Should brands appeal to emotion in advertising? [+Examples]

Most of the decisions we make are driven by emotions rather than logic. From picking our partners to deciding what to watch on Netflix — people are inherently emotional. 

​​"Research reveals that emotions constitute potent, pervasive, predictable, sometimes harmful and sometimes beneficial drivers of decision making.

Many psychological scientists now assume that emotions are, for better or worse, the dominant driver of most meaningful decisions in life .”

- Jennifer S.Lener, Ye Li, Piercarlo Valdesolo, and Karmin Kassam

Over the decades — from 1970 to 2012, a large number of researchers began to focus on emotion as an essential driver in our decision making:

​​From 2023 to 2024, over 17,400 papers have been published on the impact of emotions on decision making. 

Our moods also impact our choices. People in sad moods prefer rewarding decisions while people in happy moods make faster, better decisions.

Furthermore, advertising that tapped into moods such as pride, love, achievement, empathy, loneliness, friendship, and memories performed the best, according to researchers. 

This is known as emotional advertising.

In this post, we explore why brands use emotional advertising, when to use emotional advertising, and show you how to ethically use emotions in ads to influence consumers’ behavior.

Emotional intelligence is the ability to understand and manage your own emotions as well as the emotions of others, but can also refer to the emotional connection between a brand and a consumer. Emotional advertising uses ads to connect to consumers’ emotional state, ego, needs, fear, or aspirations. 

Emotions can have powerful pulls in advertising: 

• 90% of people were more likely to remember a brand’s ad if it made them laugh. 

• 31% of ad campaigns that perform well have an emotional component, compared to 16% of ads that focus on a rational component.

• Video content that causes anger is 38% more likely to go viral. 

You can also use emotional advertising to support emotional branding — the practice of building a brand that connects with consumers’ emotions. Nike, Dove, and Apple are all great examples of brands that use emotional branding to connect with consumers. 

Beyond happiness, sadness, or anger — emotions are richly nuanced. 

To help work out which emotions they're feeling, many people use Robert Plutchik’s emotion wheel. 

In his research, Plutchik identified eight primary emotions.

Within the emotion wheel are eight core emotions from which other emotions come from. These are: 

1. Trust 

2. Fear 

3. Surprise 

4. Sadness

5. Disgust 

6. Anger 

7. Anticipation 

8. Joy 

From the center of the wheel (or the primary emotions), secondary emotions come up. Take surprise for example: 

1. Amazement 

2. Distraction 

3. Wonder 

4. Awe

5. Amusement 

6. Shock 

7. Speechlessness 

8. Disbelief 

The combination of basic emotions can create new ones. For example, joy and surprise create delight. You can also use the wheel to work out the intensity of your emotions. For example, trust moves to admiration. 

You can use the emotion wheel to figure out the specific emotions you want your audience to feel when they see your ad. 

The more you understand what your audience is feeling and what you want them to feel, the more you can refine your ad to create a strong emotional connection that triggers buying behavior. 

96% of consumers say they don’t trust ads.

Take a look at one person's opinion on Reddit:

If consumers don’t trust advertisers, then purposefully hijacking their emotional state may feel all the more manipulative and cause them to lose trust in your brand. 

If you’re going to use emotions in advertising then you need to perfect the balance between connection and persuasion and manipulation. 

Laura Crosswell writes that most advertisements are manipulative because they appeal to emotion rather than reason — they’re designed to remove thinking from the equation. 

But ethical emotional advertising is not about using anger, fear, shame, desire, or sadness to get people to shut off the rational side of their brain in order to make impulsive buying decisions.

It’s about using techniques, such as emotional-driven storytelling, to create a genuine emotional connection with consumers. People crave emotionally-rich experiences — whether it’s a cathartic story-based ad that makes them cry or an empowering ad that makes them feel more energized and confident. 

Some people even go out of their way to find commercials that make them emotional.

Take a look at some of the comments under a YouTube video called, “Heart-touching commercials that will move you emotionally.”

And it’s not just logic that has value in decision making — emotions have their own wisdom. Being able to recognize your own emotions and use them skillfully to make decisions is an essential part of emotional intelligence. 

The emotions created through emotional advertising can be one essential element of our decision-making process. For example, emotional ads can help us differentiate between brands that align with our interests and values and brands that don’t. 

How can you ethically use emotions in advertising? Below, we share some essential tips and explore some great examples of emotional advertising. 

Find your customers’ emotional motivators

Most marketers get the importance of consumer emotions in decision making. But how do you uncover them? How can we quantify them? And what’s the best way to connect to them? 

To help answer these questions, Scott Magids, Alan Zorfas, and Daniel Leemon used big data analytics to identify over 300 “emotional motivators” connected to profitable behaviors. 

