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Emotional marketing is a term thrown around in the marketing world that means basically what you think. It means that you use various words, colours and images to evoke certain emotions in the audience in all your marketing messages. There is an entire science involved in marketing that studies the effect of the colours, images and words on the page and how they affect the consumer.

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There are eight emotions that can be brought out by various words:

1. Sadness
2. Fear
3. Anger
4. Surprise
5. Disgust
6. Anticipation
7. Joy
8. Trust

Each emotion has various stages and strengths that we tend to call other emotions. For example, joy, anger and anticipation can translate into passion. Feelings of anticipation and joy can be called optimism. The trick is that each audience has their own trigger words that will evoke certain emotions, and they have certain emotions that will trigger various actions for that particular audience.

Encourage Sharing

For the most part, emotions like joy and trust make us want to share with others. That being the case, you may want to make your audience feel trusting and happy to get them to share their information with you and to share you with their friends. Each audience has its own language that elicits trust and happiness. It’s important to learn it.

Make Them Want to Help

If you want people to empathize then you should seek to evoke feelings of sadness and loss of the audience members. Think of the SPCA commercials where they show abused and starving animals during a sad song. This makes the audience feel sad and terrible and want to help. Since they’re a well-known organization with a good reputation, trust is already there. Each time the commercials air, many people donate.

Go Viral

If you want a post to go viral, you should pair it with some anger, disgust and anticipation or fear. Be sure to give your audience members a way out of these bad feelings, which is to buy what you’re offering. This works because these feelings are extraordinarily powerful and have lasting consequences.

Feelings First

When engaging in emotional marketing, it’s important to realize that feelings go first. People feel, and then they buy. If you want more people to buy, make them feel something that leads them to buy what you’re offering.

Examples of Emotional Marketing

A great lesson in the way emotional marketing works is to watch the entire series of Mad Men, especially the early episodes. You can learn so much about how the copywriters and ad men dealt with their audience’s emotions through the written word, images, and eventually TV commercials.

In the meantime, here are three examples to take a look at:

1 – Procter & Gamble – This award-winning ad elicits feelings of community, belonging, family and pride.

Link – https://youtu.be/8ywO8DR-5NY

2 – Netflix Commercial – This commercial makes you want to belong to the community of watchers and see the shows that only are on Netflix, due to the innovative, funny, and interesting shows.

Link – https://youtu.be/0SZv2vPdj6g

3 – Pfizer – This commercial pulls at the heartstrings to promote the message of a drug company.

Link – https://youtu.be/OAlyHUWjNjE

What commercials can you find that evokes emotions in you? What about sales pages, or blog posts, or other types of advertising?

I would like to know. So leave a comment below or jot me a quick email.