How Top Brands Trigger Emotional Responses to Drive Engagement

Why we’re all in on performance branding – and how it can transform your growth.

How Top Brands Trigger Emotional Responses to Drive Engagement

Bryan Karas

October 17, 2018

The key to most of Jaguar Land Rover’s most recent marketing campaigns is partnerships – collabs ranging from an experience with James Bond, men’s shoe designs with Clarks brand and even a short film with Hans Zimmer.

Marketing partnerships are important and every company should try to find partners who align with their brand – it’s highly beneficial…

Bond is cool, but the most interesting thing is how Jaguar Land Rover uses these partnerships to sell an emotional feeling – they aren’t telling you to buy this car because it has “top rated safety features” they are telling you to buy this car because it makes you FEEL awesome when driving it.

Emotions run high…

A study from the content marketing division of BBC Global News and Storyworks and Neuro-Insight called, “Science of Memory” found that emotion is key to creating a long lasting impact when producing brand content.

The more emotions you can get out of people the more likely it’ll trigger long term memory in the brain. And emotions don’t always have to be positive – fear, anger, sadness all count.

BBC Storyworks concluded, “A sudden spike in emotional intensity causes memory encoding to rise shortly afterwards. Seamlessly integrating a brand in the memory window after moments of high emotional intensity allows the brand to ride the wave of the narrative into memory.”

Commedia dell’arte??

Even though all human emotions fall in line with the BBC study, there are three that really hit the mark on social media.

Joy – most people want to be happy, so a nice little “pick me up” video evoking happiness out of the viewer promotes positive feelings and social sharing.
Pride – people love to be self-empowered and motivated. There’s a reason why self help books sell like crazy – inspire people to be comfortable with who they are…
Amusement – humor almost always win. People love to share videos that make them laugh, but, in acting, everyone will tell you that comedy is harder them drama.

For a complete list, with examples, of all the different types of emotions you can try evoking out of an audience…check out this blog post.

How Brands Use Humor on Social Media to Trigger a Positive Emotional Response

Some would argue that instilling fear into the minds of consumers is the most effective way to sell – cough cough the old school insurance industry cough cough — but the most shareable content on social media tends to make people happy – it uses humor. Learn how top brands use humor on social media to capture their audience’s attention.