Emotional marketing – What is emotional marketing?

Definition of emotional marketing

Emotional marketing is a type of marketing that uses customers’ emotions to create a bond between them and the brand or company. Emotional marketing tries to mobilize people through their feelings or sensations, so that their attitudes and actions are favorable towards a product, service or brand.  

This type of marketing arises because after a purchase decision, there are always reasons based on emotion.

Benefits of emotional marketing

The main benefits that a company obtains from carrying out emotional marketing campaigns are:

• Differentiation from the competition.  It allows you to differentiate both products and services from each other, as well as the brand from its competitors. In a market as competitive as the current one, emotional marketing can mark that differentiating line between companies.

• Brand loyalty.  The bond created between the customer and the brand goes beyond the commercial relationship, thus increasing brand loyalty.

• Get new clients.  Emotional marketing gets new customers due to its sentimental nature, which empathizes with customers. In addition, loyal customers recommend the brand to those around them, which provides new consumers.

• Increases reputation.  Associating the brand or products with positive emotions, such as joy, optimism or solidarity, improves its reputation.

• They last over time.  Emotional marketing campaigns are more remembered over time because they appeal to a feeling or emotion that can be revived even many years later (the ads that we remember from our childhood are the ones that are really linked to feelings).

Examples of emotional marketing

We can see some examples of the application of emotional marketing in the following cases:

Coca Cola, freedom, friendship and happiness

Coca Cola worked for many years on an emotional marketing campaign where it related its brand to feelings of friendship and happiness, and to the concept of freedom. This campaign ensured that, just by seeing the Coca Cola logo, many customers associated these feelings with the brand.  

Nike, Just do it

Nike is one of the companies that is most committed to emotional marketing. With its long-running Just do it campaign, it evokes people’s feeling of self-improvement. Nothing can stop you from doing what you want, so do it.

Other examples of emotional marketing

The DGT’s awareness campaigns use emotional marketing, but emphasizing feelings such as fear or sadness. These campaigns usually have a high awareness rate, they remain engraved in the viewers’ memories.

Advertising that appeals to negative feelings, such as grief, a sense of injustice or even guilt, is also used by NGOs in their awareness campaigns about the humanitarian problems they address. Although sometimes, these organizations choose to focus on the feeling of improvement, emphasizing how much we can achieve by being supportive and working together; Surely this sounds familiar to you from organ donation campaigns.