5 - Rational or Emotional Appeals
A topic of much debate in advertising is over whether brands should use a rational or emotional appeal in marketing products or services, as there are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches.
(EN: The resolution to this debate is simply not to have it, because which is more effective depends much upon the idiosyncrasies of the product, the customer, and the purchasing situation. Neither approach should be promulgated as being universally better than the other in all instances - which makes the entire argument, predicated on the notion that one can be universal, rather pointless and entirely academic.)
Choosing Rational or Emotional
The author traces the notion of the "unique selling proposition" back to 1961 (Reeves), and since then it has been considered essential for any advertising campaign to instill in the customer the sense that a given brand is distinguished from its competition in (at least) one way that will be significant to their buying decision.
Initially, it was believed that the USP was a rational appeal to a feature, function, or capability that one brand offered over another. However, as products have become commoditized there is really no such distinction to be made, and companies began to leverage human or emotional qualities that had nothing to do with the product or service in question. The notion that driving a given brand of car will make you sexy, drinking a given brand of product makes you part of the young generation, wearing a given brand of sneaker makes you a friend of a famous athlete, or using a specific brand of floor cleaner will make your family appreciate you, are all examples of such appeals.
One study (Burke 1989) sorted emotions into three categories:
- Warm feelings (affection, emotion, sentiment) to be maintained by consuming the brand
- Upbeat feelings (happiness, energy, action) to be achieved by consuming the brand
- Negative feelings (sadness, disgust, loneliness) to be avoided by consuming the brand
For commoditized products specifically, the emotional appeal is more effective than a rational one, and this can even be said of products that are not entirely commoditized but are similar enough that the rational appeal can only be applied to differences of negligible importance. (EN: It's also worth noting that inferior products also use an emotional appeal because a rational one would merely reveal their inferiority.)
Known Brands
One weakness of traditional approaches to marketing is that they all seem to assume an audience that has no knowledge of the brand - has never seen or even heard about it before - and tactics were chosen as if the content of a given message would be all that the subject knows about a brand.
The problem is: this is almost never true. Advertising has been so prevalent for so long that, unless a company is introducing a new product, chances are the market has heard of it. And the moment that some people have seen their first advertisement, or even heard information from another source, they are no longer a clean slate.
In terms of a familiar brand, the argument remains whether a rational or emotional appeal is the most successful - but ultimately, whether it is more important to remind the prospect of functional benefits or emotional associations is the same argument as whether it is more important to establish their beliefs about those qualities in the first place. (EN: And again, it's idiosyncratic to whether a given customer perceives the benefits of a given product to be primarily functional or emotional, so I doubt the argument can be "won" by either side.)
There is also the notion that there is interplay among the two ... that the memory of a product is stronger when there are both emotional connections and functional knowledge, but even this has its limits because the functional benefit is ignored if the emotional aspect is too strong, the emotional overtone is lost if the functional benefits are too much or too complex to be understood, etc.
There is some research that favors using positive emotional messages, because even if the claim is that using the product will avoid negative emotions, the mind becomes distracted by the negative aspect and this creates an unfortunate association to the brand.
Another study suggests that a prospect who has established an emotional connection is unlikely to feel the emotion more strongly if additional emotional appeals are used, but they can always learn new information about functional benefits, particularly for products that have multiple uses.
Emotions sell
The author offers the premise that "emotions determine our behavior" and that in reflecting on the value offered by a brand, people transform the information they receive into something personally relevant - leading to the hypothesis that emotions are what sell products.
(EN: More recent theory on the subject, backed by better evidence, is that peoples' emotions determine their needs and this leads them to seek solutions, but the process of determining what product and brand will satisfy their emotional needs and whether it is worth the effort of acquiring them are rational decisions. Emotions are still involved in that they are necessary to kick off the process and are a factor that is used for validation of the decision, but the implication that they drive the final result is giving them too much credit.)
Additional research into emotional advertising suggests that when customers are emotionally engaged in a purchasing process, they are likely to form strong attachments to brands - to give the manufacturer greater share-of-wallet over a longer period of time and to have less need of price incentives to purchase the brands to which they are emotionally attached. However, this sort of attachment seems to apply only to about 25% of products that customers purchase frequently.
It's also noted that, in spite of gender stereotypes, emotional branding seems to work just as effectively with men as it does with women.
There is also the sense that emotions do not need to be sustained, as is commonly assumed. It's found (Rossiter) that a customer who becomes emotionally engaged by an advertising message will be more favorable of a brand without further stimulation, whereas one who is not engaged by an advertising message will be less likely to become excited about it at the point of purchase and further, that customers who are not emotionally involved in the first place will lose attention more quickly and spend more time assessing alternatives at the moment of decision.