Here are the top 10 emotional motivators they found: 

You can use these motivators to help move consumers from feeling unconnected to feeling fully connected. 

Figuring out your customers’ biggest emotional motivations and moving them through this process can make them up to 52% more valuable to your brand — leading to 68% more credit card swipes and 52% more online buys. 

But emotional motivators can change across industries and customer segments. 

The first step towards creating a great emotional-driven ad is to understand the unique emotional motivators of your customer base. 

That’s where market research and customer insights data comes in. Use qualitative research methods to work out what has the most emotional meaning for your customers and how these emotional motivators drive their buying behavior. 

Are your customers nostalgic for the past? Are they driven by career success? Do they want more freedom in their lives? 

Research approaches like customer surveys and interviews can be a great way to find out more about these motivators. Use the above list to create questions that uncover more about your customers’ perceptions and cravings for things like freedom, security, and success. 

Go for creativity 

Creativity is one of the main emotive responses people can have to your ads. 

These ads make people feel like your brand is imaginative and creative — your originality delights them and makes them remember you. 

To tap into delight, think about new ways to intrigue or surprise your audience. 

Play with concepts, script, and music. Creative ad scenarios, quirky characters, and humor are all good ways to delight and surprise your audience. 

This ad from Weetabix is a great example of using creative humor to do just that: 

In the ad, an academic opens his speech by telling UK leaders he needs to share a discovery of national importance. In his charts, he highlights that Britain’s economical, societal, and sporting performance has dropped over the years. 

He says the biggest reason why Britain hasn’t been “so great of late” is because people haven’t been eating their Weetabix. One of the leaders replies, “Makes sense, I’ve been eating croissants.” 

The academic tells them we need to rebuild Britain, “bix by bix.” He says the data shows that areas where Weetabix eating rises, crossword guesses and bodybuilders per kilometer also rise — a sign that Weetabix improves intelligence and strength. 

We can find the surprise element of the ad in both the humor and the unusual solution to societal issues. 

Take a look at our past AdMiration analysis on the ad: 

“Self-aware humor can be highly impactful in captivating an audience, driving an emotional response and making a brand more relatable. 

The storytelling is excellent, posing a nation-wide problem and offering a solution in a humorous and relatable way that puts the brand at the forefront.”

And here’s a comment from one of our watchers: 

"I liked the initial formalities and how things switched so quickly into entertainment. At the same time the ad remained funny and informative till the end.”

Support emotional resolution

Manipulative ads often trigger painful or uncomfortable feelings and use them to motivate you to buy. 

In comparison, effective and responsible emotional ads may purposefully create a negative emotional state, but they won’t leave you stuck there. 

Take Always’ 2014 Like a Girl Ad campaign. 

In one campaign ad, they asked teens to run, throw, and fight like a girl. Most of the people in the ad imitate “ditzy” runs, baseball ball drops, and “girl fight” cliches. 

The start of the ad might make most girls and women feel a mix of sadness, embarrassment, and anger. 

But Always provides emotional resolution. 

They bring in young girls and ask them to interpret running, fighting, and throwing like a girl. They do these things confidently. They then ask the older participants to reinterpret what it means to “do things like a girl,” and they repeat these actions with skill and confidence. 

They take the female viewer on an emotional journey: from anger and humiliation to confidence and pride — moving them through to resolution. 

Thanks to the campaign, three times the number of girls developed a positive association with the phrase “Like A Girl” — a jump from 19% to 76%. 

Tell a story 

Storytelling is one of the best ways to connect with consumers through emotional advertising. 

The emotions people experience when hearing a story last longer than the emotions they experience  hearing facts about an event or situation. 

And the best stories don’t create one-dimensional emotional states. They take us through many emotions throughout the story. 

Take this vintage John Lewis Christmas Ad.

The ad shares the story of a little girl who spots a lonely-looking man on the moon through her telescope. She tries to send a paper airplane to the moon, but she can’t reach him. 

She then decides to send a telescope attached to a bunch of balloons. The old man is delighted. He unwraps the telescope and cries when he finally spots her through the lens. Watching the ad, the story might make you feel: sadness, frustration, delight, or joy at different points.  

Another essential component of great story-driven ads is likable characters. Character-driven stories create oxytocin (the feel-good connection hormone) in the brain. Your protagonist should be someone your viewer can relate to and root for. Both the older man and little girl in this ad are endearing, interesting characters. Viewers are in her determination to find a way to connect with him and celebrate her success. 

Don’t be afraid to make people feel sad 

You can easily fall into the trap of exclusive positivity when it comes to emotional advertising. 

But strategist Joy Molan says that, “good vibes only,” is bad marketing. 

