TRANSCRIPT
What’s the single most powerful tool in marketing and advertising? The one thing that will make customers make a purchase and love your brand.
This one thing is the most simple, yet overlooked lever in marketing. It’s emotion. Outside of people’s basic needs food, water, warmth, sleep – the rest of online purchases are made based on emotional impulse.
In this video, I’m going to show you step by step how to use emotional marketing to drive sales and loyalty for your brand. I’m going to give you a framework for how to figure out what emotions motivate your audience. And I’m going to tell you the top ten emotional motivators that drive sales.
You’re going to unlock how to create more compelling campaigns and learn how to build a more magnetic brand.
Research from Harvard Business Review found that emotional factors drive 95% of purchasing decisions, highlighting how critical this is for influencing consumer behavior.
Dr. Michael Platt, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania, conducted a groundbreaking brand loyalty experiment on Apple and Samsung customers.
His hypothesis was that “if you have a strong social-emotional bond with a brand, your brain will actually exhibit the same pattern of brain activity it does when something good or bad is happening to someone you love.”
In other words, it’s possible for you to feel the same depth of emotional empathy for a brand as you do for someone you care about.
In his experiment, he asked subjects how they feel about their smartphones while analyzing maps of brain activity, specifically focusing on parts of the brain involved in empathy.
What Platt found was that “Apple customers have strong emotional-social connections to the Apple community and, ultimately, to the brand. On the other hand, the brain activity of Samsung customers suggests that they choose that brand because they don’t like Apple, not because they really love Samsung. They have very little emotional-social connection to the Samsung brand.”
Because of this, Samsung’s brand is much less defensible against competition. And the numbers bear it out. Apple has a 92 percent retention rate among iPhone users, while Samsung has a 77 percent retention rate.
It’s no wonder that after Steve Jobs passed away fans of Apple showed up in the hundreds of thousands to pay their respects. Yes they were mourning the loss of a generational visionary, but perhaps, more importantly, they were commemorating a person that created a brand that they felt a deep emotional bond to.
By getting customers to feel powerful emotions like joy, nostalgia, anger, or fear — you forge a potent connection between your brand and your audience, which translates into increased sales, loyalty, and brand advocacy.
Now let’s get into the most important question:
How do you figure out what emotions drive your audience?
To do this, you first have to understand the underlying psychographic data of your audience, which includes information about your customer’s personality, values, attitude, and lifestyle.
To simplify this, ask these four core emotional questions about your audience, which are loosely organized based on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
- What do they love?
- What do they fear?
- What do they hate?
- What motivates them?
Now let’s break these down one by one:
EMOTION #1: LOVE
Love is used to tap into people’s self-esteem, self-worth and self-image. So, depending on your audience, this could do a few different things for you.
The very basic psychological process behind love is something known as attachment theory, which is the idea that people have an innate need to form close emotional bonds with others — both for survival and for well-being.
When people feel good about themselves, and their self-image, they’re much more likely to purchase products that match that positive self-image of themselves.
That’s why you’ll see marketers try to mine for data as it relates to love to include things like family, friendship, fun and freedom.
Companies use love-based messaging to essentially create an emotional attachment to their products.
One campaign you might remember is Dove’s “Real Beauty” Campaign, which focused on tackling unrealistic beauty standards and championing real beauty instead.
This campaign was so successful because it included real stories about people who struggled with self-esteem and felt knocked down for appearing different, or unaligned with unreachable beauty standards in society.
Dove’s campaign also highlighted how these individuals overcame struggles to feel confident in their own skin.
Because many people empathize with being held to unrealistic standards — Dove was able to create an audience of loyal consumers who relate to this feeling. And, more importantly, on the feelings of being loved and supported for your natural beauty and uniqueness through buying and using their products.
This was a groundbreaking approach at the time, but this is a playbook that most beauty and lifestyle brands are replicating.
Another brand that relies heavily on love as its emotional lynchpin is Tiffany & Co. Tiffany weaves romance into their advertising often to unlock feelings of love and commitment. Proposal-focused messaging like their “Will You?” campaign focus specifically on the magic of proposals and celebrating the moment two people commit to a life together.
Coca-Cola: Coke’s well-known “Share a Coke” campaign captured hearts as soon as it launched in 2013 because it featured individual names on each bottle, which tapped into the basic human desire for recognition and personal connection.
EMOTION #2: FEAR, INSECURITY, ANXIETY
Fear can stimulate a high-level of brand recognition because people have a better recall for ads that evoke fear than ads that evoke joy.
Take any deodorant brand — where would their sales be if we weren’t all a little afraid of the embarrassment of b.o.?
After 300 thousand years of human evolution, the fear reflex still outweighs the pleasure response as a motivator of action. That’s why this tactic is turned to so often in marketing.
As it relates to psychology — fear, anxiety, and insecurity are all emotions linked to the fight or flight response. This autonomic response happens when we perceive a threat, and it can make people feel more alert and create more urgency to take action.
Think scarcity tactics like “get it while supplies last.”
