This is an article I wrote and edited, talking about how eCommerce businesses can successfully use emotional marketing to their advantage without being insensitive or emotionally manipulative.
I researched different use cases and analyzed good and bad examples of emotional marketing to give readers an idea of what they should strive for and avoid.
Here is a sample of the article:
Emotional marketing vs. emotional manipulation
“So far, I’ve talked a lot about the benefits and unique qualities of emotional marketing. However, there is something essential that needs to be mentioned.
To many people, profiting from people’s emotions can be considered pure manipulation. And in a way, they are not entirely wrong. According to Wikipedia, “Manipulation (psychology) is behavior designed to exploit, control, or otherwise influence others to one’s advantage.”
And the end goal for eCommerce businesses is to make their customers purchase their products or services so isn’t that some form of manipulation?
Well, just as with any type of marketing, there is a right and a wrong way to do it. Here is a list of things that can turn your marketing strategy into harmful manipulation:
- Your product is not as advertised. It’s faulty, doesn’t fulfill its purpose, or can be dangerous to people and the environment.
- You’re actively profiting from a culture without contributing to its prosperity or acknowledging its struggles.
- You’re falsely supporting marginalized groups and using performative marketing campaigns only to reach your goals, forgetting everything about them afterward or actively supporting harmful rhetoric.
- You’re actively lying about donating to charities and supporting important causes, e.g., the endless number of companies that talk about being eco-friendly and carbon neutral while still actively harming the environment.
Simply put, if you have bad intentions and are putting false emotions in your campaign, people will know, and it will only harm your business in the long run. Don’t promise things you cannot fulfill; always work with certified experts to avoid unfortunate situations.”
Challenges with writing about emotional marketing
When I pitched this topic to Shift4Shop, I was ecstatic. I’ve always been interested in the psychology of marketing, and at that time, I was also taking a course in brand management, which further ignited my curiosity.
So naturally, the hardest thing about this article was not writing an entire book’s worth of content on the topic.
Working with emotions is very tricky, so it was very important for me to do my research and show readers how they can avoid being manipulative or downright cringy.
Which brings us to the most entertaining part – examples! Unfortunately, because of word count restrictions, not all of them made it live, so I’ll take advantage of this post to show you some bad attempts at emotional advertising.
As a bisexual woman, one of my biggest pet peeves, or icks as the young say, are companies trying to profit off of the LGBT+ community during pride month while completely ignoring or actively going against it for the rest of the year. As I mentioned in my article, this is emotional manipulation 101.
Now, not all of them are super bad. The LGBT sandwich from Marks&Spencer, for example, is mostly just hilarious, even though, like many other companies, it tries to get quick money by turning everyday household items into a rainbow.
The aftertaste of this sandwich is even more bitter when you consider that M&S donated only £10,000 to one LGBT+ organisation in 2019 despite making over 10 million in revenue.
Still, they at least donated something, and thankfully, that has been the general trend in the last few years – if you’re putting the rainbow on, you need to find a cause and support it. Besides the hypocrisy, there’s another lesson in these campaigns, and the next example in front of the jury is Burger King’s pride Whopper.
During their campaign in 2022, Burger King gave their customers the option to order their burgers either with two top buns or two bottom buns.
Can you spot the mistake?
Unfortunately, the ad agency they hired didn’t, and apparently, they also didn’t consult with a single gay person to test this. For the uninitiated, your average homosexual couple consists of a top and a bottom; otherwise, it rarely works out. It’s a dynamic that is developed due to a person’s character and sexual preferences, which usually involve one side being more dominant than the other.
So the lesson here is very simple: Know your audience inside out!
This nonsense ad could have been easily avoided if they had only gathered a test audience that actually consisted of LGBT+ members. But they didn’t because they didn’t care about the content being relatable and creating a meaningful campaign. Just another bland attempt with a rainbow in the background.
The next embarrassing and highly problematic example is the 2017 Nivea ad, which was targeted towards its Middle Eastern audiences to promote its new deodorant, “Invisible: For Black and White.”
Where do I even start, right?
To put it as subtly as I can, without the Nivea logo and product, this can be easily confused for a KKK recruitment poster.
And it’s not just the absurd slogan in the middle of the image—“White is purity”—it’s also the visuals themselves. With its white windows, light colours in the room, and a woman, we can probably guess that it’s Caucasian, this ad is clearly showing us that we can only be pure if we’re white.
This statement isn’t only overtly racist, but it also doesn’t make sense in terms of the product they are trying to sell. Their deodorant is also supposed to make sure that black and dark clothes don’t have white spots from the aerosols.
Still, even if the slogan and image are kinda iffy, at least the caption should help clear things up, right?
Sadly, wrong. The caption they chose only digs the hole deeper: “Keep it clean, keep bright. Don’t let anything ruin it, #Invisible.” By using the words clean, bright, and ruin, they imply that dark is dirty and can ruin the perfect purity of white.
Naturally, the backlash was huge, but they also found new fans in the form of a popular white supremacist Facebook group:
Now, I’m sure that the Nivea marketing team isn’t filled with racist employees, and they did take this down rather quickly, along with issuing an official apology. However, it’s a type of carelessness that you wouldn’t expect from a big brand like this. You would think that they have a quality control process that prevents such incidents, but the reality is that a lot of people just don’t pay attention.
Marketing is a challenging and demanding industry. You need to stay on top of trends, do extensive research, manage project finances and KPIs, track designers and copywriters, and God knows what else. It’s understandable that some things might slip through the cracks, but it’s also important to realise the impact incidents like this can leave in the consumer’s mind.
People are sensitive about the topics they care about, so it’s crucial to craft emotional marketing campaigns with care and respect. The simplest thing professionals can do is test everything before it goes live. Ask your mum, your brother, your neighbour, or even the cleaning staff who comes to the office. If you plan on doing a campaign for a specific community, include them in your research, or even better, hire someone from that community to help you out.
Last words
Don’t be stupid and proofread your content!
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