Emotional Appeal Advertising: 8 Types with Examples
Using emotional appeal advertisements in your marketing strategy can significantly increase engagement and boost sales. The concept is that our brain first evaluates the emotional component of the message before using logical reasoning. Therefore, if your ad highlights the emotions and desires of consumers, it can hit the target more accurately and quickly than one focusing only on facts and arguments.
Sounds exciting, doesn't it? So, let's see how to find the right keys to unlock the minds and hearts of your potential customers.
Explaining Emotional Appeal in Advertising
Emotionally appealing advertising motivates consumers to make decisions based on feelings instead of cold, rational logic. It operates on simple and understandable incentives, such as the desire to have fun or avoid certain inconveniences. Such advertising creates a close connection with the brand, motivating people to trust the business to solve their problems and meet their requirements.
To understand what an emotional appeal in advertising is, you can look at the successful campaigns of top brands such as Apple, Coca-Cola, Airbnb, Toyota, McDonald's, and others. These are not just commercial offers - they are real stories in which feelings play a much bigger role than information.
Their calls to action can completely ignore rational logic, focusing on human emotions. Moreover, many campaigns do not mention specific products at all. They focus on lifestyles, visuals, and events, allowing consumers' minds to imagine the desired picture.
To define emotional appeal in advertising, it is also worth noting that it works not only with positive feelings. Negative emotions have a stronger impact on the human psyche; they are better remembered and form strong conditioned reflexes that allow you to create even closer connections with your customers.
Benefits of Advertisements with Emotional Appeal
According to Gitnux statistics, emotional appeal advertisements have a 2X higher conversion rate and bring 31% more revenue to businesses. Surveys show that a sense of connection with a brand increases the likelihood of repeat purchases by 1.5 times and recommending a product to friends by 3 times.
Emotional appeals in marketing also have other benefits, which we will discuss in more detail.
Increase the loyalty level
An emotional connection with a brand reduces the likelihood of customer outflow to competitors. According to Redpoint Global, it is important to 74% of consumers. They will buy products of their favorite brand and will not consider alternatives, even if they have a lower price or better characteristics.
Creating lasting associations
Emotional triggers work both ways. If we see an advertisement and feel joy, pity, admiration, or fear, these feelings will be evoked in the future by visual images from the same advertisement. This makes the brand recognizable to a wide audience.
Differentiation of your brand
Another positive point of emotionally appealing advertising is that it allows you to stand out among competitors who build their messages solely on product prices, characteristics, and functionality. Yes, this is a great tactic, but still, 85% of purchasing decisions are made subconsciously. By appealing to consumers' emotions, you can touch this level and thus get ahead.
8 Types of Emotional Appeal Advertising with Examples
The range of human feelings is extensive, and often, certain emotions can mix to form very complex and unpredictable reactions. Therefore, make sure that your ads using emotional appeals focus on one chosen emotion and deliver a clear, unequivocal message to your audience.
We will consider the main emotions that work effectively in advertising and examples of successful use of such appeals.
1. Happiness
Most people consider happiness one of their favorite values. By demonstrating this positive emotional appeal in your advertising, you will give your potential customers a powerful motivation to buy your product. The advantage of this approach is that it works almost without fail. The disadvantage is that most brands use it, so your message may get lost among other messages of this kind.
An example of the commercial use of happiness can be seen in the Johnnie Walker - Joy Will Take You Further advertising campaign. The famous whiskey producer created 50 videos showing happy people doing what they love and succeeding in it thanks to positive emotions. The success of the campaign is best evidenced by the reach of 270 million unique users.
2. Sorrow
Sorrow is the exact opposite of happiness. It would seem that you should avoid using it in advertising at all costs. However, one of the most interesting phenomena in human psychology is that we tend to avoid pain more than we tend to enjoy pleasure. Therefore, sadness can be an even more potent symbol than happiness.
Forbes provides a great example of using negative emotions. When a social campaign to ban plastic straws broadcast facts about the amount of garbage, its effectiveness was minimal. However, photos of injured marine animals increased the number of views tenfold, and donations increased hundreds of times.
If you also want to engage your audience with a social and environmental issue, Claspo will help you spread the message on your website. Our widgets can broadcast your call to action, create an emotional connection with your audience through visuals, and, most importantly, motivate your visitors to take action, such as going to a relevant page to learn more about an issue or donating to a non-profit organization you collaborate with.
