Why an Emotional Appeal in Advertising Is So Important
Have you ever scrolled on social media, saw an ad that pulled at your heartstrings or made you giggle with laughter, and instantly bought something?
If so, that was the work of emotional advertising, part of the more general concept of marketing communications. As the name suggests, emotional ads use emotions to connect with consumers and entice them to buy a product or service.
And it has a high success rate!
Thanks to our natural emotional responses, consumers are more likely to make an emotional purchase than an informed purchase. With that said, let’s explore the importance of emotional appeal in advertising.
Understanding Emotional Appeals in Advertising
The emotional marketing strategy aims to create an emotional connection between the target audience and the product or service in the advertisement to influence the consumer’s decision-making. The consumer will actually make decisions subconsciously, without the rational brain even knowing it!
The Difference Between Rational and Emotional Appeals
Rational appeal in advertising focuses on logic and reasoning. These ads persuade consumers to make a purchase decision using rational thoughts or those based on the facts and features of the product or service. Rational ads may highlight the following:
- Benefits
- Functionality
- Price
- Quality
Conversely, emotional appeal focuses on evoking an emotional response and getting the consumer to purchase based on desire. The power of emotional advertising effectiveness surpasses that of rational appeal.
The concepts come from the three persuasive techniques: pathos, logos, and ethos. Pathos appeals to emotion, logos appeals to logic, and ethos conveys credibility and authority.
Examples of Emotional Appeals in Advertising
One of the best-known marketing campaigns that uses positive emotions is Coca-Cola. Their historic “I’d like to buy the world a Coke” campaign invokes happiness and creates a positive association with their product. This persuades consumers to buy Coca-Cola and share it with their loved ones.
Dove’s Real Beauty campaign also used happiness to show that others typically view us more beautifully and happily than we envision ourselves. The campaign was a massive success and still widely circulates on the Internet today.
Nike’s advertisement with Colin Kaepernick used a sense of pride to make its target audience feel good about the brand and themselves for supporting the company. Pride is a valuable emotion to help build brand loyalty. Further, celebrity endorsements, like those from Kaepernick, can help elicit a stronger consumer response when combined with emotional appeal.
On the other hand, Apple uses desire for the newest technology to get consumers to buy the latest iPhone model yearly. Even if there aren’t significant differences between the models, consumers are always lining up for the next iPhone!
Anti-smoking campaigns use fear appeal ads, showing rotting teeth and black lungs, to convince people not to smoke or to quit.
Political campaigns will use comparison to highlight the positive attributes of their campaign and the negative qualities of their opponents.
ASPCA and the UN World Food Program (WFP) often invoke sadness by showing abused animals or testimonials from hungry children to get consumers to spring into action and donate to their campaigns.
Does it really work, though?
It sure does! The New York Times reported that ASPCA raised $30 million from one campaign alone!
The Types of Emotional Appeals and How to Use Them
There are two primary types of emotional appeals in advertising: positive and negative. Some examples include:
- Adventure
- Anger
- Comparison
- Fear
- Greed
- Guilt
- Happiness
- Humor
- Love
- Outrage
- Pride
- Sadness
- Trust
Both are powerful tools to use when creating emotional appeal advertising.
However, when consumers have a consistent negative emotional experience with your product or service, it can be bad for your brand awareness. So, while negative emotions can be a powerful tool in emotional appeal, you shouldn’t always use them in your campaigns.
Whichever emotion you use for a campaign, ensure you use the same appeal across all marketing channels. Integrated marketing services can help you achieve this.
Tips for Using Emotional Appeals in Advertising
So, how do you go about using emotional appeals in ad campaigns? Follow these tips to help you create emotional content that will influence consumer behavior.
Create an Objective
The objective of your ad is its purpose. What action do you want the viewer to take after seeing the advertisement?
Once you know the objective, you can identify which emotions will help accomplish that goal. The feeling should be appropriate in the ad’s context. For instance, using happiness and excitement in an advertisement for an organization like Save the Children would be off-putting.
Use Visuals
Visuals are imperative for helping consumers see your message. You should use pictures and videos in your advertisements to elicit a stronger emotional response.