Using this information, marketers can make emotional appeals to show how their product improves quality of life by solving for their deep-seated fear, insecurity, or anxiety.
A great example of this is the World Wildlife Fund, which elicits fear-based emotions via campaigns that depict how climate change will adversely and irreversibly impact you and future generations lives if you don’t take action against the harmful effects of global warming.
Or, ADT Home Security Systems, whose ads often show traumatic home invasions, that create a sense of urgency to buy a security system – or else.
Or, Clearasil: This skincare brand has long identified with teens and their insecurities about having acne by showing the negative effects it has on self-esteem, followed by highlighting how their product can "visibly reduce pimple size in just 4 hours.”
Now this lever can certainly be used cynically, but for this video I don’t want to moralize these choices but rather talk about the science and psychology that drives human behavior.
EMOTION #3: ANGER
Believe it or not, turning rage into revenue happens more often than you think. Anger makes for a great motivational tool – Most often used when companies openly speak out in favor of a movement or take a clear position on a sensitive issue. Anger is an emotion that is strongly associated with a desire for change.
Anger is a complex emotion that is influenced by factors like social norms, cultural values, and our own personal experiences.
However, the main psychological reason why it works so well in marketing is because people ultimately feel a strong desire for fairness, justice, and equality.
This lever is often used in political campaigns, where anger is meticulously cultivated to spark action. When people feel that something is unjust, they’ll experience anger, which directly motivates them to take action.
One survey found that subjects who read about an enraged politician from their own party were more likely to report feeling mad themselves than people who didn’t. Those same angry supporters also reported that they were more likely to attend rallies to vote on Election Day.
Another example of this is Nike’s controversial 2018 campaign that urged customers to “believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything." This campaign sparked anger and frustration because it featured NFL quarterback, Colin Kaepernick, who protested against racial injustice and police brutality during the national anthem.
According to Forbes, while some people disagreed with this message, for the people who did agree — the campaign led to a 31% increase in online sales and an upsurge in the company’s stock price. By tapping into the anger around racial injustice, Nike was able to create a potent emotional connection with its audience.
Ben & Jerry’s is another great example, their ads often feature anger around social issues like their 2024 campaign “Make Some Motherchunkin’ Change!”, which calls out hot-topic issues like climate change, racial justice, and gay pride at a time when brands have pulled back on purpose-driven marketing for fear of conservative backlash. By tapping into the feeling of facing big challenges together — Ben & Jerry’s creates a loyal following of customers who are like-minded and inspired.
This approach doesn’t come without risk. It can be very polarizing and can alienate potential customers.
EMOTION #4: AMBITION
As human beings, we all have the innate desire for self-improvement and self-actualization. That’s why ambition-based messaging can work so well.
The focus here is primarily on your customers’ dreams and aspirations.
Because people are naturally driven to want to succeed and accomplish goals — campaigns that evoke a strong feeling of motivation while highlighting the positive consequences of taking action often work the best.
Companies who do this really well include:
Gymshark: a popular fitness brand that is known for showcasing high octane, ultra-fit influencers to spread their mission. Gymshark influencers not only create a wealth of motivational, self-improvement content but they also specialize in interactive community-based marketing campaigns, like the “66 Days, Change Your Life Challenge”, where participants posted before and after photos of themselves completing the challenge. This feel-good campaign debuted in 2018 and has led to an ongoing campaign since.
Red Bull is another great example. This well-known energy drink brand is recognized for featuring images of extreme sports followed by testimonials from satisfied customers about how Red Bull drinks helped maximize focus and performance. One jaw-dropping campaign in particular featured Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner. Together, they set out to achieve the fastest and highest freefall jump in history — from a stratospheric height of 128,100 feet. Millions of people watched via live stream while Baumgartner leaped into the stratosphere, breaking not only records but also the sound barrier itself. This campaign wasn’t just about shattering records, but it connected the audience to the emotions of finding unlimited potential within yourself and others.
THE 10 EMOTIONAL MOTIVATORS THAT DRIVE SALES
Now that we’ve gone over the core four emotional drivers, what, what are the most powerful emotional motivators you can use for your brand?
Well as it turns out, researchers at Harvard analyzed just this, and they found 300 universal emotional motivators, and using big data analysis, identified the top 10 “high impact” motivators:
- Stand out from the crowd
- Have confidence in the future
- Enjoy a sense of well-being
- Feel a sense of freedom
- Feel a sense of thrill
- Feel a sense of belonging
- Protect the environment
- Be the person I want to be
- Feel secure
- Succeed in life
As you may have noticed, the top motivators are higher up on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. They are heavily skewed towards, esteem, belonging, love, and self actualization. So while this is not a one-size-fits-all prescription, as you’re exploring creating emotion driven marketing and deeper emotional connection within your brand, for most companies, looking for ways to help people reach the higher elements on Maslow’s chart will likely create the best results.
I hope by giving you a greater understanding of the psychological framework that drives action, you’ll start to conduct your own research on the emotions that motivate your customers.
If you’re looking to forge a deeper connection with your customers or build tailored emotional marketing, reach out to us at pthreemedia.com.
