Digital is about data, hard data. At least that is the widespread thought, but nothing could be further from the truth. Emotion appears to play a larger role in the digital experience and, therefore, in the perception of digital branding. After all, emotion shapes experiences and that affects brand awareness.
An important insight, because as we wrote in the previous blog, branding campaigns are increasingly digital. For this, a clear message and good targeting does not seem to be enough. The feeling, the emotion, evoked by an expression has a great influence on its impact.
Emotion as gatekeeper digital branding
Generating more brand awareness takes a long haul. Real brand awareness only exists when your brand ends up in the long-term memory of the consumer and that does not happen after 1 contact moment. Using emotion in the right way can help shorten this path. Emotion should be seen as the gatekeeper of long-term memory.
Emotion determines whether and how we store experiences we go through every day as experiences in our long-term or short-term memory. Only when experiences are strong enough to evoke emotions do emotions form memories that shift an experience from short-term to long-term memory.
Advertising recall lower than ever
With the large and growing volume of commercial messages that consumers face daily, they are becoming more selective in processing them. As a result, ad recall has dropped by a whopping 93% over the past 50 years. From 34% in 1965 to 2.2% in 2007. You always have to be of better stuff to make sure they remember your brand. Let alone to make sure they are loyal to your brand and consider your brand in their purchasing decision.
With so much information and messages coming at us every day, we lump everything together. We know we have seen an advertisement of cars, but often have no idea what brand.
(Positive) Emotion necessary for brand awareness
Since Brand awaress and brand loyalty are in long-term memory, emotion can play a role in differentiating you from competitors.
According to behavioral scientist Dr. Liraz Margalit, buying often has more to do with emotion than rational attributes. You can benefit from this direct association if you can ensure that people associate your brand with positive emotions. A small note, however, is that negative experiences are better remembered. This is determined from evolution because they signal danger.
Emotion works automatically as a mechanism for survival when there is no time to think and process information. So if there is a direct association between your product and emotion people will buy it, regardless of quality or features. Positive emotion is best achieved by exceeding consumer expectations. As a result, they see your brand as helpful and will return more often.
Researcher Nelson-Field shows that advertisements that evoke strong emotional or physiological reactions (such as goose bumps, laughter or high heart rate) have the most effect on campaign goals because they are easier to process. Something that is no luxury given the attention scarcity. By showing genuine interest in the consumer's need, responding to their emotions and thus capturing and holding attention, you can evoke a positive emotion that leads to your brand being stored in the consumer's long-term memory.
Perception of social media influences campaign effects
Social media is becoming more and more a part of everyday life. This makes it more important to understand this role and how people feel about it. Studies show that people use social media for different reasons and that social media evoke different emotions. This affects how people perceive an advertising message.
Research by Murphry Research in the UK commissioned by Snapchat shows that using Facebook mostly evokes negative feelings such as anxiety and loneliness, while when using Instagram, people feel inspired, confident and creative. Perhaps an important reason why the platform continues to gain popularity. Snapchat evokes emotions like crazy and playful. Not very strange considering its playful features and young target audience. Youtube is seen by people primarily as a medium where they are entertained.
Dutch research also shows that consumers experience each social medium differently and that this experience determines how you can advertise successfully. If you respond to that experience with your ads, the effectiveness of your campaign will be greater because the feelings evoked by the media will reflect on how people experience the ads. Therefore, it is also inadvisable to place the same content everywhere. On Facebook, practical ads are more successful, while on Instagram ads with a high entertainment and inspiration value score well. Only topicality is a dimension that is important on all social media platforms.
Happiness feeling on mobile
It was long believed that consumers would engage in a fast-paced, stressful state when using their smartphones, but researchers at the University of Pennsylvania showed otherwise. When using smartphones, a relaxed and comfortable feeling prevails. We feel safe in the mobile world because, above all, we are having fun there. Because of this positive emotion, we want more and more of this and the undivided attention is also 47.5% higher than on desktop. Google research shows that video ads on mobile even get 84% more attention from consumers than television commercials.
What is the benefit of digital branding?
In times when attention is scarce, you need to reach people at times when they are happy. People who feel relaxed see 56% of the ads that pass by, while stressed people see only 36%, according to a study by Fred Bonner. He concludes that our emotional state affects our ability to perceive ads.
In addition, research by Laura Maclean and Richard Shotton shows that people who feel happy rate ads 62% more positively than people who did not feel happy at the time. One possible explanation for this is that when we are in a good mood our nature detection system is at a low ebb, so we feel less need to think critically.
This sounds like good news, but unfortunately it is not so black and white. The smartphone is also the device where people find online ads most annoying. For example, research by Choozle found that more than 30% of respondents disliked mobile ads. Only 7% rated it as something positive. The reason is that user experiences are still too often negative.
Ads make websites slow, are shown too often, are irrelevant, take up too much space thus impeding the use of the website, are forced to be played or cannot be clicked away. When planning our campaigns, we take this into account as much as possible to take advantage of the positives above all. If you want tips for optimizing your expressions for mobile, also read this blog.