Observe Your Competition
Monitoring your competition can help you stay on top of market trends and allow you to form better marketing strategies. If your competitors use a specific emotion, you should consider utilizing the feeling or a similar one, especially if the consumer response is positive.
Track Changes in Customer Behavior
Spending habits and consumer actions change over time. This means you must pay attention to changes in your audience’s behavior, so your advertisements don’t miss the mark.
Remember that Pepsi commercial with Kendell Jenner? The one where she stopped a protest and created a bond between protesters and the police with just a single soda?
You don’t want your advertisement to end up with a response like that commercial did. The backlash was harsh and lasted several months.
Conduct market research and perhaps even hold focus groups regularly to ensure you are current on consumer spending habits.
Additionally, since so many different types of advertising exist, you want to ensure you continue to advertise on the right platforms, whether it’s on social media, television, or elsewhere. Research the best places to promote your business to achieve your goals.
Let’s Have a Chat About Your Advertising Campaign
Emotional appeal in advertising has the power to convince consumers to buy your product or service at a moment’s notice. You're missing out on precious consumer dollars if you don’t incorporate emotions into your ads.
To improve your advertising campaigns and attract more customers, let’s have a chat. Our team at EraserFarm can help create emotional advertisements that will have consumers lining up to purchase from your business!
What are Creative Services | Your Guide to Creative Services
PR Newswire reports that the creative agency market will have an incremental spend of more than $320 billion between 2021 and 2026. The increased spending for creative services proves that businesses need fresh ideas to keep their customers interested and engaged.
But what are creative services exactly?
Creative services are basically creativity for hire - like writing, design, and production - that give your business some oomph. They handle the creative messaging that lets the world know your business exists. You can tap into these services at design studios, advertising agencies, and branding agencies. Creative agencies play a vital role in helping businesses stand out in their market and increase profits. So why should your business consider hiring one? Let’s see what makes them worth your while!
What Services Does A Creative Agency Offer?
A creative agency provides marketing initiatives and creative solutions to help businesses improve their marketing, ad presence, and brand identity. They can help your business with any creative strategy, work, or promotion. This includes:
- Advertising, brand, content, marketing, or social media strategy
- Measurement and analysis
- Content creation
- Communication services such as media buys, paid placement, sponsored content, influencer marketing, and PR
You’ll find the following positions in a creative services company:
- Account manager
- Art director
- Brand and content strategist
- Copywriter
- Creative director
- Campaign director
- Editor
- Graphic designer
- Producer
- Videographer
- Web designer or developer
How a full-service creative agency provides its services can vary from company to company. For example, some creative agencies work within a specific industry, such as plumbing or HVAC. Other agencies may only work in-house for a large corporation. At EraserFarm, we’ve worked with many clients in diverse industries, such as food and beverage, medical, and nonprofit sectors to invigorate the brand voice and get messaging out there to be seen and heard. We love showcasing what our teams have created - take a look at our creative work to see some of our best creative projects to date. Creative agencies can offer an extensive range of services, but we’ll focus on four of the most common services available below.
Advertising Services
Most businesses don’t have the knowledge or bandwidth to create and execute a successful advertising campaign. They also often know what they want to say, but don’t know how to say it. Thus, a creative agency will generate advertising ideation based on market research to understand the target audience and oversee the execution of the campaign. And they’ll do it in a way that sounds like your authentic brand. Depending on the campaign, the agency may need to hire out some of the services. For instance, the designers at a creative agency can create a billboard, but they may need to hire another company to print and hang it.
Consulting Services
You can hire a creative agency to consult with your business on a variety of topics. Some common examples include:
- New products or services
- How to lower marketing overhead
- New markets and demographics to target
If you require consulting services for many aspects of your business, a full-service agency in your area is your best bet.
Design Services
If your business needs to revamp its image or create new promotional materials, a creative agency can help. Whether you need a new logo, design templates, or even new signage, you’ll want the design expertise of a creative or design agency.
Digital Services
Digital marketing has increased global touchpoints, but IT demands can be intimidating unless you have experience in the field. With the growing importance of technology, many creative agencies now offer expert digital services. Using digital services can create an entirely new user experience. Even making technical advances to your website or app can go a long way with new and returning customers. Digital offerings can also give your customer an immediate answer or pathway to a solution for those with an urgent need, or even entertain them.
