Sweet Emotion: The Pull of Emotional Marketing 

What do you think of when you read the words “Sweet Emotion?” 

Maybe it’s hearing that famous song while on a car ride with someone you love. Just seeing it in print floods your head with those memories, taking you back to a simpler, better time. 

Or, perhaps you find the song annoying and overplayed, so you make fun of it whenever it comes on the radio. 

Regardless of how it makes you feel, it makes you feel. It made you take action. (Or maybe you’ve never heard the song and this title wasn’t right for you, etc.) 

I gave this blog that title to provoke an emotional response.

While this was a bit scattershot, there are ways to make your customers feel how you want them to feel. In turn, that can make them more likely to turn to your company. 

How to Make People Feel for How You Want Them to Act 

“You never want your potential customers to feel afraid.” 

Have you heard that before? 

Even if you’ve never heard it expressed in so many words, you probably recognize the sentiment. If your customers associate your brand with fear, concern, or other forms of negativity, they’re less likely to use your business. 

However, it’s not true. 

We’re not saying that your entire online marketing should be all “gloom and doom,” of course. But, it’s been proven that “eliciting fear allows your brand to be seen as the one good thing in a dark world, meaning your customers will lean on you more when things take a turn for the worse.” 

It may be unpleasant to think about, but we’ve all seen examples of that during the pandemic. You’ve seen it in the world of politics and even forms of entertainment. If you can show people that, hey, there are terrible things going on, and the only way anything can get better is to use your product or service, they’ll come to rely upon you. 

Now, obviously, that’s not going to work for every company. Someone who sells tires is more likely to do well with that than someone who sells baked goods. However, it’s one unlikely (but proven) way to use emotion to improve your marketing. 

Charity in Sadness

Not to be all “gloom and doom” ourselves, but the two kinds of marketing aren’t just “negativity” and “happiness.” 

How many times have you seen the commercial (or heard someone talk about the commercial) where you’d see images of sad dogs while someone said: “you could help them?” 

My mother immediately turns off the screen when it comes on (she might not be the target audience). 

But, that ad (and others like it) have run for long periods of time for a simple reason: it works. People feel sad when they see the unhappy pets and thus, they want to give money. By giving the money to charity, they don’t feel sad anymore. 

When you make someone feel their sadness, they don’t “like” it. They don’t want to feel that way. 

So, they take action. 

In this case, they take action by giving money (or, in the case of my mother, turning the channel.) But, you don’t need everyone to give money, just as many people as possible. Again, this isn’t to say that your hardware store should move entirely to “sad pet montage” marketing. But, the key takeaway here is that you want to use emotion to get your customers to take action. 

The Response to Emotion: Action 

When people are sad, they want to give. 

Consequently, when people are happy, they want to share. When something makes someone feel good, they want to share it with others. This is the marketing that most of us are familiar with. 

Anger makes folks stubborn, it makes them “dig in their heels.” You can probably think of many examples of this off of the top of your head. 

Identifying the emotion that you want your customers to feel through your marketing can be a powerful step. While this is an early step, it’s rarely the first step. 

You need to know who your base of potential customers is. Then, you need to know what the right emotional marketing is for them to make them respond how you want. 

That’s our specialty. We can help with all of that and more. For a consultation: (888) 477-9540.