Marketing plays a major role in determining whether your customer will buy your product or service by appealing to their wants and needs. Does your marketing bore your audiences with messages that are less than passionate? Or do they appeal to the emotion-based value drivers that your customers employ when making purchase decisions?

Marketing needs to lead the campaign for building long-term loyalty-based relationships with your customers. If your messages are the same as your competitors and do not light a fire in the minds of your prospects, you will never get them to even consider your product or service, let alone buy.

All people make buying decisions based on emotion, not logic, even in high technology purchases; therefore your marketing must use emotion to sell what people want, not what you think they need or want them to need. Although you as a marketing professional may feel passionate about your product, you must move beyond the traditional “feature and benefit” approach to marketing and include emotion into the marketing mix. As much as business people pride themselves on logical, rational behavior, they are still human. They like to buy from people they like and they can make product decision on things that you think are pretty silly. Customers will only buy what appeals to their emotion and satisfies their wants and needs. Logic does play a part in justifying the decision after we have made it, but emotion is the core ingredient.

Boring Marketing is Ignored Marketing

In today’s overcrowded market, it is very hard to get through to your prospects and partners. You do not get many chances to get your prospect’s attention, and to spend your time and money on boring marketing programs is definitely a sin. The world is a busy, cluttered place with advertisements and messages everywhere. You have to find something that excites your customer and market to all of their senses. Strong marketing should communicate your company’s personality. Think of your marketing in terms of how you would describe your company in a personal conversation to someone you just met. Chances are it will include not only the facts, but also the emotional elements as well.

Add Emotion To Your Marketing

To capture your customers and build a long-term profitable relationship, you need to understand the effect of emotion in purchase decisions when building your marketing strategies. Marketing needs to begin building the customer experience that is rich and diverse in the way you interact with your prospects. Figure out what your customers love, and what they hate, what keeps them awake at night, what gives them heartburn and what events they dread. If you know what aspects of their job that they are the most concerned about and design your products, services, and marketing to address those concerns, then you will begin to build the customer experience that will form into a lasting relationship. Think about your marketing messages and see if they simply push your product or if they incorporate the entire customer experience. Once you capture them emotionally, your chances of successfully selling them your product or service will be much greater.

Business Case for Emotion-based Marketing

To increase the appeal of your marketing, you need to provide both rational and emotional elements in your messages to your prospects. When your customer makes a purchase decision, they use both rational and emotional elements in their decision process. The rational elements are things like pricing and product quality. Pricing needs to be competitive, but can be easily copied. Product quality and selection are critical, but product innovations also can be replicated. There are few competitive advantages in terms of product or price today. On both counts, sustainable differentiation is difficult to achieve.

The goal of emotion marketing is to develop an enduring connection with each customer that nurtures loyalty and results in repeat business. When you put emotion-based marketing principles in action, they lead to strategies that are almost impossible to replicate. This provides a powerful competitive advantage since it is one area your competition cannot duplicate. Appealing to your audiences in terms of emotional engagement will comprise a growing proportion of the value being exchanged between you and your prospects.

Emotion in High Technology Marketing

Do you think emotion has no place in high technology marketing? Does your marketing have to be features and techie jargon? The 4P marketing strategy of yesterday is no longer effective in today’s connected world. The new marketing strategy of the 21st century is emotional and experiential marketing. As marketers, we have gone from marketing products and services to building a total customer experience. To remain competitive, marketing must try its best to win the hearts of prospective buyers. The physical appearance of a product alone is not enough. To be able to lure a buyer, a product must be marketed in a fashion that touches a buyer’s emotional chord. Introduce creative, passionate marketing programs, give your customers a pleasurable experience doing business with you, and watch your sales increase.