What we know about using emotion

Source: WARC Best Practice, November 2022

Setting out key insights on using emotion, arguing that it helps to build a brand and business, while
also giving a sense of the debate on its impact and its relationship to rational persuasion.

There is increasing evidence and consensus that using emotion in advertising builds a brand and its
business, especially in the long term. Emotion is also proven to drive advertising attention and
memorability. However, opinions differ on whether emotion should be the sole focus or a balance
struck between emotional and more rational motivating messages.

Definition
Emotion-based communications aim to evoke and appeal to human emotions to encourage brand preference,
which will build the brand's business in the long term.

Key Insights
1. Brands are getting better at leveraging emotion but should focus on positive
emotions

Research by emotion-AI company Affectiva, which analysed people’s facial expressions as they watched ads,
has found that over the past eight years, across countries and categories, advertisers have become increasingly
successful at pulling on consumers’ heartstrings. Overall, there was stronger emotional engagement with ads,
but with a bigger increase in negative emotions - a trend magnified in 2020 by the COVID-19 pandemic and its
consequences. While the study showed that in some cases negative emotions, like sadness, can still result in
strong engagement and sales, positive emotions are more strongly associated with positive sales effects than
are negative emotions. Positive responses are far more likely to come from powerful stories that generate strong
emotions. They need light and dark to be compelling, but a positive and relevant resolution with a tangible role
for the brand is important in order to reap the rewards of a powerful emotional hook.

Similarly, further work by Kantar and Affectiva, looking at sustainability ad campaigns, suggests it is about
inspiring and entertaining even sceptics to change their behaviour. Sustainability campaigns perform better if
they do not just dwell on the challenges but leave people with a more inspiring and positive view. While guilt can
be useful, it can also be a route to disgust, rejection and apathy. Instead, messages need to help people take
concrete action and feel in control. The study found the emotion of humour can be useful to ease people’s
worries about the climate and is especially so for those less committed to climate action.

Read more in: What’s the right tone in hard times? and How to use emotion to talk to climate sceptics

2. Advertisers should use a combination of rational and emotional appeals

In 1980 the Foote, Cone & Belding (FCB) agency created a grid that uses two dimensions – high/low
purchase-decision involvement and think/feel purchase decision types – to create four quadrants.
Namely: high purchase-decision involvement and “think”; high purchase-decision involvement and “feel”; low
purchase-decision involvement and “think”; and low purchase-decision involvement and feel. The grid was used
as a strategic guideline for determining messages of advertising campaigns. However, a US study of 35
categories – ranging from groceries and electronics to financial services, cars and home buying – and over 115
product examples found that the quadrants were not discrete. The study also found that purchases are not
either “think” or “feel”, rather “think” and “feel” are dimensions of purchase which are evaluated at the same
time. Therefore, advertisers should not decide on advertising appeals which exclusively mirror the thinking or
feeling product type.
Research shows that consumers can process brand-building and activation messages at the same time,
though activation messages such as price are more quickly attributed to brands than brand-building messages
such as quality or an emotion. Rather than adopting sequential messaging to move consumers through the
purchase funnel with brand-building communication followed by activation, executing a “triple play” in the same
piece of communication can drive purchase behaviour in the short and long term and is highly predictive of
changes in market share. A “triple play” combines emotional and rational drivers – a rational price message, a
quality reason-to-believe and an emotional ‘detonator’. The chosen emotion can take years to gain full impact,
so it needs to be communicated in perpetuity. The rational price and quality drivers should be relatively long
lasting but can be periodically refreshed.

Read more in: Updating the Foote, Cone & Belding Grid: Revisiting the product classifications of the
FCB Grid for online shopping and contemporary consumers’ decision making and The funnel alibi: Why
brand building and activation should be undertaken simultaneously

3. Activating emotions’ makes it more likely an ad will ‘go viral’

An academic study found the best way to engage viewers so that they choose to share an ad is not just by
stimulating positive emotions but by provoking ‘activating emotions’, which can be positive or negative. The
global study concluded that emotions are characterised by how activating, or ‘physiologically arousing’, they are
– in other words, whether they fire people up. Provoking positive, activating emotions increased the likelihood
that a video would be shared the most, but when an ad provoked a negative activating emotion (i.e. disgust),
viewers were also motivated to take action and share the video. Conversely, emotions that were less activating
(i.e. sadness) reduced the likelihood that the viewer would share the ad. This builds on prior studies that
highlighted the importance of emotion in driving “virality”:

A US study of what can drive ad sharing on YouTube found that emotional ads are shared more than
informational ones, and that ads which appeal to positive emotions, such as inspiration or amusement, stimulate
significant ad sharing. Storytelling and a 1-2 minute ad length also generate positive sharing responses as they
enable emotional engagement.

