Emotions are powerful. They are the primary drivers of human behavior. Hence they also influence purchasing decisions. The businesses that do manage to create favorable emotional associations with consumers stand to gain more in the long run. That is the reason why consumers prefer one brand over the other and why someone will pay more to own a product of a certain brand than get an alternative one at a cheaper price.
Throughout the history of advertising, we have seen that the best marketing campaigns are often the ones that manage to connect with consumers on an emotional level. According to a Neilsen study, advertisements that had the highest emotional response resulted in 20% more sales.
Just imagine, a consumer visits your website, and you offer them what they want to see based on their emotions. Brilliant, isn’t it? So, it’s no surprise that emotion detection technology has become a popular topic of discussion in marketing circles.
How Does Emotion Detection Technology Work?
The basic idea that governs this concept is that emotions can be detected through facial expressions and other bodily measurements like a heartbeat, breathing pattern, and biometrics. With wearable technology on the rise, this might soon become a reality that marketers want.
Even today, if you want more sales, you will have to evoke some sort of emotional response in a consumer to sell your product. And, in this case, B2B companies are no exceptions either. Every decision that a consumer takes is connected to an emotion. With this technology ready to explode, it will be easier for marketers to connect with their clients on an emotional level. Competition too will become fierce with the availability of this technology.
Take a look at Apple’s Think Different campaign or Kleenex’s Unlikely Best Friends campaign. The way these campaigns connected to their audience on an emotional level created long-lasting affinity with the brands. It’s now up to technology to be able to detect emotions and pass the intelligence to marketers. Emotion detection technology will make this long-lasting effect stronger and fruitful.
What Does This Mean for Marketers?
Marketing aims to move consumers and create an experience that would result in building a bond with a brand. Emotion-detection technology aims to make it easier for marketers to connect to consumers, which is nothing short of a revolution that is to come.
The book Brand Immortality by Pringle & Field contains a data analysis of IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, located in the United Kingdom). Analysis based on data from 1400 case studies of successful campaigns prove that brands that used emotional content performed far better than the ones that used straightforward logical content, 31% for the former and 16% for the latter.
Bigger brands have already started testing their campaigns by analyzing emotional reactions. And, more will follow suit.
The moment marketers start implementing emotion-detection, marketing as we know it will change forever. If you think about it, marketers have already started gearing towards it unknowingly.
Marketing automation technology has helped marketers bring about a change in marketing by using personalized content and connecting with consumers on a personal level. This personalization will reach a higher level when you equip emotion detection along with it.
Emotion detection technology might just be the next level of marketing that marketers are itching to unlock. However, you have to understand that reading emotion will let consumers see what they want to see in real-time based on their emotional state at that point in time. They will not know if they are seeing the actual content, because what they are seeing is what their heart wants to see.
Marketers have to make sure that the transparency and trust established between a brand and a consumer does not decrease as a result. Consumers want to feel special, they don’t want to feel sold. There is a pretty thin line between these two feelings, so marketers have to be careful about that.
Game-Changing Future
Who would have thought that one could actually market their products to consumers based on real-time emotional states of each consumer. Marketing as we know it will change for sure and the way investments are piling up in this sector, a game-changer is coming. The seed that has resulted in this revolutionary idea was the technology that is used to measure how consumers react and engage in marketing campaigns. That same technology is evolving to engage with customers in a unique way.
Customization and personalization is what appeals to every one of us. It has already become part of our daily lives. Notifications, pop-ups, targeted advertisements, dynamic landing pages already play a big role. By the looks of it, there’s more to come in the near future and it’s pretty promising.