She says (quoting Joni Mitchell) that there’s “comfort in melancholy.” She says that we need to get comfortable with uncomfortable emotions: 

“There’s a commonly held belief that negativity in advertising should be avoided at all costs. Does this ad contain language that isn’t wholly positive? Careful now. Does the narrative arc contain a moment of tension, confusion or conflict? You’re on thin ice. Does your campaign make people feel uncomfortable, melancholy or - at worst - sad? Go straight to jail, do not pass go, do not collect £200.”

She says sadness can be cathartic — take wallowing in a favorite sad song. She argues negativity, tension, and conflict can be an advertiser’s secret sauce.  

While undergraduate paper award-winner Cheryl Frazier writes: 

“Through experiencing fictional situations, we get a sort of emotional catharsis that is unparalleled in everyday life, one that elicits positive emotions (such as relief, reassurance, and a feeling of belonging) and a desire to revisit the experience whenever the same catharsis is needed.”

Let’s apply this to an ad from the RSPCA: 

Throughout the ad, we see a stuffed dog being mistreated — picked up by his ear, left muddy on a swing and thrown in the trash. Towards the end of the ad he’s rescued by someone from the RSPCA, who takes him in and takes care of him. 

The fact that many animals are mistreated and abandoned is upsetting to most of us. But by watching the ad, we can connect with that upset and find a place to put it. The sad opener becomes a happy ending when the dog gets rescued. This brings the relief, reassurance, and catharsis talked about above. 

We can also unconsciously align ourselves with the RSPCA worker who also feels compassion for the dog, just like we do, bringing us a sense of belonging. 

Make them laugh

Maya Angelou said, “I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t laugh.” 

Laughter is essential for social connection. Laughter evolutionarily evolved as a “play signal,” used to create feelings of connection and reassure each other we aren’t a threat. 

More than surprise or purpose, marketing consultancy Spikes found that humor is the biggest factor behind many of the most popular ads in modern history. 

Take Stella Artois’ Missing Chalices ad produced by David: 

The ad features a Stella Artois chalice in different places around someone’s home: carefully placed on a drying rack, wrapped in bubble wrap in a cardboard box, and placed on a shelf with the rest of their glassware. 

At the end of the ad, a message pops up on the screen: 

“Each year, thousands of chalices go missing from bars.” 

A final shot of a glass in a jacket pocket flashes on screen with the words, “Unacceptable, but understandable.”

Based on our AdMiration analysis, this ad sparked a strong emotional reaction from the audience: 

The ad also scores in the top 10% of all UK ads for its potential to drive sales with a 91 sales impact. Here’s what one watcher thought of the ad: 

"It was a funny ad and quite relatable, I have actually got a Stella glass at home which I did in fact take from a pub so felt very personal, so thought of many people doing it, and Stella being aware is a good marketing approach, making light of it."

Create a sensory experience 

Play on the sensory to create stronger emotional responses. 

Neon colors. Velvet. Low lights. Ads often overlay different sensory elements to make a bigger emotional impression on us. 

Whether it’s bright sights or implied textures and scents, you can intensify the emotional impact of your ads by bringing in more sensory experiences. 

Marketer Tayla Ellise says:  

“Sensory advertising is a very engaging mechanism for capturing consumers' attention — allowing them to interpret the stimulus and create meaning. 

By tapping into senses such as; taste, touch, smell, sight and sound as Lindt has demonstrated, you can subconsciously influence your customers’ perceptions of your brand and establish positive emotional connections with them.”

Measure the emotional impact of your ads 

So how can you tell if your ads are hitting the right emotional notes? You can use consumer insights tools like Zappi to help measure the impact of your emotional advertising. 

Our second-by-second response measurement and System 1 emojis, create an Emotional Intensity metric that allows you to see what your audience feels when they watch your ad. 

With this metric, respondents choose the emojis that reflect how they feel as they watch your ad. You can use this feature to measure emotional intensity by recording how many (and which) emojis people click on throughout your ad. 

Is your ad doing what you set out to do? Did your audience feel how you expected them to feel? What emotions came up at each point in the ad? 

Because this feature measures real-time emotional responses, you can use it assess the emotional highs and lows that come with great ad stroytelling.

From making people laugh to delighting them, emotion-driven ads are one of the best ways to connect with your audience and make your brand and product more memorable. 

But what works for your customer is unique to them — you can’t create a great emotional ad without researching what will work for your customer base. 

But it shouldn’t stop there. Research is also essential once you’ve created your ad to optimize it to its fullest potential. Zappi’s Emotional Intensity feature can also be used to find out where you can make changes for the rest of your campaign. 

Reach out to us to learn how Zappi can help you create better ads.