Building Emotional Attachment
The goal of emotional marketing is not to inform the customer about the product, but to elicit an emotional response that leads to personal identification. Traditional marketing is a one-step process: “Here is our product. We hope you’ll like it and want to buy it.” This Jeep ad sports beauty shots of the product with a gravel-voiced announcer growling out product features. Sure, it tries to position itself as ruggedly American, but the heart of this ad lies in the product, not the customer.
Great advertisers find ingenious ways to dress up a product feature sell, making it clever and fun to watch. This Geico Ad uses humor to dress up its key product feature, “save money.”
This delightful Volkswagen ad gives Gene Kelly’s performance of “Singing in the Rain” a modern twist. You sing along as the special effects keep your eyes glued to the screen. But the entire performance has a single goal: the product sell at the end, “the original Golf GTI has been updated.”
The primary goal of these ads is to inform the customer about the product, but emotional marketing takes the opposite tack. Its primary goal is to elicit an emotional response from the customer, not to showcase a product. Many times, the only acknowledgement of the product is a cursory mention in the end tag.
This BBC World Service ad features a stirring story of an adventurous, unflinching woman boldly defying authority in far-off Zimbabwe. The BBC isn’t just inviting you to enjoy its radio programs, it’s inviting you to join their revolution. The ad skillfully demonstrates the BBC’s international reporting chops, but the primary selling vehicle is identification. The BBC boldly proclaims its rebellious passions in hopes that you share those feelings and see the BBC as a friend with a vantage point like your own.
Some ads do double duty, achieving both a product feature and an emotional marketing sell. This eye-dazzling PlayStation ad builds the customer’s ego by showing him as an ultimate competitor winning the battle, but it also clearly makes the product feature point that it is the ultimate multi-player game.
The Cheetos cheetah isn’t just a cute snack mascot. He is a juggernaut of emotional identification for teen and 20-somethings yearning to break free from the oppressive shackles put on them by parents, teachers, and bosses. This emotional marketing ad for Cheetos has all the sophistication of a Hollywood blockbuster, complete with villains and subplots. See if you can identify the role of each of the empowering characters.
The woman in the airline seat is our heroine, representing the customer.
The snoring man in the next seat represents all the authority figures in her life – controlling bosses, confining parents, and demanding teachers. He is an object of derision; a joke who is fat, annoying, oblivious, and ultimately uncool.
The cheetah represents the cool the customer aspires to, an alter-ego. He is suave, unflappable, and always in control. He is so cool that he dispassionately gives the flight attendant a back massage while he cooly masterminds the retaliation.
The cheetah calmly encourages her to not be controlled, and to quite literally, stick it to the man – right up his nose.
This rebellion motif is the powerful unifying theme in a lot of Cheetos ads. The heroine suffers an injustice from an authority figure and her alter-ego (the cheetah) bolsters her courage to cleverly and subversively retaliate. Then she cleanly gets away, masterfully escaping detection.
This Cheetos ad plays out this exact same scenario at a laundromat. They even go the extra mile of demonstrating the cheesiness of the product by showing that just a handful of Cheetos can easily wreck an entire load of laundry.
Cheetos has carefully mapped the most intimate emotional motivators in the lives of their best customers – teens and 20-somethings. The confusing feelings that surround impending adulthood are the foundation of this brand, the actual snack is just a prop.
This Cheetos ad showcases the best of high school angst all over again. The Cheetos cheetah parties with the cool kids and snubs the nerd wannabe.
This Cheetos ads relives the boyhood secret hiding place scenario, complete with special friends and secret passwords.
Most of this emotional brand wooing takes place on a subconscious level. The next time that customer goes to the grocery store, he strangely finds himself reaching for a bag of Cheetos. He probably isn’t quite sure why. It just seems to feel right. He can easily convince himself that his purchase of Cheetos is based entirely on a rational evaluation of snack features and quality, but there are lots of cheaper cheese snacks. He picks Cheetos because every bite makes him feel just a little bit more powerful, cool, and dangerous. Who would think that a fatty, fried ball of puffed corn could engender such passion?
And that is the genius of emotional marketing. It slips in under our radar. Because these are emotions we WANT to feel, the ads just seem like friendly and intriguing bits of entertainment that leave us with a little warm glow. It is drip marketing that slowly waters our deepest hopes and dreams of being the people we fantasize about. These ads foster rebellion, courage, caring, sophistication, intelligence or any other powerfully coveted personal attribute. We adopt these brands as our own because they build our ego.
Even the most powerfully unnatural personal attributes are successfully imprinted upon some of the world’s most boring products. Somehow, these product claims just seem to make sense when they are anointed with emotional marketing. This V8 ad marries skydiving and adventure with a tomato juice.
This Johnnie Walker ad pairs liquor with bravery.
This Gillette ad builds the case for courageous shaving.
Why does this stuff work on us? Because these ads aren’t really about products at all. They’re about how we want to feel about ourselves. The products are the touchstone that trigger the feeling. If I secretly believe I’m a bold adventurer, my brain is already hard wired to admire any person or product that claims to be like me.
This Dunkin Donuts ad is custom made for people who love eating at donut shops and still want to feel healthy and smart. Sure, the sandwich is overflowing with cheese and packs the carbohydrate wallop of two slices of flatbread, but it’s made with egg whites. It must be healthy, right? Our deluded little brains want to believe its true, so it’s just a short leap for Dunkin Donuts to convince us.
Most products are a blank canvas waiting to be painted with emotion.
Sure, some products have clearly superior attributes, but they are the exception. For every major product category, customers usually have a firmly established brand preference. Incremental product improvements usually won’t convince them to abandon their current brand preference. If your product isn’t substantially better, then your best bet is to fully utilize emotional marketing and build upon the customer’s deepest beliefs.
Don’t use your product as the default brand foundation.
After untold hours getting their product ready for market, company managers are proud of their efforts. They often have a bias that causes them to default to a brand position that ignores how the customers feel about themselves. Instead, they frame the brand experience by how customers feel about their product. If you ask a teenager why he eats Cheetos he will tell you, “I like the taste.” Yet Cheetos never mentions the taste in any of their ads. Don’t be fooled into believing the customer’s story about your product. When buying a car, most of us say we want “reliable transportation,” yet wildly impractical sports cars continue to be best-sellers.
Listen hard and let the customers tell you where to go.
Start with the ego of your customers and build up from there. The great news is that the customer has already done most of the convincing work for you. They have a powerful need to find products and people that affirm their sense of personal identity. They are just aching to find product brand “friends” that remind them of their own most coveted traits. If you spend a lot of time listening to them about every part of their life, they will tell you exactly where they want to go. Your job is to catch the wave.
