Why are emotions important in your marketing strategy?

 

Most people like to think they live their lives and determine their reality based on their logic and reason. But in reality, most decisions are based on our emotions. We justify our purchases with logic but we buy on emotions. And the emotions that we buy on, are about either avoiding pain or gaining pleasure. Be careful what “buying decisions” your emotions prod you to make.

 

How this works?

If we see this is not a complex theory, it is how our brain works. for example when I say the word “dog” if you’re like most people you have a picture of a dog in your mind. Your picture might be your dog when you were a child, your neighbor's barking dog, your ex-girlfriend's dog, or perhaps Scooby-Doo, Whatever the case, you had a picture in your mind and that’s because we translate words into pictures.

Next in the process come feelings. Your "dog" picture might generate certain feelings for you. Perhaps you had memories of your childhood, you remember you haven't heard your neighbor's dog for a while or remember you saw your ex the last week in a coffee shop and so on, those thoughts turned into a picture which led to some feelings for you.

If some of these feelings are strong we'll go ahead to take action, maybe you felt some nostalgic and call your parents,  you ask to your neighbor about his dog or you just have the crazy idea to call your ex. It is important to mention we are not talking about thoughts, we are talking about feelings, thoughts stay in your head, but feelings lead you to take action.

 

How to apply this concept to your marketing strategy?

Some people think emotions has no place in a marketing strategy, maybe they are right if we were talking about manuals and employee handbooks, but keep them out of your sales and marketing department. The big mistake in marketing is being boring. The world is full of advertisements. If your message is boring, you don’t have a chance.

Think something exciting about your product, but be careful, your message doesn’t need to sound like late night television to provoke emotion, it is important to get a clear idea about your niche, keep in mind aspect such as gender, age, locations, language and so on, then find common aspects between them, what they love, and what they hate, what keeps them awake at nights. You’ve got to know what aspects of their life they’re emotional about. Here is where social media starts getting importance in your business, social media is more than likes and comments, this is a priceless source and you have access to this data anytime you want.

 

3 ways good design makes you happy

This is an amazing video about how we all make all of our decisions based on emotions, not logic, it could help you to get a solid idea about this topic and bring some inspiration to start an effective marketing strategy right away. Here Don Norman turns his incisive eye toward beauty, fun, pleasure and emotion, as he looks at design that makes people happy. He names the three emotional cues that a well-designed product must hit to succeed.