Emotions Support Marketing
How can understanding emotions support marketing efforts?
Overall, assessing emotions garners a more thorough understanding of a target audience and their perceptions, attitudes, motivations and behaviors. By doing so, you can achieve a competitive advantage.
The following are examples of how understanding emotions can support your marketing efforts:
Identification of more specific brand opportunities and barriers —as a result, more pointed marketing strategies can be developed. For example:
- Understanding that a target audience uses your brand twice a month and your competitor’s four times a month is a good insight.
- However, couple that finding with the emotional response— your target feels; ambivalent and cynical about your brand and empowered and exuberant about your competitor’s—and you have a great insight.
A more complete target market profile. For example:
- Understanding that 90% target audience likes to participate in sports activities is important.
- However, knowing that 70% of your target feels devoted and passionate about participating in sports activities, because it gives them a chance to push their physical limits and connect with friends provides a much more actionable insight.
Fresh insight for positioning development or fine-tuning.
- A brand feature is easily replicated, but a brand’s spirit or emotion is not.
- While all brands can benefits from incorporating emotion into brand strategies, commodity products or products without differentiating features can distinguish itself with a positioning grounded heavily in emotions.
Distinguishing between concepts (advertising, product, etc.) that rank closely on rational measures.
- Concept tests designed to only measure rational responses do not always identify differences between concepts. This makes it difficult to select a concept.
- Considering emotions provides another measure to assess the merits of a selection of concepts.