Emotional Reponses in Marketing: Convincing Customers to Buy

Marketing campaigns that encourage people to share and buy can be summed up in one word: emotional.

This should come as no surprise as it was previously discussed how neuroscience plays a big part in marketing. Furthermore, studies have shown that people rely heavily on emotions when making brand decisions rather than information. Emotional responses to ads also have greater influence on an individual’s intent to buy than the content shown on marketing material.

Principal of a consumer psychology practice, Peter Noel Murray, Ph.D, implied in Psychology Today that consumers often don’t even think their way to logical solutions. Feelings give way to reason and emotions don’t hinder decisions. Rather, they constitute the foundation on which decisions are made.

Unruly, the video ad tech company that ranks the most viral ads each year, found that some of the most shared content of 2015 relied heavily on emotions, specifically themes that revolved around warmth, inspiration, and happiness. Notable examples included Budweiser’s Super Bowl spot #BestBuds and Kleenex’s Unlikely Best Friends. This hasn’t been always the case though; throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, most marketing campaigns were centered on humor and sarcasm.

Example of an emotional campaign

Create a Positioning map for your business!

The SWOT analysis is part of a company’s strategic planning process where it connects its objectives and strategies to actionable tactics carried out by employees. Specifically, SWOT is part often of the situation analysis, where the company determines where it stands on four key strategic areas to better determine what changes to make.

SWOT is an acronym that identifies the four critical elements of the analysis. The letters stand for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Strengths provide an analysis of the company’s advantages over its competitors. Weaknesses consider areas in which the companies are at a competitive disadvantage. Opportunities are a list of untapped markets or business developments. Threats explore the external environment that could affect the company, including technological, environmental and regulatory factors.

 

Strengths and Weaknesses

The purpose in using SWOT to assess strengths and weaknesses is it helps the company firmly understand its core market advantages and areas that competitors may criticize the company for. Companies typically make core strengths the focal point of marketing messages in trying to create differentiation from competitors. Companies need to understand their weaknesses to decide what areas they should improve on and what areas are inherent to the nature of their business.

Opportunities

Exploring untapped opportunities helps company leaders consider ways to grow. Generally, strong companies are always looking for ways to grow because if they do not grow, they typically fall behind and give up opportunities to competitors. Opportunities can include new and emerging markets, new business and product developments and strategic business partnerships that may create more sales and profits.

Threats

Though it is one of the least enjoyable areas of SWOT to consider, companies need to understand external threats so they are not caught off guard. Changes in government regulations may affect the level of competition or costs companies face. Environmental standards or conditional changes can affect companies in the ways in which they use natural resources for business. Technological advances or changes can affect companies that do not adapt.

 

Examples

Social Media Monitoring

To succeed in today’s connected world, you need to build a community around your company, brand, and products. Over the last decade, social media monitoring has become a primary form of business intelligence, used to identify, predict, and respond to consumer behavior. Listening to what your customers, competitors, critics, and supporters are saying about you is key to getting great results from your social media campaigns. There are countless tools out there, offering many ways to analyze, measure, display, and create reports about your engagement efforts.

Turn neutral customers into brand advocates. More than three-quarters of social mentions are neutral, while only six percent are negative and 18 percent are positive. Neutral mentions are usually customers seeking assistance or advice — and a timely response could turn these customers into brand advocates.

Rise above the noise by posting on low traffic days. Thursday is the day of the week for the highest volume of company mentions, according to the paper. Nearly 16 percent of all company mentions happen on Thursdays, with weekend rates averaging just under 12 percent. The paper suggests that these low-traffic days represent an opportunity to “rise above the noise” by scheduling content.

Create platform specific content for better engagement. While 67 percent of company mentions occur on Twitter, that doesn’t mean abandoning other platforms. Creating network specific content, such as GIFs for Tumblr, or small infographics and quotes for Pinterest, can result in increased engagement overall.

Don’t forget to listen. When companies listen to consumers on various platforms, businesses can set a tone for the content, and thus achieve better return on marketing and customer service investments. But resist the temptation to fixate on power users. 91 percent of mentions on Twitter come from users with less than 500 followers.

Become multilingual. All users should be replied to in a timely manner because “any of your customers can be an influencer.” By showing users a dedication to customer service, customer retention rates could improve, and almost any customer could become a brand advocate. The paper also points out that 36 percent of mentions are in a language other than English, so have a strategy in place for responding, even if it’s just saying ‘thanks’ in as many languages as your team knows.

 Example of free tools

Social Mention- Real-time Social Media Search and Anaylsis

Google Alerts – Monitor interesting topics

Googe Trends – Measuring Search Ineterests in Brands

Howsociable – Indication of the Level of Activity around a brand during a Given Week

Marketing Ethics

Marketing is an effective way to increase sales, and it includes powerful tools that companies can use dishonestly. Ethically questionable marketing tactics target young or unsophisticated consumers with misleading messages. Advertising claims that are partly true or ring true encourage consumers to buy harmful products and engage in behavior that is not in their own interest. Such marketing is ethically questionable.

Pharmaceutical Industry

The pharmaceutical industry has become more marketing-oriented to maintain profit levels. Many drug companies try to influence medical professionals to prescribe their drugs by hosting lavish events at conferences and showering doctors with gifts and benefits. Smaller businesses can use similar tactics to influence intermediaries and agents to give preference to their products. The ethics of such a marketing strategy are questionable. Ethical marketing is to provide information so the customers can make an informed choice.

 

Fast Food

Fast food companies specialize in lifestyle marketing and often aim such ads at teens and younger children. Many of the ads are digital, and marketing campaigns online via social media are a favorite channel for reaching these consumers. It is ethically questionable to aim ads that use marketing techniques other than information at audiences that may not have the maturity to treat them skeptically.

 

Cosmetics

In 2011, Wal-Mart rolled out a cosmetics line aimed at girls as young as 9 years old. The marketing campaign targeted both the girls and their parents, emphasizing the “environmentally friendly” nature of the eye-liner, lip gloss and mascara. Apart from the questionable practice of placing undue emphasis on a child’s appearance, it also is ethically questionable to use a popular movement such as environmentalism to market a completely unrelated product.