Take a look at this commercial that Nike did with Michael Jordan and Spike Lee back in the late 80’s:
Now, see this from 2018:
Besides all obvious differences, such as video quality and styles, there’s one thing more relevant: the message.
See, both commercials are trying to sell Nike basketball shoes. Both show the greatest players of their time — Jordan and LeBron. But one does it in a more obvious way.
So, what has happened in the last 20–30 years that made the message change? Some could say that the older version could be more effective, conversion-wise with a clear CTA, nowadays that brands have only 3–6 seconds — i.e. pre-roll and bumper ads — to convince people to pay attention to their message convincing to buy their products.
What really happened is that Nike started to use a much more effective psychological marketing approach: Emotional Targeting.
Not that the Jordan 80’s commercial isn’t effective. It uses too a psychological trigger, called social proof. It sums up like: You can’t do things like Michael, but you can use the same shoes he uses. Buy it, this is the closest you can get to be like Mike.
But the 2018 commercial appeals more to emotions, through a fast-paced storytelling of Dante, a boy that goes from playing in the streets to a teen getting better at basketball, until he becomes a young man playing side to side of his idol LeBron. It’s a dream coming true. Which person wouldn’t want that? Achieve success.
That’s why storytelling works so well. It’s a powerful way to engage your customers. Research by Pringle & Field found that “emotional campaigns outperform on almost every metric,” including revenue, profit, and share gain.
Emotional targeting produces authentic content that speaks the consumer’s language, wants and needs. It touches people’s hearts and propels them to purchase the brands products.
The 4 steps of Emotional Targeting
The main goal of using Emotional targeting while creating a brand’s marketing strategy, is to put the customer in the center of a transaction, not the product. The customers don’t purchase products, they purchase experiences. They purchase a better versions of themselves.
Most traditional — better description would be old — marketing methodologies focus on WHAT users buy. On the other hand, emotional targeting methodology focuses on WHY users buy.
Let’s be honest. Me, you and many other people that we know have the same attitude about brands: We don’t really care how the product or service is so awesome, or the best, or unique, or the first or the only one.
Our brain operates in a way to care about ourselves — and sometimes about our beloved ones. Awesome, the best, unique, the first, the only one are qualities that are more appealing when addressed to us as individuals.
The emotional targeting methodology focuses on the emotional reason behind a purchase. The goal is to show the users to themselves as their best selves if they become your customer.
This methodology has a framework, originally created by Talia Wolf, that consist in a 4-step process that includes:
- Emotional Competitor Analysis
- Emotional SWOT
- Emotional Content Strategy
- Testing
1. Emotional Competitor Analysis
The first step on creating a Emotional Targeting strategy is to see how competitors do it.
Typically, you have to analyze 10–15 competitors, so you can identify patterns. The objective of doing so are two:
- Understand where the market is emotionally
- Understand where your brand fits in
One important thing to keep in mind: you don’t have to analyze only direct competitors. You can analyze other brands that are targeting the same specific audience that you’re creating a strategy. (i.e. Acer, Coca-Cola, Mcdonalds and even BMW are targeting Esports audience).
There are four parameters in this Analysis:
- Message: What is the main thing they are saying?
- Color: Color has a emotional effect on us. Try to understand the psychological use of it, what emotion it conveys.
- Image: Is one of the first things people notice. So, what kind of emotion does the image used by the competitor is been created?
- Emotional Triggers: How is the competitor is trying to make customers feel?
To better understand how to make this analysis, here are some examples from Nike’s competitors:
Under Armour Emotional Analysis:
“You are the sum of all your training. Rule your self. I will”
- Message: Hard work. It’s about the hard work that makes you better.
- Color: Blue (trust) + Red (Power)
- Image: Repetition. It conveys the idea of training a lot to become better
- Emotional Triggers: Competition, self-improvment and Leadership
Adidas Emotional Analysis:
“This is fun taken seriously. This is about being your better self.”
- Message: A competitive hobby taken. It’s about achieving your best.
- Color: Blue in dark tones (high competence, sophistication)
- Image: Repetition. It conveys the idea of training a lot to become better
- Emotional Triggers: self-Competition, Improvement and Acheivement
Emotional Analysis Conclusions
Once you do your research over competitors, it’s time to take some conclusions on what is the industry main emotional approach. In this case, the examples shown from Adidas and Under Armour are mostly about Competition and Improvement.
So, the next step is to understand if the strategy that you’re going to create is following the same approach or trying to stand out in another direction.
2. Emotional SWOT
As a normal SWOT analysis, you’re going to map out the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats of you brand. But instead, you’re seeing the emotional part of it.
You can use this Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions to help you describe the emotions and understand their relations and levels:
But most effective is to some cognitive biases to the describe the SWOT analysis, because they help you get to some practical psychological outputs. You can see a extensive list of them here.
So, still sticking to our Nike example, this is how you can make this analysis over the overall sports apparel industry:
- Strengths: Most brands are well-known worldwide. People trust in the quality of their products and are mostly well accepted.
- Weaknesses: All brands tend to create marketing message using a motivational approach of self-improvement. This seems as a status quo in the industry.
- Opportunities: Using situations that make customers feel part of something greater or related to a top athlete is a good opportunity of messaging. Other less used is some kind of DIY approach, that could be used to create a sense of pride of creating something, such as making the design of your own shoes.
- Threats: Some people can feel that this brands are for people that are more related to sports and the competition part of it. If a product is sold as high performance, some people can feel intimidated to buy it.
So instead of analyzing the features and the pricing of your competitors and yourself, with the Emotional SWOT, we’re going to be talking about ourselves and the industry.
By understanding how our brains process information and make decisions, we are able to target users and steer them into becoming customers.
3. Emotional Content Strategy
Once you’ve thoroughly analyzed the industry’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, it’s time to develop a responsive emotional content strategy.
You have to combine the weaknesses with the threats to tackle the things the other brands aren’t solving and that can be of great value to the customers.
In the example we’ve been doing, the motivational tone and the self-doubt are things that we can use to start thinking our emotional content strategy for a new sports brand.
It’s a good rule of thumb to use more than one emotional trigger to create it. We have to answer this question: How do we want our customers to feel? How do we want them to think about us?
So in our example, could be something like this:
- The customers must feel: Secure and Happy with their self
- The customers must see us as: Empathetic and non-judging
So, with that, imagine a sports brand that values more the well-being, creativeness, the joy and acceptance. The kind of brand that says that participating is more important than winning.
If Nike’s slogan is “Just do it”, this fictional brand’s slogan would be “Just be you”.
Testing
Emotional targeting is done through an extensive and ongoing process of research and analysis. Everything related to a specific campaign, from the location of text to the colors on certain buttons, is examined, tested, and validated in order to best engage your desired audience.
The last thing you should do when establishing your emotional targeting strategy is to put it to the test and measure how well the decisions you previously made are being accepted by your target audience.
In order to do that, here are the main things you have to analyze: Emotions, Elements, Words, Visual and Color. You can see in the image below how to map it out in a framework:
Running A/B tests, asking people near you or doing customer research are some examples of testing approaches.
Emotional Targeting isn’t something that only big brands such as Nike can do. It’s a good practice to change your perception when creating marketing strategy, redirecting it from the center of the product to the customer.
These insights can help you expand your target audience, engage your customers, and increase revenues.
This was part 11 of 12 in a series of articles for a minidegree program in digital psychology and persuasion by CXL Institute.w