How ads and influencers can associate brand and emotions ?

Published on September 08, 2020  - Updated on December 04, 2023

How ads and influencers can associate brand and emotions ?

Emotional marketing has to be used during the communication process to associate your brand with specific (mainly positive) emotions…

How to use emotions to reduce the churn rate?

Several tools exist for doing emotional marketing and reducing its churn rate.

As said before in previous articles, emotions are considered as one of the new key factors in customer satisfaction. But before managing the customers, you need to convince them to buy and experiment with your product or service. Advertising is done for that. Successful advertising is emotionally loaded. Did you know that on 10 reasons to buy, 8 are emotional?

Importance of emotional design

The evolution of consumer expectations has transformed product design from simple functionality to a profound consideration of emotional aspects. Today, the importance of emotional design in user experience is undeniable. Instead of being limited to criteria of efficiency and speed, brands are now required to understand and respond to the emotional behaviors and expectations of users. Placing humans at the core of digital thinking and strategy becomes essential to create products and services that not only function well but also evoke positive emotional responses.

Benefits of developing emotional design

Emotional design humanizes and personalizes the product, creating positive emotions in the user. This makes it easier for users to remember the product, establish a conscious or unconscious connection with the brand, and engage with its community. Emotional design contributes to user retention. The trust generated by positive emotions and personalization enables the establishment of unique interactions with the brand's target audience. Additionally, with emotional design, a more involved user can quickly become a brand ambassador.

Emotional design can also be a differentiating factor, allowing a brand to stand out from the competition. Implementing a marketing strategy based on sensory experience and emotional aspects can help make an offer stand out. Consumers pay special attention, even more credibility, to messages that provide them with a unique sensation.

Elements to create emotional design

• Humanize the brand
• Personalize messages
• Create memorable moments
• Use multiple channels
• Respect the editorial guidelines

Criteria to consider

• Relevance of the content to the brand's activity.
• A semantic field consistent with the product or product range of the brand.
• Distribution channels adapted to the target audience.
• Harmonized media (maintaining a link between editorial and graphic guidelines).
• Tone used, a factor with a strong impact on user emotions.

Examples of emotional design

Google

Google regularly changes its logo on its search engine. These Doodles surprise users, create curiosity, and even generate anticipation about the next logo and the occasion.

Apple

Apple, quant à lui, soigne son design d'une manière épurée. La fameuse pomme, emblème de la marque, est déclinée sous plusieurs formes et couleurs, mais toujours en respectant les mêmes codes design. L'utilisateur se sent rassuré et lui accorde sa confiance.

Nike

Nike effectively uses emotional design to inspire people to be active and achieve their goals, eliciting positive emotions like motivation, confidence, and pride. The "Just Do It" campaign is iconic for its positive and motivational messages.

Coca Cola

Coca-Cola is known for its classic and timeless design. The iconic shape of its glass bottle, coupled with its distinctive red logo, evokes feelings of happiness, refreshment, and friendliness.

Tiffany & Co.

The luxury brand Tiffany & Co. is renowned for its emotional design associated with elegance and sophistication. Their famous blue box, a symbol of luxury and romance, evokes positive emotions and a sense of exclusivity.

LEGO

LEGO is recognized for its emotional design centered around creativity and play. The colorful and versatile LEGO bricks inspire imagination, offering a playful experience that brings joy and pleasure to both children and adults.

Take benefit from the emotional feedbacks of influencers.

Note that the ad campaigns should always be in line with the real experience. Because beyond Ad campaigns, more and more the real experience is what matters for customers.

To demonstrate and put forward the real product experience, different tools exist. One of the ways that have greatly developed in recent years: partnerships with influencers (or specialists in your fields… that should have both aura and
charism).

Asking influencers to share their experience is a great way to let the final customer dream, to create positive emotions around the brand in the consumer’s mind.

You may naturally take benefit from the large network of those influencers. Indeed, among the big number of fans that are following the influencers, most will tend to like what he/she likes, to imitate him/her.

It will therefore be easier to provoke emotions in consumers. In addition, there are now micro-influencers on social networks which makes it possible to limit the costs of these campaigns and to reach consumers at a reduced price.

Photo by Mateus Campos Felipe

Marketing and influencers: trends in 2024

Trend 1: Paid UGC for authenticity

In 2024, the rise of "Paid User-Generated Content (UGC)" sees brands seeking authentic content created by customers or influencers to enhance their credibility. Published on official brand channels, this approach acts as social proof, thereby improving conversion rates.

Trend 2: Strengthening ties with communities

The trend of cultivating relationships with influencers with engaged communities continues in 2024. Brands aim to establish their own communities, fostering closeness and interaction with individuals who share the same values. Active management and exclusive content strengthen brand loyalty.