A study looking at brand communication on Chinese “super app” WeChat during big marketing moments found
that successful campaigns that went viral were emotional, highly culturally relevant and based on consumer
insight. For example, British Airways’ ‘Flying the Nest’ campaign tapped into family feelings with a video of a
Chinese student going to college in London – in which she relates her fears about leaving her family but then
her parents pay her a surprise visit.

Read more in: Why do some advertisements get shared more than others? Quantifying facial
expressions to gain new insights, Why and how video ads go viral on YouTube and Emotional
connection key to standing out in WeChat ecosystem

4. Emotion is the top creative strategy for effective communication

WARC’s 2021 Health of Creativity report – an analysis of the most awarded ideas from 2015-19 looking at
campaigns awarded for both creativity and effectiveness – found that more than half (54%) of the ideas used
emotion as a creative strategy. Historically, emotion has also clearly been the most used creative strategy
among campaigns in the WARC Effective 100 rankings, which is based on the results of the top regional and
global awards shows. While in 2020 it was overtaken by three other strategies -sustainability or
responsibility were the most awarded (41%), followed by UGC or participation (39%) and information or
education (37%) compared to emotion at 29% - at the 2020 edition of the biennial IPA Effectiveness
Awards almost three-quarters (74%) of winners used emotion.

A major new study of creative effectiveness has analysed and compared a total of 4,863 effectiveness award
entrants and winners from 2011 through 2019, from every major market in the world. It introduces a new
framework – The Creative Effectiveness Ladder, which identifies the six main types of effects that creative
marketing produces, setting them in a hierarchy of levels from least to most commercially impactful. Emotion is
the top creative strategy used at all levels of the Ladder bar one, where it is the second most used strategy.
Emotion has proven to be especially effective for two types of campaigns identified on the Ladder – those
designed to change consumer behaviour and those designed to build brand health.

According to analysis of the inaugural Kantar Creative Effectiveness Awards in 2020, “Feeling” is one of five key
ingredients that can deliver creative effectiveness. “Feeling” is making consumers feel something through
storytelling to build brand affinity, though not at the expense of functionality. The other four Fs are: Fortitude –
being courageous and communicating an honest, authentic message that speaks to consumer values and
truths; Fluency - building strong, distinctive brand cues that enable consumers to instantly make an intuitive
connection to the brand across campaigns, executions and media; Focus - simple and single-minded messaging
that helpfully conveys the benefits of the product or service; and Fun - delivering an engaging and enjoyable
experience to consumers as they consume the story.

2021 Creative Effectiveness Lions winners such as Pernod Ricard’s The time we have left showed how
emotionally relevant narratives can create meaningful brand connections. Despite the subject matter being quite
melancholy, the execution showed the warmth of human interactions – which is a successful tool to drive
memory response – with the product is woven into the narrative.

Read more in: The Five Fs of creative effectiveness, according to Kantar, Great stories build brands,
Over half of award-winning ideas use emotion as creative strategy and The effectiveness code

5. “Right brain” creative elements that elicit attention and emotional response are in
decline
Various studies conducted by agency and research group System1 have found that creative elements proven to
elicit attention and emotional response – and drive long-term effectiveness – are less used today in
advertising than in the past. One study of TV ads showed that over the last 15 years features characteristic of
the right brain, based on empathy, relationships and human connection, have largely disappeared. These
features include dialogue, implicit glances, scenes unfolding, accents and a clear sense of time and place. They
are being replaced by ‘left brain’ features, which are literal, factual and explicit – and less effective.

System1 suggests five principles to make creative more right-brained:

Entertain for commercial gain

Read more in: How 'right-brained' TV ads attract and hold consumer attention – as well as drive emotion,
Flatland: Addressing the crisis in video advertising creativity, Why literal, factual, repetitive TV ads are
leading to a decline in effectiveness, System1’s five tips to deliver more effective television
ads and Marketer's Toolkit 2020: The pivot back to brand (Economy)

6. Influencers can generate a stronger emotional response than TV ads

Influencers can generate a significantly stronger emotional response and higher levels of memory encoding than
TV ads, according to neuroscientific research. Respondents carried out a series of tasks as normal – watching
TV, YouTube videos and browsing their Facebook feed – during which they were shown a series of ads that
formed part of brand campaigns. Measurement of brain activity showed quite different responses for TV ads and
influencer ads – TV response was much weaker. Comparing key metrics across the formats revealed that
participants reacted far more strongly to influencer ads than TV ads: the former generated 277% more emotional
intensity and 87% more memory encoding (which correlates to future action and decision making).

Read more in: The science of influencer and its impact on influencer measurement
7. Lack of negative emotions may be more important than presence of positive ones

Research in China for Timberland conducted by Kantar found that the amount of net positive emotions
generated by an ad has a strong relationship with its likely on-air impact. Consistent with other markets, ads that
make people feel good generally do well in China. However, in the research, which broke down the net emotion
into its constituent positive expression (smile) and negative expressions (frown, disgust, smirk, etc.), Kantar
found that the mere presence of positive emotion was not highly associated with probability of success – but
absence of negative emotions seemed to matter more. Negative expressions such as a frown can indicate a
sense of confusion or disbelief which puts a greater burden on viewers, raising the likelihood of tune-out – and
reduced cut-through.

