When contemplating the idea that emotional marketing is the future, it could be suggested that this style of selling has always been with us. A social media blog called Buffer cites a study that suggests that advertising campaigns based on emotion performed twice as much as ad campaigns with purely rational content, and still a little more than mixed emotion and reason.
That reason is not too difficult to understand. The four basic emotions, happiness, sadness, fear, and anger are primal and not all that difficult to elicit in an ad campaign.
For example, consider the typical ad for an erectile dysfunction product. The ads usually feature either men or couples who, albeit of a certain age, seem vital and happy. It is implied that the man has a little pharmaceutical enhancement that makes all that happiness possible. But the ad also elicits a touch of fear of not having the erectile dysfunction product and thus being denied that sexual based happiness.
A car ad will do much the same thing, though sometimes in different ways. There is a famous ad that shows a mom and her young daughter with the suggestion that the daughter “grew up” in the particular car, showing scenes from various stages of life. Owning the car is associated with the joys of family and, by implication, the longevity of the car is noted as well. Another car commercial can try to fear route by noting all of the safety features, the implications being that you and/or your children might die in an accident if you don’t have them.
Negative political ads like to play on both fear and sadness. If the ad is attacking an incumbent, one is expected to feel both angry at the alleged misdeeds and sad that the particular person is in office. Of course a positive ad is supposed to elicit happiness because of what the politician who has approved this message has either done in office or will do if elected/
The takeway is that marketing has always appealed to emotions by associating the product with positive emotions and the lack of the same or a competing product with negative ones.
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