How to use emotions to increase advertising effectiveness

Emotion is a key ingredient of effective advertising campaigns. As humans, we are driven by our emotions more than anything else. To ensure our survival, we have been programmed to remember things that make us feel very good or very bad. That’s why appealing to the audience’s emotions helps us connect better and achieve campaign goals. Find out how to use the power of emotion to create more effective campaigns.

How does emotion work in advertising?

Pringle and Field, authors of the book Brand Immortality, explain why emotion is so important to advertising effectiveness. The emotional brain processes sensory information in a fifth of the time it takes our cognitive brain to assimilate the same information. In essence, people feel first and think later. Detecting anger or fear are very important survival skills, and we will always be ready to pay attention when we feel those sensations. That is why emotional stimuli evade cognitive processing and often affect us without us being aware of it. It is also why consumers register emotional messages from brands, even if we pay minimal attention. Emotional stimuli are also more strongly encoded in the brain, making emotional campaigns not only more memorable, but also more impactful in driving consumer behaviour.

Brand building vs. sales activation

Emotions are fundamental to building a brand. Brands that evoke strong positive emotions associate those emotions with their brand in the minds of consumers, so that when the consumer makes a purchase decision, the positive emotional memory drives them to buy that particular brand. This is why it is so important to have highly distinctive brand elements to ensure proper identification against alternatives.

However, emotions are not only useful at the top of the funnel. Emotions are also important for sales activation campaigns. In these cases, rather than creating memories, emotions help drive immediate action. The consumer feels the emotion and acts immediately.

Positive and negative emotions

Most campaigns tend to use positive emotions to create lasting bonds with consumers. This has every reason to generate positive connections with the brand. However, negative emotions can also create brand memories. In fact, in some cases, they are even more effective than positive emotions. This is because, as humans, we always focus on the negative.

Many NGOs and some public bodies – especially when they are trying to push a desired action – can use negative emotions very effectively. However, it is difficult to find examples of brands using negative emotions, with one exception: when they are used to amplify positive ones. A good example of this use of negative emotions is Nike’s classic ‘Dream crazier’. It evokes feelings of anger and contempt at the beginning, but evolves into a strong sense of pride at the end. And the ending is the most important, as viewers will judge a spot on how they feel at the end. This is where the most effort should be put into generating strong positive emotions and highlighting the brand.

Evidence of the relationship between emotion and advertising effectiveness

The positive relationship between emotion and advertising effectiveness has been demonstrated by numerous surveys.

• Pringle and Field conducted an in-depth analysis of data collected by the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) in the UK. The IPA databank contains more than 1,400 case surveys of successful advertising campaigns submitted to the IPA Effectiveness Award competition over three decades. The analysis compared the increase in profitability between campaigns that focused primarily on emotional appeal versus those that used rational persuasion. The results were stark: purely emotional campaigns performed twice as well as those using only rational content, with a notable increase in profitability of 31% for emotional content versus 16% for rational content. Campaigns that combined emotional and rational content were in the middle ground, with a 26% return.
• According to a Nielsen survey, emotional ads increase sales. They surveyed 100 ads from 25 brands in the fast-moving consumer goods sector and found that the most emotional ads achieved a higher increase than the average for all spots.
• Kantar conducted a meta-analysis using its database of digital ad pre-tests. According to their data, digital ads that left consumers with strong emotions were four times more likely to drive long-term brand equity and four times more likely to generate impact compared to those with weaker emotional connections. They are also more likely to go viral.

If emotion is such an important component of advertising effectiveness, brands have a huge opportunity to leverage emotion throughout their creative process. Advertising pre-tests that use neuromarketing techniques to measure emotions will give more insights to achieve this.

Measuring emotions in ad testing

One of the most commonly used neuromarketing techniques in advertising is facial coding. This technology allows us to identify different emotions and classify them accurately. In this way, we can anticipate what the audience will feel when they see a campaign before it goes to the media. With facial coding data, we will be able to know if the ad evokes positive emotions and if there is rejection among a part of the audience. A second-by-second analysis will also allow us to understand the exact moment where emotions are triggered, so that we can know how to enhance the emotion in the spot and how to eliminate negative emotions in the final execution.

Interested in knowing the emotions of your audience? Contact our experts so that they can explain all the possibilities.