What’s the Difference Between a Creative Agency & Other Agencies?
A creative services company is an umbrella term that can include other agencies. Different agencies you may be familiar with include:
- Ad agencies
- Design agencies
- Digital agencies
- PR agencies
- SEO agencies
- Social media agencies
While these agencies have a specialized focus, a creative agency usually encompasses more than one of these services. For instance, when a business works with a digital agency, they are working with a company that focuses on a specific digital space instead of a company that has a more diverse list of services.
How Can a Creative Services Company Help Your Business?
There are many ways creative services can help grow your business. Below we highlight the top five benefits to consider.
Brand Strategy & Identity
Your brand identity drives every aspect of your business, such as
- Your tone
- The design of your website and business cards
- How employees speak to consumers
- Your pitch to prospective clients
A creative agency can help you craft a brand identity that aligns with your target audience. Then they will create a brand strategy that is the driving force behind your business. This includes everything from copywriting and graphic design to brand standards and competitive analysis.Having a polished brand identity and strategy can help make your business recognizable and memorable.
Brand Engagement
After implementing your brand strategy, a creative agency can help you analyze how well customers respond to it. Examining and interpreting data is crucial in driving brand engagement.Your business can use the data to take actionable steps toward increasing customer engagement.
Video Marketing
Video marketing often helps improve a business’s success on social media and search results. Data shows that video content generates leads and enhances engagement. Although anyone can do their own video production, having the professionals of a creative agency handle your production is best. They can take care of the strategy, scriptwriting, post-production, and everything in between. This will give your video marketing what’s called “high production value,” so that your messaging shines through and gets your customers interested in what you have to offer.
Social Media
Social media marketing may seem easy to handle in-house, but realistically, building a strong social media presence takes a lot of time and effort. When you join forces with a creative agency, you don’t have to worry about spending hours figuring out which platforms to join or what content to create. Instead, a creative agency can easily help your business develop a winning social media strategy.
Digital Marketing
The world of digital marketing is admittedly overwhelming, making it difficult to know where to spend your ad dollars. However, a creative agency can use data to understand where your customers are on the internet and how to reach them best.
Should you invest in SEO, content marketing, or PPC marketing? The professionals at a creative agency will be able to tell you, and they’ll craft a plan to maximize that investment.
Get Started With Creative Services in Tampa
At EraserFarm, we offer a personalized, boutique creative agency experience. Want to create brand loyalists? We know how to do it. Need help with an overall marketing strategy? We got you! Our agency is small - on purpose. Our team works closely with each client to create tailored marketing and creative solutions that build an emotional connection with your consumer.
We’d love to have a chat. Reach out to us today to book in, and find out how we can help grow your business.
What Is an Advertising Agency? | The Ultimate Ad Agency Guide
Today, quality alone is insufficient to sustain a business; you also need to portray your products and services in a manner that attracts customers. If you do not have your own marketing staff specializing in this area, it can be difficult to achieve effective results with your advertising. The solution, oftentimes, is outsourcing your advertising tasks to an ad agency.
Advertising agencies are a type of creative agency that ensure your products and services attract your target audiences while staying consistent with your brand’s image. Their aim is to create impactful, visually powerful content that captures your target market’s attention and brings customers to you. Let’s look at their work in detail:
The Objectives of an Advertising Agency
Your advertising agency’s job is not as simple as to entice people to buy your products; in addition, their focus is on generating brand awareness and putting your story out in a way that you gain loyal audiences. While their primary goal is to get viewers to respond to your call to action, their secondary role is far more intricate – and perhaps more critical – and involves influencing people’s attitudes and perceptions.
An effective advertising agency will keep your brand in the minds of your consumers, ensuring that when the consumer thinks about buying a product or service in your business niche, your business will be the first one they consider.
The Functions of an Advertising Agency
The services performed by an advertising agency can include:
Market Research
No effective advertisement can be planned without knowing your industry’s current market landscape. You may not have the best technology to stay on top of all market trends on your own, but an advertising agency makes it their job to know.
