How to Incorporate and Leverage Emotion in Marketing

REEFExperiential Marketing Blog
how to leverage emotion in marketing
Have you ever considered emotion in marketing when strategizing your marketing initiatives? People often associate emotions as something that can swing dramatically in one direction or another but that isn’t always the case. We can feel sadness, happiness, complacency, or anger to varying levels. By associating happiness with laughter or joy, we can brand it to shape and encourage different consumer behaviour. We can also feel empathy or sadness when we watch others experience heartbreak or suffering, which can also encourage a change in brand specific behaviour. In experiential marketing, harnessing the visitor’s emotions make the experience more real and inspires a change, be it in buying habits, social sharing, or otherwise. By creating an instance in which visitors are prompted to feel, you are encouraging the change in behaviour that your marketing strategy dictates.

Aligning Your Brand With Emotion

There are tons of brands who use content to evoke emotion in their target audience. Dove is one of the first brands that comes to mind because they show empathy with their audience through their marketing. Their “Real Beauty” campaign aligns their brand with the everyday reality that many men and women struggle with low self-esteem and aims to inspire empowerment and self-belief. Think way back to 2013, when Dove launched their “Real Beauty Sketches” ad series. This series is based on a series of women describing their facial features to a sketch artists behind a divider and then again having someone who loves her describe her features to the same artist. Dove worked to explore the idea of women finding themselves beautiful. This ad is solely driven by the emotional context. At Reef, we explore the ways in which you can connect emotion and your target audience in an experimental marketing fashion.

Understanding how Emotion makes us feel

Consumers are looking for an emotional connection and we know that people use their emotions to make decisions more often than they use information. So tapping into people’s emotions while they are in the midst of our experiential marketing event, you are creating more openness in their buying minds for your product.

How to Use Emotion in Marketing

Use Colour

This is a powerful tool at your disposal. It is common knowledge that colours make you feel a particular way. Have you ever walked into a room and a colour made you feel a myriad of emotions? This is why therapists paint their offices calming colours and sports teams choose exciting jersey colours. Colours can also denote status and ideals, like black being luxurious and elegant. Brands can also utilize colour theory by incorporating colours that compliment the feelings or ideals they are looking to tap into, into their branding or marketing materials.

Incorporate Video

While attending an experiential marketing event, visitors expect an immersive experience and video can help you achieve that. By incorporating photographic and video elements to your planning, you can evoke emotion from your visitors that they not only connect with but encourage your desired behaviour. Connecting shareable technology and emotion allow your brand story to be told and disseminated.

Emotion and Experiential Marketing

At Reef, we work hard to engage all different strategies in our experiential marketing projects. We will work with you to help identify the major shift in behaviour you wish to see and then how to inject emotion in marketing. This idea is a core belief that our experts take to heart. Let’s work together to harness emotion, inspire change, and align brands with the needs of their clients.