Volume 6 (2014): Issue 1 (May 2014)
Emotions in Marketing

The power of emotions is evident in almost all areas of marketing and consumer behavior. Consumers often strive for "affect optimization": At the end of the day, they want their emotional balance to be positive. That means products, advertisements and other people - anything that can make us happy - all have a high potential for success. Hundreds of empirical studies demonstrate the importance of emotions in marketing and consumer behavior. But emotions are very diverse and can be researched from different perspectives. Methods for measuring emotions are as diverse as the various theoretical approaches. They range from verbal self-evaluation and picture-based scales to neuroscientific measures like heart rate, electrodermal reactions or regional brain response. Other popular approaches include observational methods that attempt to capture emotional facial expressions. Which method fits best needs to be decided on a case-by-case basis.

Our experience of stress depends on how we evaluate the circumstances impacting our individual well-being. In principle, any event can be a stressor. Certain events can produce complex emotional states, such as a mixture of anger and worry. If such states are prolonged, they can lead to stress. Stress can be identified by means of such expressive components as facial expression and signs of stress in the voice. Indeed, the voice is particularly sensitive to stress and is frequently used to measure stress levels. Coping strategies differ from person to person and are not mutually exclusive. Often, people use multiple strategies at the same time. Not all of these strategies are good for individual well-being or favor a cooperation-based work culture. To avoid employee burnout, companies should keep an eye on the stress load of their employees and develop trainings to increase emotional competences and improve constructive stress management.

Not only are subjective feelings an integral part of many judgments and decisions, they can even lead to improved decisions and better predictions. Individuals who have learned to trust their feelings performed better in economic-negotiation games than their rational-thinking opponents. But emotions are not just relevant in negotiations and decisions. They also play a decisive role in forecasting future events. Candidates who trusted their feelings made better predictions than people with less emotional confidence. Emotions contain valuable information about the world around us. This information is not as readily available in our mind as hard facts but rather lies in the background of our conscious attention. In negotiation situations like the ultimatum game, feelings provide an intuitive sense of what offer is about right and what offer is too high or too low. But feelings also summarize statistical relationships among things that, on the surface, may seem disconnected. These statistical relationships make more probable futures feel more right than less probable futures. However, researchers warn that you should not always trust your feelings. Feelings that tend to help are those based on general knowledge, not those based on easy-to-verbalize local knowledge.

Relationships with brands are like relationships between people. Even when they were very close, they can fail for diverse reasons. The disadoption of favorite brands doesn't happen overnight. It tends to be an extended, often painful process and not a clear-cut, one-off event. Breakups are not isolated to the person and the brand. Friends and family often get involved and offer their opinions and advice. Other brand relationships are also affected by the disconnection, and this can speed up or delay the process of breaking up. The brand relationship changes its form and can go from being a best friend to a platonic love, a distant friend, a stalker or even an enemy. A breakup is never the end of the relationship. Rather, it redefines the relationship and is part of a never-ending cycle of change. If the former relationship is perceived positively, it is easier to eventually activate and intensify it. If negative aspects prevail, negative word of mouth is a danger and companies must be able to counter it. Some relationships reach a point of no return. But there are also customers who might regret having abandoned a brand. With some sensitivity, it might be possible to win them back.

Not all brands have the potential to develop into meaningful objects for consumers. They need to serve certain psychological and symbolic functions in order to qualify as passion brands. They need to help consumers define and express their personality, combine potentially conflicting social roles or experiment with new roles. Brand passion is lived in very different ways. Some fans invest a lot of time and money in their beloved objects; others join brand communities to collectively enjoy the brand. Others yet act as missionaries on behalf of the brand or develop their own rituals in dealing with it. Companies can encourage customers' relationships with their brands by helping consumers care for the brand and enhance or maintain it. True passion, however, also needs a pinch of magic in extraordinary and unique experiences and transformations. Creating such magical moments is the true challenge for brand management.

Emotionally pleasant TV commercials are often preferred over merely factual ones. A large-scale study of Belgian TV ads confirms this notion and shows that such commercials also create more positive feelings toward the advertised brand. Interestingly, these effects depend on neither the level of involvement associated with the product category nor the type of product. Independent of the perceived creativity of the commercial or its informational value, emotionality had a significant impact on the evaluation of a brand. However, the effects were slightly more pronounced for products that align themselves with pleasure and experience than for functional products. Advertisers should therefore leverage the power of emotions not only because these ads are better liked, but more importantly because they lead to more favorable brand attitudes.

Sheer driving pleasure is the essence of the BMW brand. For this reason, we have an ideal candidate for our real-world interview in this MIR issue about emotions in marketing. Mr. Meysenburg takes us behind the scenes of the world brand from Bavaria, the success of which makes one think that the promised thrill behind the wheel is definitely not a product of chance …

Emotions affect all of our daily decisions and, of course, they also influence our evaluations of brands, products and advertisements. But what exactly do consumers feel when they watch a TV commercial, visit a website or when they interact with a brand in different ways? Measuring such emotions is not an easy task. In the past, the effectiveness of marketing material was evaluated mostly by subsequent surveys. Now, with the emergence of neuroscientific approaches like EEG, the measurement of real-time reactions is possible, for instance, when watching a commercial. However, most neuroscientific procedures are fairly invasive and irritating. For an EEG, for instance, numerous electrodes need to be placed on the participant's scalp. Furthermore, data analysis is highly complex. Scientific expertise is necessary for interpretation, so the procedure remains a black box to most practitioners and the results are still rather controversial. By contrast, automatic facial analysis provides similar information without having to wire study participants. In addition, the results of such analyses are intuitive and easy to interpret even for laypeople. These convincing advantages led GfK Company to decide on facial analysis and to develop a tool suitable for measuring emotional responses to marketing stimuli, making it easily applicable in marketing research practice.