Advertising agency experts monitor trends in consumer preferences and know what elicits the right responses. More importantly, they track your competitor’s marketing strategies to design advertising campaigns that distinguish you from other companies in your niche. As a result, your campaigns are planned after carefully considering all external and internal market factors.
Design
Designing an effective advertisement is arguably the most important yet challenging aspect of marketing. It’s resource-intensive, time-consuming, and requires careful planning. It’s an advertising agency’s job to design ads that are impactful but stay true to your brand’s values and stories. They won’t make you choose between your brand’s culture and their version of a good ad; instead, they will integrate both of these into a combination that lands you customers who share your values.
Media Planning
A well-designed advertisement will be of no use if you do not use the right platforms to leverage it. Advertising agencies know the trends in electronic media consumption, so they’ll design your campaigns accordingly. This goes beyond looking at popularity statistics, including your audience’s age, demographics, geographical region, and your product’s niche. Their strategic approach will ensure that your efforts and budget are spent in the right direction.
Endnote
To a business owner, their brand means more than a source of income. The brand story and connection – and the effort that goes behind design and creation – can be hard to portray if you do not have the right talent working for you.
An advertising agency will take this burden off of you and use its expertise to create content that represents you and lets consumers build connections with you. We’ll recommend that you outsource your marketing campaigns to experts so that you can focus on what you’re best at. Contrary to popular belief, the smaller an agency, the more closely it will work with you.
Start the discussion today and contact EraserFarm for a consultation with a multifaceted advertising agency dedicated to communicating your brand’s unique personality.
Small Searches For Innovative Uses Of Media In Places Big Can't.
You’ll all be happy to hear this will be a shorter blog than most. But, in my opinion, a valuable and important one, nonetheless. The use of media to your advantage creatively. Oh sure, I could make this longer by using really prodigious words to pontificate and expatiate my point but that would be a rather diaphanous display of elaborateness, don’t you think? I’ll stick with what I’m good at. Small stuff. Like words.
So, onto my topic. When I say finding innovative uses of media that big can’t, I am not implying that bigger shops can’t. They certainly do it and do it exceptionally. What I am saying is Small can get into the nitty gritty for clients trying to squeeze every last drop out of their smaller advertising budgets. Big simply cannot operate in that space profitably. Small can operate in both.
SOCIAL MEDIA
Instead of standard posting, which is all well and good, why not play with the space you’re in. There are so many things you can do visually and breaking the Facebook or Instagram wall is one of them or using the Pinterest environment to surprise and delight your customers, like this Bonefish Grill ad we created that looked like 2 ads in one.
A traditional medium, yes. But not an excuse to not look for new ways to optimize your messaging beyond the, well, traditional ad. Try playing with page numbers of the magazine or running a classified like we did for Intrepid for roughly $200 that garnered a flood of calls into the sales team leading to several boat sales. Or how we created an insert on a cocktail napkin? Or how about instead of a full-page ad, is there an idea in dispersing your messaging in small spaces around a single publication? Thinking this way could get more bang for you messaging buck.
TV
We’ve taken existing footage of food porn that everyone does and simply tweaked the audio to be highly unexpected based on an idea that grabbed attention immediately. It’s as simple as that. FedEx did a wonderful Super Bowl spot years ago using just the color bars saying they used another service to ship their commercial and it never arrived at the TV station.
DIGITAL
Lots of opportunity here. And lots of great work being done here all around. I am particularly fond of a standard display ad created by Pringles that just grabs you and keeps you clicking. Small price. Big reward. Even little ol’ us created some more engaging standard-sized banners to help save the African Elephant. Or turning your mouse into a magnifying glass to find the reclusive North American Gray Wolf.
DIRECT MAIL
Boring? Why does it have to be? We do quite a lot of direct mail for our client KFB Law and we always try to make the piece interactive and fun and now even link to an online landing page to further the experience on their website.
Well I believe I need to stop because it seems this turned out to be a long blog after all. So, to all out there, please allow me to extenuate my sincerest reparations in audible form. Sorry, couldn’t help myself.
If you’d like to see how we can do this kind of work for you, let’s grab some coffee, say hello and discuss a project we can work on together. Email my partner Cindy at cindy@eraserfarm.com and let’s get to it.