship of trust to the brand. Use the trust you build with your customers as your emotional marketing cue. Besides trust in a brand, consumers still want value. When using consumers’ emotions in your marketing, let your potential customers know that value they receive when they buy your products. How much less does your product cost than the competition? Maybe your product costs more, but lasts longer and has more uses exactly as some of brands like baby Johnson.
Sense of Belonging //
Developing a sense of belonging make people thrive emotionally. Think about all the people who put the sticker on their cars and are proud to belong to the elite group of a particular product. Customers want to know that they are part of a “family” of others that provides them with a sense of belonging. This important emotional marketing cue lets consumers feel a sense of relation that boosts some wires in their psyche.
[ Also Read: Sell It To Me Baby ]
The approaches listed above constitute a few of the numerous emotional marketing cues that can be successfully implemented.
Why do we buy? We buy because of emotional wants, hence you will be more successful when you market and sell to the emotional wants of your prospects.
Ethic should be recurring in your mind when working on a marketing strategy. What if it is an emotional marketing strategy?
Happy Reading
