What is emotional marketing?

As the saying goes, people will forget what you said or did, but they will remember how you made them feel. Emotional marketing is a powerful tool because it taps into how humans make decisions. The core idea is that humans have two different streams or levels of thinking - otherwise known as dual process theory.

The first level is automatic, instinctual, and emotional. It’s the stuff we do without really thinking about it like eating, walking and sleeping and comes naturally to us. This type of thinking is virtually automatic and provides a rapid response.

The second level is logical, calculated and informed thinking. It requires a lot of mental energy and focus. Decisions are arrived at through reasoning and takes far longer than the emotional response.

because it bypasses our evolved rational brain and cuts straight through to our emotional brain.

We worked with Network Rail to produce a suite of videos reminding the public of the potential dangers at level crossings. We filmed two scenarios; a professional driving to work in their car, and a person walking their dog. The story demonstrated the consequences of their distractions when they didn’t turn up to work or return home. The aim was to trigger an emotive response from the audience, reminding them that ‘distraction kills’.

We also created a video for Network Rail aimed at staff working on the track. The Sentinel card is a rail industry standard for trackworker safety, and they wanted to emphasise the importance of using a Sentinel card to their staff. Instead of focusing on the potential risks at work, we looked at how failing to use your card could affect your family, should something tragic happen while you were working on the track.

The video sweeps through the home of the trackworker’s family while an apologetic voicemail plays on their phone.

Through emotional marketing, we can also touch on people’s values; what’s important to them, and what they care about. This is particularly important for charity fundraising campaigns or social causes.

We worked with Dorset Council to develop a new identity for their fostering service to encourage more people to enquire with their local authority. We held focus groups with the Council’s existing foster carers to find out what their needs and motivations were when it came to fostering. A lot of the people we spoke to had their own birth children and were altruistically motivated to give a cared-for child a safe home and a loving family. They all disliked the idea of fostering being referred to as a career.

Along with this insight, and some research on the fostering landscape in the area, we developed a warm, authentic creative style that reflected the audience and Dorset as a place. We spoke about the intrinsic value of fostering a child and focused on the small, day-to-day ‘wins’ for foster carers and their families. This underpinned the fostering service’s wider ambitions for care experienced children and young people and care leavers.

If you want to use emotional marketing in your own communications, you’ll need to determine how you’d like people to respond to your emotional marketing. We like to use the ‘think, feel, do’ model to better understand what emotions, thoughts, and actions we want to inspire in our audience.

It’s also important that you take the time to understand your audience on a deeper level. If you want your audience to feel hopeful, what does ‘hope’ mean to them? How does this link to their values? What have been the barriers to this before?

As an agency who’s worked for many not-for-profit and charity organisations over the years, we know that campaigns for change don’t just happen overnight. The trick is to see emotional marketing as a relationship building exercise, so the key is to start with making sure you know exactly who your audience is. Our blog on why audience research is important is a great place to start if you’re looking for more tips on the value of audience insights.