Over the years we’ve run lots (and I mean lots) of tests in the wild. Each one tells us something unique and interesting, but when we look back, we often find macro trends that tend to ring true across initiatives, customers, and industries. We’ve started collecting these trends and drawing connections between audiences and expectations. So, we’re starting a new series to highlight common insights across the work we do. We’re calling it: Apple Bites.
In each Apple Bite, we’ll break down general trends we find in our data, and what they mean when trying to reach audiences in a way that clicks.
Today’s Apple Bite is all about emotion.
With the right angle, it’s easy to evoke emotion. Pull the right chords, tap the right nostalgia. Emotion is powerful in marketing, but just how much is it actually capable of?
Emotion should amplify performance, not overshadow it. It can’t stand alone if you want people buying what you’re selling; the emotion has to be not only relevant to the consumer, but also the brand and the product itself.
It can be tempting to create a campaign that pulls at the heartstrings. Campaigns like that may get traction, but do they actually result in conversions? In our real-world research, we’ve found that even in the most emotionally driven categories, messaging must be anchored at its core to a tangible, product-provided truth.
Food & Bev is a particularly emotionally charged space.
There’s plenty of opportunity to leverage things like nostalgia and generational appeal successfully. It’s easy to connect brands to moments shared with friends and family, tapping into emotions of love and care, and evoking nostalgia for moments of fun, freedom, and connection. And while the idea of bringing emotion into campaigns is not at all a bad idea, and, indeed, may even look like a successful campaign – it’s not going to guarantee purchase.
In order for emotional appeal to affect audiences beyond merely personal resonance and really drive action, that emotion has to be paired with something tangible. Something they can only receive from this product. Whether it’s the taste of their youth, a new kind of experience, or the promise of community, emotion is only emotion until it becomes access to something they want.
Few consumers have much emotion about household goods.
They’re the everyday items we keep in a closet; the parts of our lives we look past and only seek out when we need them specifically. It’s the dish soap under the sink, the mop in the closet, the deodorant in the medicine cabinet. These items aren’t connected to powerful emotions and memories the way food is. They don’t move us, they’re just part of life.
It can be tempting to inject emotion into these products. A sense of accomplishment, lowered stress levels, feelings of peace, calm, and cleanliness. But how is this feeling earned by your product? Couldn’t any cleaning product lead to a cleaner home and a sense of accomplishment? To inject emotion into everyday items successfully, it requires consumers to understand how this specific product will take them to a place of relief in a way that’s better, faster, or simpler than another one. Promising the feeling of kicking back and relaxing alone won’t move the needle. It’s the how behind it.
Nothing quite gets the hackles up like being forced to look at one’s finances.
It can be tempting for financial companies to attempt to reframe the emotional association many consumers have around finance from one of anxiety or dread to something more like satisfaction or control. Promising a less stressful relationship to your finances is one thing, but how you intend to keep that promise is another aspect entirely. And it’s the more important one.
We’ve found that simply relying on the emotional appeal of stress-free finances doesn’t do enough. It needs to show up tangibly with real-life benefits. Exactly how will this product or service make my finances less stressful? Exactly how do you intend to improve the way I feel about my money?
🍎 Emotional messaging might stick with us, but it doesn’t always result in conversions. The key to doing it right lies in intentionality and purpose. What features of your product result in emotion? 🍎
These insights were all uncovered from testing in the wild. They’re based on real-world consumers’ values, observed over many studies where consumers actually live: on social media feeds. No matter what angle you’re looking to take for your next campaign (emotional or not), you can get ahead of what works and what doesn’t by testing your ideas in the wild before investing in ideas based on guesswork alone.