CONSUMER BEHAVIOUR & DIGITAL MARKETING
Why Do We Buy? Part 2: Emotional Connection & the Tendency to Spend
Harnessing the power of emotion in advertising, and developing positive longterm consumer behaviours.
Can an emotional association cause us to purchase? Does delivering on a promise of emotional fulfilment offer a path to loyalty? What is it that sets us on a path of upgrading and replacing the things that we own? Is there a relationship between these effects?
Let’s take a look at how advertisers pair emotion with products and services, and how a particular human tendency causes us to keep on buying.
Our culture shapes how we all see the things around us. What’s seen as locally or globally respected, and what we should feel good or bad about. We all want to feel good about those respected things — eating healthily, wearing popular brands, achieving things, having a happy family. It’s emotionally satisfying to be seen in a favourable way by ourselves and others.
Advertising can leverage those emotions by tying them to brands and promising an experience through purchase and use. Upgrading what we own in the search for fulfilment can also result in additional buying that complements our new identity. The combined power of these two effects can create emotionally engaged customers with the potential to generate long term loyalty alongside purchasing behaviours.
What is Transformational Advertising?
Think of transformational advertising as aligning a set of emotions with the consumption or use of a brand, product, or service. Without exposure to these ads you’d never associate those emotions so strongly to the subjects. The promise being that these same emotions will be experienced as a result of purchase and consumption.
You might see a transformational approach used by a brand selling a range of running shoes with an ad that alludes to athletic performance and a feeling of greatness. Buying their brand and this range promises to unlock that same feeling, granting entry into the brand community that you yourself can feel aligned to — both internally as a mental state, and outwardly that others will also recognise.
It’s important to use your own transformational advertising with the intent to deliver a net positive outcome through consumption or use. Misleading promises are immoral and risk complaints from dissatisfied customers, returns, bad reviews, and the loss of future business.
Conversely, by emotionally empowering customers through the use of products and services it’s possible to create a brand experience that lays the foundations of future potential purchasing behaviour, and even advocacy. If buying that new pair of running shoes really does deliver fulfilment, the consumer could be set in motion to improve their own fitness long term. They may well feel better about themselves, live a healthier life, and ultimately continue to push their capacity as a human being.
What is the Diderot Effect?
Have you ever treated yourself to something new only to embark on an unexpected shopping spree? A new outfit for a wedding, then realising that you should probably get shoes and maybe an accessory or two? A new couch, then realising that your coffee table and rug just don’t look right anymore? This unintentional pattern of spending is explained by the Diderot Effect.
The Diderot Effect is based on the idea that what we buy becomes a part of our own identity as a person — what we were, are, and will be. When we add a non-complementary item of higher value, we feel compelled to continue purchasing and replacing the other now outdated facets. What we go on to buy can reinforce the behaviour, resulting in continued spending; often on higher priced items as the personal identity becomes increasingly lavish.
Compounding the Effects Over Time
Brands with the ability to tether a positive emotion to the use of their products and services possess the potential to add value through either continued, or complementary purchasing. The initial acquisition of the customer becomes vitally important here. Advertising with a transformational angle generates a demand based on the desire to obtain that particular feeling. Well executed campaigns target the right consumers with an effective combination of emotion alongside a product or service, resulting in conversion either in store or online and an emotionally fulfilled buyer. Customer interactions beyond that point can affect their future behaviour; aiming to channel any demand created via the Diderot Effect. Complementary products and services, replacements for consumables, promotional offers, and building upon brand perception all hold the potential to reinforce and convert purchasing intent.
The sum of these additional impressions needs to shift away from generalised offers and towards more personalised, relevant dialogue. Relevance can only be achieved through an understanding of your customer in terms of data points and measured behaviours. This needs to be translated into the content, channels, and placements that make up an ongoing marketing strategy.
The easier it is to identify and communicate with a consumer, the more effective a brand can be at nurturing additional behaviours that contribute towards improved customer lifetime value. The aim here should be to consolidate online data points across multiple sessions alongside offline behaviours to a profile that holds a single view of each user. This empowers the brand to maintain a consistent narrative by either including or excluding users from chosen communications.
Satisfied customers return to engage and purchase again, as well as refer friends and family directly through word of mouth, and persuade new customers indirectly via positive reviews. Without acknowledging this relationship you risk losing customers to aggressive brands capitalising on shopping behaviour signals and the temptation of the Diderot Effect.
Setting Your Own Strategy
Here’s an outline of the points to consider when incorporating these complementary effects into your own marketing activity over time.
- Define a brand strategy in terms of what you stand for, how you communicate, the aesthetic, and the feelings you want to evoke from your customers.
- Outline customer archetypes including targetable audiences within marketing platforms.
- Build a content strategy that connects the brand emotionally with the target customer.
- Create a fundamentally human customer experience to foster easier connectivity and a deeper long term relationship.
- Ensure that conversion is followed by a multichannel journey that retains customers and develops advocates over time. Include the potential to cross-sell, up-sell, recover lost sessions, or re-engage lapsed consumers.
- Segment your customers into audiences based on previous behaviour across your website and marketing platforms. Apply these segments as targeting for relevant stages of your customer journeys as both inclusions and exclusions.
- Include personalised content across your website and marketing channels: product recommendations based on browsing and buying behaviour, remarketed interests, expressed preferences, and similar customer characteristics.
- Create and market collections that allow your customers to shop over time to attain a set of complementary products and services.
- Bundle core products and accessories to enable easy consumer decision making and increase average order values.
- Employ the authority of customers, popular figures, or brands as advocates that showcase the value of initial and supplementary purchases.
- Implement a desirable loyalty and rewards system across digital and traditional consumer touchpoints.
Consumers that engage long term with strong brands feel valued, respected, and understood. They are individuals with emotions and desires, not units that increase a metric to drive top line revenue growth. Delivering on advertised promises to these customers opens the door to developing a long term relationship. Applying a well tailored marketing strategy is the key to fostering healthy and valuable relationships beyond that initial conversion point.
The combined impact of transformational advertising and the Diderot Effect offer interesting possibilities. It has the power to deliver emotionally engaged customers with the potential to generate loyalty alongside longevity in purchasing behaviours.
Thank you for taking the time to read this article. If you would like to talk more about activating your own strategy, please feel free to contact me via my website or LinkedIn.
If you missed Part 1 in this series, “Causal Mechanisms & Consumer Characteristics”, you can read it here.