3. Laughter
We always like to laugh with someone. So, when we see a funny ad, we will want to forward it to our friends and acquaintances, spreading the company's message and making the job easier for its marketers. Moreover, the images from the ad will often come to mind when we talk to friends and at social events.
One example of such an emotional appeal in advertising is Samsung's Join the Flip Side campaign. The videos show iPhone owners secretly dreaming of the Galaxy Z Flip folding smartphone and seeing its image in all objects around them. Thanks to the subtle humor and great scripts, the videos in this series have gone viral, with over 20 million views.
4. Anger
Anger is an extreme emotional reaction that often blocks out other feelings and forces us to direct all our efforts in only one direction. Usually, anger is a reaction to a demonstration of injustice or misconduct. Therefore, it is used in social marketing campaigns.
An appeal to anger can be seen in an advertisement for Patagonia, a manufacturer of sportswear and equipment. The company uses environmentally friendly production methods and invests in preserving the environment. It draws public attention to global issues by openly demonstrating their consequences in its marketing campaigns. This approach has helped the company build a very wide audience of loyal customers, which includes 11% of the US population.
5. Empathy
Empathy is common to 98% of people. It allows us to step into another person's shoes and understand their feelings and also evokes the desire to help and support them. This creates a powerful emotional connection that can be used in marketing.
One of the top examples of empathy-based advertising is the Always-Like a Girl campaign. It aims to challenge stereotypes about women and turn insults into compliments. Thanks to its compassion, this ad won several prestigious awards, including Cannes Lions and even an Emmy. The videos were seen by more than a billion people from 150 countries.
By appealing to your audience's empathy, you can encourage them to join your good cause and build a friendly and loyal community for your brand. This will undoubtedly strengthen your relationships with existing and potential customers.
6. Fear
Fear is one of the most powerful emotional appeals in advertising. It is a defense mechanism that helps us avoid dangerous situations, minimize risks, take care of ourselves, and protect our loved ones.
Proactiv TM often shows people with severe cases of acne and other skin diseases in its advertising. It emphasizes that this can lead to problems with communication, romantic relationships, and employment and offers its products as an effective solution.
We at Claspo are against such advertising strategies. First, such intimidation is a manipulation that cruelly plays on people's feelings. It has nothing to do with the ethical marketing we practice and promote to others. Second, by instilling fear in your advertising campaigns, you will cause your brand to be associated with negative emotions, which is hardly what you want.
There are more ethical and gentle ways to use fear in your marketing campaigns. For example, seasonal sales, limited-time offers, and exclusive collections - all these strategies appeal to the fear of missing out on something special and valuable and motivate consumers to buy. At the same time, your buyers are not intimidated, but on the contrary, they are happy that they hit the jackpot and take advantage of the opportunity that others missed.
7. Love
We are used to seeing romantic feelings as intimate and avoid showing them to others. But modern marketing takes a different approach. It encourages you to declare your love to the entire world, feeling joy, relief, and pride.
Back in 2015, Coca-Cola launched a campaign called Choose Happiness. It uses various messages, including showing your love, whatever it is. Coca-Cola posters often feature couples from different countries, cultures, and social groups. Although not everyone views the new campaign positively, it has been very effective overall. According to Marketing Week statistics, it increased the brand's advertising reach by 26.7%.
Your advertising campaign can be dedicated to love in all its manifestations without being large-scale like Coca-Cola. It is enough to add a heartwarming thematic image to your website widget simply and will already strengthen your campaign's emotional message. For example, this Claspo widget template is dedicated to Mother's Day and reflects the tenderness of a mother's love. It serves as a great reminder to please moms on this special day.
8. Trust
Trust is the feeling that drives us to buy products from a particular brand without exploring alternative offers. It is the main driver of loyalty, creating emotional attachment and the starting point of a long-term journey together. That's why almost all brands use it in their marketing strategy in one way or another.
An emotional appeal ad example of this kind is the videos of the antiseptic manufacturer Dettol. Instead of its products, it shows happy customers who share the company's values of quality and dedication. The heroes of the videos are small business owners from all over the UK. By demonstrating its reliability, the business created a sense of trust. This allowed it to take 10% - 80% of the market in different countries during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Emotional Appeal Advertising: how Claspo can help
It's simple—Claspo widgets are a marketing tool designed to draw site visitors' attention to your emotionally appealing campaign and increase its effectiveness. Thanks to our targeting, your messages can appeal to different audience segments, and our flexible display rules allow you to strategically fit widgets into the customer's journey on the site. Get started with our free plan and see what Claspo can do for your business.
