Emotional Marketing – What is It and Does it Work?

Most of us have seen those commercial ads on television – the parent and child reuniting over the use of a certain kind of computer that is for sale or an Internet service like Skype. What do these types of commercials make us think? They usually make us want to cry because they are just so beautiful and who does not emphasize with distance causing a divide in their lives? This type of emotional marketing is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it for many decades, perhaps even several centuries with print ads in newspapers. The question is does it work?

Businesses have to be very careful when it comes to emotional marketing. As the years go by, the average television viewer is becoming increasingly desensitized to these kinds of tactics by advertisers. The question has not been so much “Does it work?”, rather it has been “How can we use this technique to our advantage?” With so many different businesses out there with products they can market to the emotions, how can businesses avoid an overload of these types of commercials or even print ads? Well, the trick is to not use too many of them. If those are the only types of commercials and ads you can think of for your business, then you need to start thinking outside the box.

While emotional marketing can be very beneficial to your business, it can also be very detrimental if you use the tool too often. You will become known as the company that wants to make their customers cry or scare them into buying your product. And who really wants to be known as that company? No one. It is good to appeal to the emotions of your customer every now and then, but you ultimately want your customer to have faith in your product or service because they believe in it – not because they cried when they saw your commercial.

If you are a business who is thinking of using emotional marketing for your ad campaign for your product or service, you need to make that decision very carefully. Think about if you have used this tactic at any point within the previous year. If so, then you need to think of a different type of ad campaign for the time being. You do not want to overload your customers with emotions every single time they see your ads. That just does not make for good business sense.