OPINION11 April 2023

The emotional truth behind making marketing memorable

B2B Media Opinion UK

Emotion is commonly used in advertising aimed at consumers, but why do so few marketers use emotion in business-to-business? By Josh Cohen.

Happy_sad_emotions_crop

Eliciting emotion has long been a business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing superpower, but it’s rarely spoken about as it’s such an obvious tool to drive up awareness, memorability and favourability metrics. But in business-to-business (B2B), it’s a different world. Despite the B2B marketing industry growing to around $12.65bn in 2022, it is still failing to deploy one of the most basic tactics in driving action: emotion.

B2B marketing has a reputation for ‘playing it safe’. And according to our recent research report, made up of 200 in-depth interviews with UK-based senior B2B business leaders, 98% don’t think business brands connect with people on an emotional level, with 74% of business leaders calling for B2B marketing to connect with customers in a more meaningful way. 

You would think that we had forgotten that behind the job title, there’s a consumer. So, when Binet and Field found in 2019 that B2B buyers are as susceptible to emotional brand triggers as B2C customers, it shouldn’t have been all that surprising. It did show that industry thought was changing, but it hasn’t yet gone far enough.

Finding the human truth
The success of brands connecting to their customers on an emotional level lies in recognising the person behind the job title. We in B2B marketing place far too much emphasis on product truths over human truths when it should be the opposite, which is mind boggling when we consider that in almost all cases, there is no genuine differentiation between products.

First, tell me how your product resolves a fear I harbour or emboldens an ambition I nurture. Then you can tell me how it does it so well. Every product or service needs a soul and a purpose; without that there’s no chance that customers will make space for them in their minds and hearts.

When looking for the human truth, you won’t find it in a single datapoint, like you might find a sales figure or click-through rate. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t data out there that can guide you towards these truths. Unveiling human truth requires exploring a wide range of disparate information, which can together paint a much deeper picture of a brand’s audience that goes beyond the products or services they need and shows who they are as people.

Bit by bit, some B2B brands are starting to find this human truth. In a timely intervention, given the current financial pressures many small businesses face, accounting software tools for example have stepped away from their dusty, number-crunching reputations and pulled on the mantle of the small-business champion. These teams are now showing their businesses to be parachuting in to take the palpably tedious and time-consuming job of filing taxes away from hard-working business owners, leaving them free to serve more chips, cut more hair, repair more cars or design more extensions.

Deep emotional drivers
Though this sounds straightforward enough, the depth and quality of that emotion, as well as how emotional outcomes are mixed and matched can have a huge impact on the customer buying journey.

Dr. Robert Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotion provides a formula for mixing and matching emotions – one that can be applied to help better understand how customer emotions lead to purchasing decisions. Plutchik starts with eight emotions in four pairs of opposites. The centre of the wheel is where the emotions are at their most extreme – terror or rage – and at the outside of the wheel the emotions are shown as mildest – apprehension or annoyance. Blending the wheel gives yet more emotions – joy and trust make love, while trust and fear equal submission.

The wheel can form a useful guide to allowing respondents to identify what emotional states they need to be in in order to take action. It can also provide a guide for us as to how they got there. If you look at Plutchik’s wheel, fear comes from a threat: the threat of falling behind, the threat of being exposed to risk. And fear is a response to danger and the behavioural reaction to that fear is to escape to a place of safety.

The idea is to not scare customers into buying a product or service but control the level of fear by evoking each element associated with it – threat, danger, escape and safety. By doing so, marketers can identify which emotions need to be elicited to drive action, and from that, build a powerful brand message.

Leveraging emotion successfully is the best expression of proper market orientation. It shows that you understand your customer for who they are, not just what they need. It’s with this mindset that we can start to build the type of bold, exciting campaigns that we so envy of our B2C cousins.

Josh Cohen is senior manager – research and intelligence at Alan. Agency

0 Comments