Soprano

Emotions. One of the biggest things that set man apart from the machines. Sometimes, people consider emotions as a form of weakness. But in the world of marketing, it’s a powerful tool that can determine your success.

How do emotions figure into all this?

A Closer Look at Emotional Motivators

There is always an emotion associated with every person’s buying decision. Whether it’s a need to belong, or a need to feel more secure, these emotional motivators push people to make purchases even if their logical mind tells them not to.

Emotional motivators are considered to be today’s most important source of growth for businesses. They drive consumer behavior, and affect customer satisfaction and brand awareness.

And this is not just mere theory. Neuro-imagery actually shows that personal feelings play a larger role in choosing brands compared to facts and other brand attributes.

Why Use Emotional Motivators?

How much impact do emotional motivators have on the way your audiences react to your campaigns?

• It creates an instant connection.

Logic requires someone to think twice or thrice. Throw anybody a few numbers, and they’ll spend time thinking about whether it makes sense or not. But tell someone a captivating story, and their emotions will automatically come out, no two thoughts required.

• It shows you care.

When you create an emotional connection, people feel that you relate to them on a higher level. Often, people think that businesses are only out to get their money. But when you hit on a person’s emotions, they suddenly see you as an organization that actually wants to help out.

• It humanizes the brand.

People may see you as a logo. A name. A business entity. Add emotions into the equation and they suddenly see that you are human, after all. This allows people to open themselves up to a deeper relationship, which can go beyond the initial purchase.

Knowing how much this can actually change the way your brand affects the market, it’s about time you look deeper into what kind of emotional motivators you should be using.

Choosing High Impact Motivators

According to the Harvard Business Review, there are hundreds of emotional motivators. However, these prove to have a higher impact than the others.

• The need for security
• The yearning for success
• Enjoying a sense of well-being
• Wanting to stand out from the crowd
• Wanting to belong
• Feeling a sense of freedom
• A desire for self-improvement

When used by brands, these motivators allow consumers to fulfill something that they deeply desire. Although it is hard to quantify emotions, the motivators on this list prove to be common denominators in what pushes the majority to act upon a purchase offer.

Big Brands That Have Done It (and Succeeded!)

Here are a few brands that used emotional motivators and have experienced success because of it.

• Gatorade’s The Boy Who Learned to Fly

Oscar awardee Moonbot Studios creates another animated masterpiece, this time, for Gatorade. The Boy Who Learned to Fly features the life story of Usain Bolt, the fastest man in the world. Hurdling through every challenge, his mother’s encouragement plays a huge role in his success.

Looking at this short animated film, the highlight was not really on Gatorade as a brand. However, the fact that they were responsible for relating such a heartwarming tale made people feel a stronger affiliation with the brand. In this campaign, they fed on the audience’s need to witness success and imagine it as their own. It can also trigger a desire for self-improvement in others, seeing how someone from a humble background was able to accomplish such amazing feats.

• Starbucks selling an entire experience

You’ll see a Starbucks at almost every corner. And when you think about it, you can probably name a few local coffee places serving even better coffee. This isn’t surprising, knowing that such a huge company would have a challenging time trying to maintain quality across hundreds of stores. Latest surveys also show that in terms of taste, the verdict is tied between Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts, with the latter offering cheaper coffee.

So why do people keep buying Starbucks?

You see, it’s not only about the coffee. It’s about the experience.

Step into Dunkin Donuts, and despite the better coffee, you won’t see the friendly baristas or hear the relaxing music. And where you simply say “One large coffee, please” at any regular coffee place, Starbucks allows you to spit out exotic-sounding syllables like “A Venti Java Chip Frappuccino, please” or “a Pumpkin Spice Latte for me, Grande”. There’s this feeling of satisfaction, convenience, and relaxation that only Starbucks can give. It caters to the side of people that craves for that sense of well-being, and of being someone important.

• Dove’s Choose Beautiful campaign

One’s own perception of beauty can be a very relevant and touchy issue, especially when it’s one’s own appearance in question. This is exactly what Dove chose to look into with their Choose Beautiful campaign.

Giving women the choice to walk between two doors, the brand waited to see whether women would consider themselves as “beautiful” or “average”. A few actually stopped and looked at both doors before finally making a choice. But for a lot of them, it was almost automatic for them to choose the door marked “average”.

This gave a powerful message to all women about how they see themselves. If you want to see how the women reacted, watch the video below:

Everyday, more and more brands are making the decision to get in touch with their audiences’ emotions instead of their logic. Seeing how these three examples above worked, the decision for a lot of other brands to do the same thing is not surprising.

Tips in Taking the Emotional Route

Have you decided to use emotional motivators in your campaigns?

Here’s how you can get started. You would have to figure out what kind of emotions are triggered within your specific audience’s buying journey. Work on both quantitative and qualitative surveys to get all the necessary data. Make sure you pinpoint specific emotions for each stage in the buyer’s journey as well. This can help you create campaigns that meet the customers right where they are in the journey – the awareness stage, consideration stage, and decision stage.

Once you’ve collated the data and figured out what emotions prove to be most relevant, you can start:

• Telling a story relevant to your buyer’s needs

When you have a clear picture of where your customers are in their journey and what emotions are in play, it’s easier to understand what kind of stories they can easily relate to.

Don’t just present random images showing emotions. An ad with a crying baby may work well for a mom who’s in the awareness stage, but it won’t be as effective if you’re targeting a teenager who’s already in the decision stage. The more relevant your story is, the more engaging the campaign will be.

• Selling lifestyle and values

It shouldn’t just be about the brand. Instead, it should be about the kind of lifestyle and values consumers can enjoy when they decide to choose your products and services.

With a deeper knowledge of your target market’s emotions, you can also see which specific values and what kind of lifestyle they would find the most value in.

• Motivating instead of pushing

Nobody wants to be forced to make decisions. Even in actual stores, pushy salespeople are often seen as annoying. Let your consumer be led and motivated, something you can do when you find out what their emotional motivators are.

Now, you can stop forcing facts and information into their faces. Rather, you can tell the right stories and share the right scenarios that would motivate them to find out more about what you have to offer.

• Getting the people involved.

This is one of the things that the Dove campaign did, and it was what gave them the success they achieved. They allowed their audience to be involved in the process, making it more personal.

There is no doubt at all that emotional motivators can give you the deeper brand-consumer relationship that every marketer aims for. By touching that part that makes every human who he or she is, you go beyond the initial sale and create interactions that can last for a lifetime.