In recent years, emotions have become one of those levers that leading marketers use to connect with their audiences. The best positioned brands are those that manage to cross the emotional barriers – and you only have to think about lovemarks or intimacy with brands to understand it – and companies with more refined strategies have opted for these links.
Emotions help you do things better and achieve better results. But are emotions an extra in the relationship between brands and consumers or should they already be one more element of the marketing strategy? Should marketers be working on this issue by default? Emotions could not be simply an extra that improves the results of the marketing strategy, but rather the language that needs to be applied in the relationship with potential buyers so as not to lose them and to get their attention.
In fact, the latest study on the issue shows that emotions are not only important to create certain links, but directly to maintain the basis of the relationship between consumers and brands. As noted in Warc, based on data from an Iris study, the failure of brands to establish an emotional connection with consumers has increased the gap in their relationship. Both apathy towards brands and distrust have grown. The figures are unquestionable.
Since 2018, brand indifference has doubled. 82% of consumers recognize that brands do not thrill them. Out of every 10 brands, eight of them are not regularly thought of. To that must be added that confidence has plummeted. It is no longer that you are not excited by the things that brands launch, it is that they are not directly trusted. 77% of consumers say they no longer trust brands. More than half (57%) feel uncomfortable sharing personal data with these companies.
The key to this fiasco
Why does all this happen? Here we must return to the starting point, that of the emotional disconnection between brands and consumers. Four out of five brands fail to establish emotional ties with consumers. Marketing strategy is still too much oriented to the previous world, to how things worked before emotions became so important and decisive.
Brands must improve consumer participation, work on the user experience or bet on those issues that matter to consumers (from sustainability to becoming cultural engines) if they want to get out of the pothole they are in. It is no longer that emotional marketing helps improve positions or can turn companies into leaders in their niche.
It is no longer even about working it as a way to amplify brand loyalty. Right now, emotions are essential for the survival of the brand. If marketers want to reach consumers and want their brands to survive the challenges of the 21st century, they must work on the emotional.