"If Nothing Works, Emotion Will", says Dr Tapan K Panda Professor and Director - SVKM’s NMIMS, Hyderabad Campus

The caption itself speaks volumes about the strategic role ‘emotion’ plays in marketing communications. For any advertising campaign to be impactful, it needs to ‘connect’ and ‘effect’ – it should connect with the targeted audiences and should have an effect on them that drives them forward in the consumer decision-making process. The beauty of emotion as a proposition is that it has direction – positive and negative emotion. You can use negative emotion to drive positive impact as effectively as a positive emotion. 

‘Fear’ is a negative emotion, and the use of fear in advertising is very common in medicine or insurance advertising campaigns that can impact people to adopt the products and services. ‘Pester power’ is positive emotion; advertisers often use the same to create a positive impact on parents to purchase a product as the child demands it. 

Advertising helps in brand building. A brand manager can use functional attributes to create brand differentiation, for example, Patanjali talks about Ayurvedic ingredients to position its brand as natural. But this kind of positioning is not defensible in long term. Today, Colgate also offers Colgate Vedshakti to counter Patanjali’s proposition. 

Hence, we search for non-attribute-based brand differentiation, which can be defended in the long run. Let us look at the Daag Achhe Hain campaign by Surf Excel – here the brand uses inter-faith brotherhood as a tool to create powerful connections. Let us also consider Domino's campaign, Maa Bhulti Nahin, that speaks about the love of a mother for her children. The British Airways campaign Fuelled by Love is another example that uses nostalgia and emotions for presenting the brand as ‘customer friendly’. The themes around which emotional ads are built also vary, for instance, Nestle launched a campaign on ‘inclusiveness’ in the workplace.

Why does emotional advertising work better than other forms of advertising?

In marketing communication, we have an established Learn (cognitive) - Feel (affective) - Do (action) model. Both cognitive and affective inputs are supposed to drive actions, but one of the enduring processes is the Feel-Learn-Do Model. Only in low-value and low-risk products like candy will one get into the feel-do-learn model, i.e., first feel about the product, then use it, and then learn about it. Dan Hill in his piece on Emotionomics: Leveraging Emotions for Business Success has mentioned that “emotions process sensory inputs in one-fifth of the time of our conscious and cognitive brain”. 

Only in low-value and low-risk products like candy will one get into the feel-do-learn model, i.e., first feel about the product, then use it, and then learn about it.

Emotion has a more profound impact on our actions and has the ability to create lasting impressions in building favorable pre-dispositions about a brand. Emotional advertisements are not just visual symbols or imagery, rather they manipulate audience feelings and stimulate emotional triggers that can influence our consumption choices. The best emotional ads drive consumers towards a decision rather than leaving them to evaluate (which is what happens in testimonial, functional, or attribute-based advertising). A survey about emotional ads in the Indian context indicates that the average score, irrespective of which theme is being used, is more than five on a seven-point scale.   

Emotional ads are the most enduring, with greater long-term recall as compared to rational advertising. A study conducted by the Institute of Advertising Practitioners in the USA found that emotional ads generated double the profit when assessed against other ad forms. Emotions are central to advertising effectiveness, and research carried out by Psychology Today magazine shows that MRI scans indicate consumers using emotions rather than information while evaluating brands.   

Emotional advertisements are not just visual symbols or imagery, rather they manipulate audience feelings and stimulate emotional triggers that can influence our consumption choices.     

How does emotion work on PPC (Pay Per Click ads)?

If emotion is a key driver for broadcast or print campaigns, does it work for PPC ads in digital marketing? The metrics used for PPC advertising are always based on hard numbers like impressions, conversions, click-through rate, bounce rate etc. PPC advertisers often don’t use the right side of the brain, i.e., consumer evaluations based on emotions and subjectivity. Research on understanding how emotions trigger the searches to react reveals that there are four key emotions – anger, disgust, affirmation and fear, which work well in driving PPC advertising campaigns.      

Research shows that emotional advertising also works in Pay per Click advertising as it augments the quality score. Is there a golden rule for creating emotional advertising? Probably no, but surely we can plan emotional advertising by -(a) understanding who the customer is - both their behavioral and non-behavioral correlations, (b) deciding the kind of persona one wants to consider in relation to the target market – this can be a celebrity as well as a non-celebrity persona – with emotion as the underlying dimension flowing through the copy, (c) creating emotionally-charged ad copy from the point of view of the chosen persona, and (d) testing the effectiveness of the script through a portfolio test. 

So instead of emotion being the last resort, one should look at emotional ads as the first resort for brand building because EMOTION always works!! 

About the author

Dr Tapan K Panda is Professor and Director at SVKM's NMIMS, Hyderabad Campus. He has over 20 years of rich academic experience.

Note: The views expressed in this article are solely author’s own and do not reflect/represent those of Shiksha