What is emotional marketing?
What a scale of brand attachment found, why different feelings change a decision differently, and where feeling and reasoning meet in a purchase.
Answer to the question
What is emotional marketing?
Emotional marketing is marketing that aims at the feelings a person holds toward a brand, such as attachment, and not only at beliefs about the product. Research shows attachment can be measured, differs from satisfaction and liking, and is linked to commitment, investment and purchases.
Key takeaways
- A five-study scale of emotional attachment to brands was distinct from satisfaction, involvement and brand attitudes, and was positively associated with brand commitment and investment (Thomson, MacInnis and Park, 2005).
- Park and colleagues (2010) define brand attachment, separate it from attitude strength, and argue that it predicts difficult behaviours, actual purchases, share of category requirements and reliance on the brand.
- A meta-analytic review of emotion and decision making found moderate to large effects overall, with discrete emotions such as anger and fear differing even at the same tone (Angie and colleagues, 2011).
- Rory Sutherland's Alchemy argues that feeling and reasoning work together in a purchase, and that a small act of care in a service can carry much of the emotional gain.
A scale of emotional attachment to brands proved separate from satisfaction and from brand attitude, which gives emotional marketing a target that a team can measure, track over time and set beside simpler scores.
The scale was built across five studies and was positively associated with commitment and investment. That is the research footing for communication aimed at the feeling a person holds toward a brand. Its authors did not claim that feeling replaces judgement of quality or price. Their result is narrower and more useful, since it shows that the bond a person feels is a thing in its own right, with its own measure, and that a team can aim at it on purpose.
Emotional marketing aims at a bond people can measure
Matthew Thomson, Deborah MacInnis and C. Whan Park developed the scale across their first two studies, checked its structure in a third, tested it against four behavioural indicators of attachment in a fourth, and in the fifth showed that it differs from satisfaction, involvement and brand attitudes. The fifth study also tied it to brand commitment and investment. That makes the target something other than a vague warmth: a bond with a structure, which can be told apart from liking.
The matter did not rest with one paper. A second paper, by Park, MacInnis, Priester, Eisingerich and Iacobucci, defined brand attachment and set it apart from attitude strength, then built and validated a short measure. The authors argue that attachment predicts intentions to perform difficult behaviours, actual purchases, the share of a category that a person gives to one brand among competitors, and how far a person relies on the brand to meet their needs. A campaign can raise liking without building a bond, which is why the distinction matters to anyone judging whether emotional marketing is doing its job.
The authors of the scale also discuss its limits and boundary conditions, and that is worth keeping in view. A measure of attachment describes people who already hold a bond, and so it is a reading of the result and not a recipe for the campaign. It does not show which advertisement or service moment created it. The research gives marketers a way to track the target over time, to compare it with simpler scores and to ask whether a change in attachment follows a change in what the brand does, and leaves the work of finding what moves it to testing in each market.
Anger and fear move a decision in different ways
Emotional marketing is sometimes treated as one thing, a pleasant mood laid over an advertisement. A meta-analytic review of how emotions affect judgement and decision making, by Amanda Angie, Shane Connelly, Ethan Waples and Vykinta Kligyte, points the other way. It found moderate to large effects overall. It also found that discrete emotions can differ even when they share the same pleasant or unpleasant tone, with anger and fear as the example, and that results varied with the study design and with how the emotion was induced.
A message therefore cannot simply aim at feeling good, because which feeling it stirs shapes what comes next, so the choice of feeling is a design decision made before any copy is written. How strongly it stirs it is a separate axis, set out in What is emotional arousal, and the way a feeling passes from one person to another is covered in What is emotional contagion. Neither tells a marketer which feeling to choose. They show that the choice has consequences.
Testing two emotional routes against each other teaches more than testing a single route against no emotion at all. The review also treats the method of inducing a feeling as a variable, which is a reminder that a feeling stirred in a laboratory and a feeling stirred by a shop, an app or a delivery are not the same event.
Feeling and reasoning share the work
Rory Sutherland, in Alchemy, takes issue with the habit of using the word emotional as a polite way of calling a decision foolish. His argument is that human problems have a perceptual and emotional side, and that a solution which ignores it is incomplete. He adds that people have little access to their own motives, so asking a buyer why they chose a brand yields reasons that were assembled after the choice. The point is not that stated reasons are false, only that they are an incomplete account of what moved the buyer. Emotional marketing, on this view, does not replace reasoning. It works on the part of the decision that the buyer cannot easily report.
That is also why Sutherland, who spent his career in advertising, treats the cheap and testable idea with more interest than the expensive and logical one: the logical option is the one every competitor has already tried, and the emotional gap is where a brand can still differ.
The book also gives a plain example of how little this can cost. Sutherland proposes that a repair engineer send a text message half an hour before arriving, which he expects to deliver most of the emotional and perceptual gain of a much narrower appointment window for a small share of the cost. He presents it as an idea to be tested against a control group, not as a proven result. The example shows that emotional marketing is not only advertising. A moment of care in the service itself can do the same work. Purpose is another way a brand makes an emotional offer, and Does Brand Purpose Move Buyers tests that offer against what buyers actually do.
Four questions worth asking before a plan leans on feeling
Each finding above turns into a question that a plan can answer, and a team can drop any question its own market data answers better than the literature does.
- Which feeling is the message meant to stir, and how strongly?
- Does the feeling attach to the brand, or only to the story around it?
- Is the bond being measured as attachment, apart from satisfaction and liking?
- Could a small act of care in the service deliver the same feeling at lower cost?
Whatever the answers, the plan is judged by purchases, by how much of the category spending it wins over a season, and by whether those results hold once the campaign has stopped running.
Common questions
What is emotional marketing?
It is marketing that aims at the feelings a person holds toward a brand, such as attachment, and not only at beliefs about the product. Research by Thomson, MacInnis and Park shows that emotional attachment can be measured and differs from satisfaction.
How does emotional marketing differ from ordinary advertising?
Ordinary advertising can inform or persuade on features. Emotional marketing targets the bond itself. Park and colleagues argue that attachment predicts purchases and share of category requirements, which liking alone does not capture.
Does every emotion work the same way in a purchase?
No. A meta-analytic review found moderate to large effects of emotion on decisions overall, and found that discrete emotions such as anger and fear can differ even when they share the same tone.
Is emotional marketing only about advertising?
No. Rory Sutherland's Alchemy gives a service example, a text message sent before an engineer arrives, as a low-cost way to improve how a customer feels. He proposes testing it before relying on it.
Sources
Sutherland, R. Alchemy. Seed book; vault hub Books/Alchemy.
Thomson, M., MacInnis, D. J., & Park, C. W. (2005). The ties that bind: Measuring the strength of consumers' emotional attachments to brands. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 15(1), 77-91. doi:10.1207/s15327663jcp1501_10 https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327663jcp1501_10
Park, C. W., MacInnis, D. J., Priester, J., Eisingerich, A. B., & Iacobucci, D. (2010). Brand attachment and brand attitude strength: Conceptual and empirical differentiation of two critical brand equity drivers. Journal of Marketing, 74(6), 1-17. doi:10.1509/jmkg.74.6.1 https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkg.74.6.1
Angie, A. D., Connelly, S., Waples, E. P., & Kligyte, V. (2011). The influence of discrete emotions on judgement and decision-making: A meta-analytic review. Cognition & Emotion, 25(8), 1393-1422. doi:10.1080/02699931.2010.550751 https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2010.550751