How ads and influencers can associate brand and emotions

Published on September 08, 2020  - Updated on November 02, 2021

Emotional marketing has to be used during the communication process to associate your brand with specific (mainly positive) emotions…

How to use emotions to reduce the churn rate?

Several tools exist for doing emotional marketing and reducing its churn rate.

As said before in previous articles, emotions are considered as one of the new key factors in customer satisfaction. But before managing the customers, you need to convince them to buy and experiment with your product or service. Advertising is done for that. Successful advertising is emotionally loaded. Did you know that on 10 reasons to buy, 8 are emotional?

Ad campaigns and emotions

Emotional marketing can therefore be used at the branding and communication level and takes an increasingly important role in developing a brand image. This is not new but it has tended to develop in recent years. We have already experienced a situation in which a product where a service gave us a strong emotion, which pushed us to buy it, emotional marketing aims to reinforce this creation of emotion.

All human beings are guided by the 6 primary emotions as said before which are: fear, joy, anger, sadness, calm, and disgust. The goal of marketers is to use these emotions to guide the consumer’s buying process, but how?

The most obvious is probably the video. Indeed, thanks to the combination of sound and images presented, it is easier to immerse the consumer in what we want to convey to him. This is a great way to captivate your audience and make them feel the desired emotion depending on the campaign to be carried out. Depending on the needs, we can make a video campaign to choose the consumer or on the contrary make him happy. Below is an example of a campaign that generates fear as well as one that generates Happiness:

Fear:

Have a look at the following ad. The purpose of this campaign being to shock so that the target audience understands the importance of the highway code, the emotion targeted by Road Safety is fear.

How to trigger fear:

Advertising by the Road Safety Authority in France (in French)

Happiness:

Coca-cola Advertising (2010): How to trigger happiness?

This Coca-Cola campaign, for example, has instead chosen to appeal to the joy and happiness of sharing a moment with loved ones around one of their drink distributed for free in this college with this modified dispenser, or by offering flowers, etc.

Another tool that is also very widespread and very effective to enter the memory of consumers is the photo. Although still and without sound, an image accompanied by text can provoke strong emotions, whether positive or negative. Find below an example of a photo campaign that generates anger and sadness.

Anger, sadness, and disgust :

This photo taken by WWF with the aim of raising public awareness of the harmful effect of pollution, the aim being to anger consumers against pollution by making them feel sad about the situation.

Take benefit from the emotional feedbacks of influencers

Note that the ad campaigns should always be in line with the real experience. Because beyond Ad campaigns, more and more the real experience is what matters for customers.

To demonstrate and put forward the real product experience, different tools exist. One of the ways that have greatly developed in recent years: partnerships with influencers (or specialists in your fields… that should have both aura and
charism).

Asking influencers to share their experience is a great way to let the final customer dream, to create positive emotions around the brand in the consumer’s mind.

You may naturally take benefit from the large network of those influencers. Indeed, among the big number of fans that are following the influencers, most will tend to like what he/she likes, to imitate him/her.

It will therefore be easier to provoke emotions in consumers. In addition, there are now micro-influencers on social networks which makes it possible to limit the costs of these campaigns and to reach consumers at a reduced price.

Photo by Mateus Campos Felipe

The Word-of-mouth impact: Free the feedbacks!

But beyond influencer marketing, is your average customer not also your best influencer?

Did you know that every emotion is the reflection of a deep need of the customers? And, by chance, for human beings, happiness is triggering the need to share and build social links. So the real question is: how to enforce your customer to share their experience with others?

Is the experience you propose so good that the customers HAVE NO CHOICE, they are so contempt that they have to share it?

If influencers have a role to play in emotional marketing, word-of-mouth is also a safe bet. Indeed, customer reviews or recommendations from friends about a
brand or product carries even more weight than that of an influencer whose
objectivity we could question.

This is particularly the case with influencers who do many sponsored partnerships with brands, we can easily ask the question of the impact of the partnership on the opinion that the influencer gives us.

In contrast, customer reviews and friend recommendations may seem often more objective, all the more now, when the actual purchase has been verified. You may take benefit from the high visibility of the big volume of feedbacks.

Thousands of customer reviews are posted on the internet every day and each one of them reveals an emotion, whether it is negative or positive. These emotions conveyed through these comments will surely tip the scales in the right way, or the wrong way, when a consumer has to choose whether or not to trust the brand when buying the product. That is called the emotional
inertia of the customer experience.

We can take the simple example of a restaurant, today it is very rare that we go to eat in an establishment without having first read the opinions on it.

If you are looking for a pizzeria and you find one rated 5 stars and one rated 2 stars, there is little chance that you will choose the one with 2 stars…

Feedbacks are now very important in the restaurant or hotel choice.

The new circle of emotions: from brand ads to product experience, from product
experience to feedback (influencers), from feedback to product experience
(average customer): the common link will always be the emotion.

This is why it is essential to encourage customers to share their experience as well as their emotions through comments. This is a very effective way to attract new consumers because it is a transmission of emotion from your current customers to your potential new customers.

Marketers: Be convinced that Emotions and Sales are deeply linked in the long run! From brand ads to product experience, from product experience to feedback, from feedbacks to product experience: the common link of this virtuous circle that is generating (customer acquisition) or consolidating (customer loyalty) sales and business is the emotion that is experienced by your
customers.

How to manage emotions in an effective and easy way?

Thanks to these different ways, you will be able to make your customers feel strong emotions and thus promise them a positive experience! To check which emotions are linked with ads or conversations, some tools exist that automatically measure the emotions in the feedbacks, and let you better monitor the consolidated results beyond them.

The startup Q°emotion proposes solutions to easily monitor customer emotions in the customer experience, to monitor the emotional branding, to limit churn rate, and improve the customer journey.

Among them, Q°emotion offers full revolutionary dashboards that let you easily manage emotions into the ad but also during the product experience. CXinsights.io, the Q°emotion solution emotionally analyses customer feedbacks before (ads), during, and after the customer experience, based on social networks like youtube comments, internet reviews (Google my business, Tripadvisor, Amazon reviews, G2, etc.) or satisfaction surveys (from an excel file, or based on platforms like SurveyMonkey, Qualtrics, TypeForm, Google Forms, etc.).