COP Publication - Points of Investigation 2/ Emotional Marketing

The primary goal of traditional ads is to inform the customer about the product, but emotional marketing takes the opposite tack. Emotional marketing’s primary goal is to elicit an emotional response from the customer, not to showcase a product. Customers evaluate products with their head, but they buy with their heart. Emotional marketing is more effective because it attaches the brand to feelings that customers already feel about themselves. What is emotional marketing? It is marketing that builds your ego. It makes you feel smarter, bolder, more sophisticated, or any other key emotion that is the foundation of your self-esteem. Because it makes you feel better about yourself, the brand transcends mere product status and is magically transformed into a friend. This gives the brand a heart and soul that builds life-long attachment. These are brands that share your values and priorities. They “get you,” and you get them. You name drop the brand name to show others you’re cool.

People are so passionate about these brands that they wear the logos on their chest, tattoo them on their body, and herald them in their social networking profile. “I’m a Jack Daniels man.” “I hate the Yankees and believe in Red Sox Nation.” Harley isn’t just a motorcycle, it’s a lifestyle, and there is a large group of people who refuse to eat at fast food restaurants that serve Pepsi instead of Coke.

Building Emotional Attachment

The goal of emotional marketing is not to inform the customer about the product, but to elicit an emotional response that leads to personal identification. Traditional marketing is a one-step process: “Here is our product. We hope you’ll like it and want to buy it.” This Jeep ad sports beauty shots of the product with a gravel-voiced announcer growling out product features. Sure, it tries to position itself as ruggedly American, but the heart of this ad lies in the product, not the customer.

Great advertisers find ingenious ways to dress up a product feature sell, making it clever and fun to watch. This Geico Ad uses humor to dress up its key product feature, “save money.”

This delightful Volkswagen ad gives Gene Kelly’s performance of “Singing in the Rain” a modern twist. You sing along as the special effects keep your eyes glued to the screen. But the entire performance has a single goal: the product sell at the end, “the original Golf GTI has been updated.”

The primary goal of these ads is to inform the customer about the product, but emotional marketing takes the opposite tack. Its primary goal is to elicit an emotional response from the customer, not to showcase a product. Many times, the only acknowledgement of the product is a cursory mention in the end tag.

Some ads do double duty, achieving both a product feature and an emotional marketing sell. This eye-dazzling PlayStation ad builds the customer’s ego by showing him as an ultimate competitor winning the battle, but it also clearly makes the product feature point that it is the ultimate multi-player game.

http://602communications.com/emotional-marketing-white-papers/