Should My Advertising Stimulate an Emotional Response?
The generation of emotion is crucial for successful marketing. Many brands benefit from an association with positive emotions. However, the fact that the most successful brands tend to have a balanced set of associations and rational strengths, should not be ignored.
Advertising that generates a strong emotional response has two benefits. Firstly, it can help the emotions transfer to the brand, shaping the brand perceptions. Secondly, it can help generate engagement and memorability. While advertising can generate negative emotions to help create drama, for most brand advertising this needs to ultimately result in a positive emotional takeout.
For the past 10 years some commentators have reported that neuroscience has found the emotional content of advertising to be more powerful than any rational information. The neuroscientist Damasio has been interpreted as saying that when it comes to decision-making, feelings and emotions always dominate cognition. While some have regarded this as a new paradigm in advertising, it is worth reflecting on what Damasio actually wrote: “I never wished to set emotion against reason, but rather to see emotion as at least assisting reason...nor did I ever oppose emotion to cognition since I view emotion as delivering cognitive information.”1
The reality is that a typical brand purchase decision for a consumer is trivial. They will take the minimum possible time to make their decision which, depending on the category, may be only one or two seconds. However, they will try to make the best possible choice, calling upon their memories of, and associations with, the brands being reviewed.
So what is the role of emotion in advertising?
1 Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1994.), xix.
Shaping Perceptions
Emotion is important in marketing, as was highlighted when Dove adopted the Campaign for Real Beauty theme in 2004. Prior to this time, the brand communicated largely rational benefits, such as its moisturizing properties and mildness. It mainly used testimonial-style advertising, but, with little sense of a distinctive, dynamic or compelling personality, its growth was limited. The Campaign for Real Beauty aimed to build the brand at an emotional level by conveying a more democratic, celebratory and iconic vision of beauty. In doing so, Dove struck a strong chord with women who were tired of trying to live up to the idealized and unachievable standards shown by other brands. Almost overnight, Dove changed from being subdued and passive into a highly-distinctive, opinionated and admired brand — with a resulting huge uplift in sales across its entire range.
Another good example of where a more emotionally-based campaign benefited the brand comes from the brand SunCom. The U.S. telecom industry was known for advertising the rational “value” benefits of their service: dependability, great price and special deals. SunCom made major changes