The World As I See It

Psychology in Marketing: Emotions

People experience emotions every day.  People are happy or sad.  They’re content or disgruntled.  They can be pleased or angry.  People also use the act of reason to try to understand something, but reason cannot be used for everything.  “The function of emotion is to make up for the insufficiency of reason…Reasoning tells consumers a great deal about the features of a product, but it is the link between reason and emotion that decides the actual trade-offs that are made” (O’Shaugnessy 27).  If the marketing gives a positive emotional experience to the consumer they will likely take notice.  The question now is how to stimulate emotions. 

“Anything that concerns us has the potential to arouse our emotions and, as Margalit says, emotions engage us with their objects in such a way as to make them lose their neutrality:  they become marked by being lovable, disgusting, exciting fearful and so on” (O’Shaughnessy 27).  Every person has a set of values determined by their background and their personality.  Someone raised in the United States will likely have very different values than someone raised in another part of the world.  “Knowing what potential buyers desire, fear and envy…enables advertisers to tailor message for maximum effectiveness” (Day 21). 

These values in your target audience must first be understood in order to create a positive emotional response to the product.  “Values open up a little-understood Pandora’s box of the human mind…values are one of a handful of customer ‘hot buttons’.  If you can identify and ‘press’ them in your promotion and service, you will gain competitive advantage” (Alder 56).  These hot buttons create different ways to touch people and to market a product.  Alder lists these as sensory, aspiration, cause, belonging, and family.  These hot buttons will be discussed further in an upcoming post.

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