Trend 3: Long-term collaborations

Long-term collaborations become crucial in 2024, highlighting the importance of authenticity and trust in influencer marketing. These partnerships strengthen connections, generate more robust sales results, and improve brand understanding. Brands benefit from better negotiations and a higher return on investment (ROI).

Trend 4: Multiplatform content strategy

In 2024, influencer marketing evolves into a multiplatform strategy, surpassing the limits of individual platforms. Brands adopt a cross-platform approach by collaborating with influencers present on multiple channels, reaching a wider and more diverse audience. This approach enhances influencers' credibility through their versatility and expertise in different content formats.

Influencer marketing regulated by law

In the field of influencer marketing, the year 2023 was marked by Law No. 2023-451 on June 9, 2023, aimed at regulating the influencer market. Following its enactment, content creators were legally obliged to specify when their content involved paid collaborations. A simple mention, but one that divides opinions. In France, paid promotion often carries a negative connotation, partly because consumers undervalue the content creator profession and feel manipulated by such publications.

The power of multichannel in influencer campaigns

In 2022, 81.5% of influencers conducted their campaigns on Instagram. Since then, TikTok, already a significant influencer platform, has experienced impressive growth. According to Brand Finance, from 2022 to 2023, with a 215% increase, TikTok is the world's fastest-growing company. Conversely, the increasing lack of visibility on Instagram frustrates content creators, prompting them to diversify their distribution channels. This is good news for brands, as multichannel strategies multiply views and significantly enhance the impact of influencer campaigns.

In conclusion, in 2024, the keyword for influencer campaigns will be authenticity. As consumers, we've never needed a return to authenticity more. Be creative, carefully choose influencers to collaborate with, and prioritize extensive interaction while optimizing content distribution across multiple social networks.

The word-of-mouth impact: free the feedbacks!

But beyond influencer marketing, is your average customer not also your best influencer?

Did you know that every emotion is the reflection of a deep need of the customers? And, by chance, for human beings, happiness is triggering the need to share and build social links. So the real question is: how to enforce your customer to share their experience with others?

Is the experience you propose so good that the customers HAVE NO CHOICE, they are so contempt that they have to share it?

If influencers have a role to play in emotional marketing, word-of-mouth is also a safe bet. Indeed, customer reviews or recommendations from friends about a
brand or product carries even more weight than that of an influencer whose
objectivity we could question.

This is particularly the case with influencers who do many sponsored partnerships with brands, we can easily ask the question of the impact of the partnership on the opinion that the influencer gives us.

In contrast, customer reviews and friend recommendations may seem often more objective, all the more now, when the actual purchase has been verified. You may take benefit from the high visibility of the big volume of feedbacks.

Thousands of customer reviews are posted on the internet every day and each one of them reveals an emotion, whether it is negative or positive. These emotions conveyed through these comments will surely tip the scales in the right way, or the wrong way, when a consumer has to choose whether or not to trust the brand when buying the product. That is called the emotional
inertia of the customer experience.

We can take the simple example of a restaurant, today it is very rare that we go to eat in an establishment without having first read the opinions on it.

If you are looking for a pizzeria and you find one rated 5 stars and one rated 2 stars, there is little chance that you will choose the one with 2 stars…

Feedbacks are now very important in the restaurant or hotel choice.

The new circle of emotions: from brand ads to product experience, from product
experience to feedback (influencers), from feedback to product experience
(average customer): the common link will always be the emotion.

This is why it is essential to encourage customers to share their experience as well as their emotions through comments. This is a very effective way to attract new consumers because it is a transmission of emotion from your current customers to your potential new customers.

Marketers: Be convinced that Emotions and Sales are deeply linked in the long run! From brand ads to product experience, from product experience to feedback, from feedbacks to product experience: the common link of this virtuous circle that is generating (customer acquisition) or consolidating (customer loyalty) sales and business is the emotion that is experienced by your
customers.

How to manage emotions in an effective and easy way?

Thanks to these different ways, you will be able to make your customers feel strong emotions and thus promise them a positive experience! To check which emotions are linked with ads or conversations, some tools exist that automatically measure the emotions in the feedbacks, and let you better monitor the consolidated results beyond them.

The startup Q°emotion proposes solutions to easily monitor customer emotions in the customer experience, to monitor the emotional branding, to limit churn rate, and improve the customer journey.

Among them, Q°emotion offers full revolutionary dashboards that let you easily manage emotions into the ad but also during the product experience. CXinsights.io, the Q°emotion solution emotionally analyses customer feedbacks before (ads), during, and after the customer experience, based on social networks like youtube comments, internet reviews (Google my business, Tripadvisor, Amazon reviews, G2, etc.) or satisfaction surveys (from an excel file, or based on platforms like SurveyMonkey, Qualtrics, TypeForm, Google Forms, etc.).