Insights

When did we as the consumer start to buy feeling, and not the product? Businesses want their consumers to feel good about what they want, without buyers’ remorse.

Therefore, emotional branding is defined as “the successful 

attachment to a specific emotion to a brand”; this is an effective marketing strategy (Roberts, 2004; Rossiter and Bellman, 2005). We buy things instinctively with the knowledge that once the item is purchased, it will help us feel better. Instead of success, the consumer then wants the feeling that comes with success, and would say to themselves, “yes, I did the right thing by buying this product”.

Brands only effectively sell emotion when the consumer trusts them. An example of this would be if the prices of the products are always low, or on sale – then the consumer would be more likely to come back, which also is a good thing called customer loyalty.

No matter the age or demographic of the consumer, there is a common underlying factor that we all have New Year’s Resolutions to become fit. Nike capitalizes on this resolution by tugging at the heartstrings of viewers’ during the Olympic commercials. If we as the consumer want to feel as good as the actors do, then we must buy those shoes.

The reason why brands are so good at selling us emotion is that they drive the very essence of emotion through desire. The want to have what they’re having, so the consumer could fit in with the overall population.

The average consumer sees about 10,000 ads per day – whether they are subliminally advertised or the in-your-face billboards on the freeway. Luckily for us, should we actively search for something on Google, we won’t buy ten thousand products a day. That’s the beauty of emotional branding – it only caters to us, the consumers, if we allow ourselves to be moved by it.