Have you noticed that the majority of brands’ social media posts and advertisements all have happy, uplifting and positive messages? There seems to be an interesting trend in creating consumer journeys that allure a full range of different feelings. The strategy of simply boosting dopamine still has an impact but isn’t as effective as it used to be.
Consumers are becoming more and more conscious of how certain things make them feel, especially brands and how they carry themselves and interact with customers. Studies in recent years on emodiversity, have shown that feeling a range of emotions is correlated with better health as opposed to just being happy all the time.
Digital marketers have already begun incorporating this:
–A major bank marketed a new credit card designed to inspire emotional connection within millennials, growing the segment by 70% and new accounts by 40%.
The results from appealing to deeper levels of emotion and connection with consumers has many implications for digital marketers:
-Creating user journeys should involve the concept of emodiversity and allow for a wide range of moods and sensations to be experienced
-Speak in the language of emotions to connect with people and align your message with strong emphasis on feelings
-Instead of constantly pushing uplifting emotions alone, it is worth experimenting with more calm and even uncomfortable moods
As a digital marketer, how would you approach this trend? In what way would you incorporate emodiversity into your digital marketing strategies?
Drop your thoughts in the comments below!
And until then I’ll see you in the next bLAWg post!
“Emotions make us human, denying them makes us beasts.”
bLAWg 
I’ve never heard of emodiversity until now but I really like the concept of it in marketing. Although it is nice to have marketing campaigns that make you feel happy, the reality is, life isn’t always filled with ‘happy’ moments. I think it is clever for marketers to start acknowledging that their campaigns don’t only need to evoke happiness from viewers for them to be considered effective. Perhaps campaigns that make us feel sad or afraid or angry can be just as effective if the message is clear. Take animal cruelty campaigns for instance. A lot of the time they evoke feelings of sadness, anger, disgust or hurt when they display images or document encounters of what animals have been through at the hands of humans. The point here is not to give viewers a feeling of ‘happiness’, but rather to evoke emotions that make us unhappy. While these aren’t ‘feel good’ campaigns, they are often effective as their message is clear – stop animal cruelty. In this instance, the use of emodiversity as a marketing strategy will be effective as the brand stands for a cause that people respect and want to be apart of. In scenarios like this, playing on unhappy emotions might even be more effective than playing on happy emotions.
I think it’s firstly important for brands to clearly define what message they are wanting to convey to their audience and then alter their emodiversity strategy so that it compliments their message.
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Hey Kim! I couldn’t agree more, there are multiple ways to approach this, for the example you provided of the animal cruelty – the campaign could have been a ‘feel-good’ campaign had the content been of happy animals and the result of saving animals from cruelty – however this approach wouldn’t be very emodiverse. The example of evoking negative emotions (more emodiverse), would most likely be more effective enticing more people to take action against this cause.
However, apart from these basic emotions; such as happy, sad, angry etc. Using deeper and more complex emotions would create new and different sensations would also be effective – especially for major brands (e.g. fashion, tech, retail companies). Deeper emotions such as freedom, security, enlightenment, paranoia.
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Oh cool, never really thought about using more complex emotions like that. This use of emodiversity would be interesting to see in campaigns because it’s so unheard of. Although, I feel like Pepsi might have tried to use the emodiversity tactic with one of their ads with Kendall Jenner, but instead it really backfired. Rather than the ad encourage emotions of freedom and inclusiveness (which is what I think Pepsi was trying to achieve), it instead confused viewers who believed it was actually insulting to the Black Lives Matter campaign. I think to get emodiversity right, it really comes down to conveying a clear message.
Overall, I’d love to see this tactic progress in marketing. I think more brands need to take a chance on the use of emodiversity. It can really help them stand out from the crowd!
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