9 times out of 10, emotional reactions are the reason we buy things. Emotion has always been the epicenter of marketing strategies, more so since it became clear that emotional buyers are more impulsive and likely to spend more than rational, reserved ones.
If an ad makes you laugh, sympathize, feel sorry for someone, or feel great about yourself, you instantly develop an emotional association with what’s been advertised. If a young, skinny, beautiful woman flaunts her white teeth at you, that makes you to inevitably compare yourself to her.
The comparison serves one purpose: to make you feel inadequate. Most ads do that. They target the “X enough” inferiority complex, the infinite list that begins “You’re not smart enough, successful enough, pretty enough, fit enough … .”
Ads create feelings of inadequacy and this gives us the momentum to take immediate action to remedy our inadequacies, faults, and shortcomings. We buy a whitening toothpaste, or the latest fashion trends, because we’d feel left out otherwise. We wouldn’t be fashionable, cool, or smartly dressed if we were to follow our own sense of style, would we?
People are capable of experiencing four fundamental emotions: sadness, happiness, fear, and disgust. Of course, different combinations of these emotions create their own matrix of secondary ones – you’ll get apprehension and distraction, contempt and annoyance, anticipation and optimism, to name a few. But let’s go back and examine two basic emotions, happy and sad.
Happiness Drives Up Sales
Marketing exploits these emotions, by triggering them with the right words and visual stimuli.
If an ad, a sales page, or a video makes us happy then we’re more likely to think of that brand or product in positive terms. We’re more likely to share it with others or bring it up in conversation. We’re happy about a product and by sharing it with others we essentially multiply our happiness. Happy is good.
A case in point is that good (happy) news tend to go viral faster than bad news. The Happiness Factor is the determining parameter that makes this possible. Therefore, if you want more online engagement with your communities on Facebook, Twitter, and elsewhere, you should focus on happy news, thoughts, and ideas. Or … should you do the opposite?
Sadness Boosts Empathy
Sadness and sorrow are two other emotions marketing can leverage to drive up sales. Surprisingly enough, sadness activates almost the exact same brain regions as happiness does. Weird? Maybe. Gold mine? Definitely.
When people empathize with the plight of someone (real or fictional) they have a tendency to trust them and invest confidence in them relatively easily.
This is possible because of oxytocin, a chemical our brains release when we read a sorrowful story. Oxytocin is a chemical that helps increase your understanding of and sympathy for others.
Sad stories build connections; they build bridges between the viewer and the narrative being told, which creates the emotional links that tie the reader to the subject or the product.
Put simply, emotions sell. If a marketing campaign revolves around emotions, then it will have a greater impact on its audience.
By creating online marketing campaigns that revolve around emotions, an online marketer:
* Encourages readers to share the article with friends, discuss it online, and chat about it in person, and this conversation boosts word-of-mouth promotion about the product or the business.
* Encourages the viewer to take action that leads in the direction the marketer desires, such as exploring more areas of the website or other products.
* Builds a relationship with the brand at hand where the outcome is that the viewer eventually yields and buys the product or service.
Emotions precede thinking. People tend to experience things through their hearts before rationalizing them with their minds, and this is a fact online marketers can use to make their campaigns more effective and sales-oriented.
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