Read more in: Timberland: Unspeakable Truths – Neuro-science and AI enable better identification of the
emotions conveyed by advertising

8. Emotion alone is not enough, “emotional peaks” are key

Multiple pieces of research have uncovered the importance of emotional peaks, and the timing of them, in
creating effective video ads and content. Looking at video ads, research conducted by Ipsos MORI shows the
end of video ads are crucial to make them easily retrievable in memory and influence brand choice. An analysis
of more than 700 ads, looking at their memorability and second-by-second emotional responses captured by
webcam-enabled facial coding, found that ads which performed best in terms of memorability elicited stronger
positive emotional response in the second half of the ad. Other research looked at three groups of video ads: a
control group had an even pattern of emotional response, with few clear peaks; a second ‘multiple peaks’ group
showed several emotional highs through the course of the ads; a third ‘end peak’ group showed a clear
emotional peak towards the end of the ad. This found that: ad recall was significantly higher in the multiple peak
(31%) and end peak (43%) groups than the control group (23%); brand recall was three times higher in the
multiple peak group (32%) and two times higher in the end peak group (21%) than in the control group (10%);
and participants were also more likely to correctly recall details of the ads with strong emotional peaks than the
control group.

As for content, research from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) found that delivering multiple
emotional peaks is key to making it memorable - brand films which have 10+ emotional peaks are in the top
quartile for memorability. Using neuroscientific research to explore the relationship between emotion and long-
term memory in delivering engaging branded content, it found 70% of long-term memory encoding peaks are
associated with peaks of emotional intensity. The research also suggested using intimate personal narratives,
with one or two main protagonists, or personally relevant content were most memorable. Films that triggered the
highest emotional intensity in the first third of their length were also more memorable.

Read more in: Last impressions in video ads are crucial, The importance of timing in emotional
messages, The neuroscience of memory: Emotion and memory in branded content and Injecting
Emotion into Campaign Effectiveness: How the BBC found a way to turn the emotional impact of
branded content into a campaign metric

10. How people feel after seeing an ad is highly predictive of in-market business
effectiveness
Behavioural agency System1 have combined measuring the emotional strength of ads and share of voice (SOV)
to predict long-term growth. It measures emotional response to advertising, based on the seven basic emotions
everyone expresses in the same way in their face, and the intensity of those emotions. This data is converted to
a set of star ratings from one star through to five star – the Emotion-into-Action score. This is combined with
SOV data to create a growth prediction. Analysis of the 2016 John Lewis Christmas campaign’s actual results,
versus what the Emotion-into-Action model predicted, confirmed the importance of strong emotional response in
delivering outstanding business results. Subsequently System1 tested every ad in the cereals category over a
year looking at emotional response. Predictions of market share growth using this data combined with “extra
SOV” (actual SOV versus share of market) were dramatically better than “extra SOV” alone. Of concern for
marketers in the US and UK is that System1’s testing of more than 34,000 television spots – drawn from the
automotive, beauty, financial, health, tech and charity sectors – found over half of TV commercials fail to deliver
any market-share growth in the long term. Looking at its best testing ads of 2019, System 1 found that key
techniques for creating emotional impact were tapping into brand purpose, focusing on family life, achieving
cultural relevance and using established brand assets. System 1 has also found that use of emotion in
interactive digital advertising impacts long-term profitability and short-term sales.

Read more in: Marketing from the heart for growth, Long-term advertising: The Higgs boson of creative
effectiveness, Majority of TV ads fail to deliver long-term growth in market share and Five tips for
making breakthrough TV ads from the most effective spots of 2019

10. Emotional communication builds the brand and business long term, but a balance is
needed with short-term rational messaging

Les Binet and Peter Field's original analysis of IPA Effectiveness Awards cases in 2007 concluded that
emotional campaigns were more effective and profitable than rational ones (combination campaigns were
somewhere in-between). In particular, emotional campaigns that created "buzz" created more business effects
and bigger paybacks. More recently, they highlighted that emotional campaigns do not perform well in the short
term (first 6 months) and suggested a balanced approach which drives both long-term brand preference through
emotion and short-term sales through rational messaging. They suggested a 60:40 split between the two
strands of this ‘brand response' model but recommended integration as much as possible. New research from
Binet and Field has updated some of their earlier findings. While penetration remains the key driver of choice
and there is still an imperative to drive share of voice, the 60:40 split should be seen as a guideline figure. The
new research shows that the effectiveness of any communication is improved by consumer involvement in the
decision-making process; the more emotional the decision, the greater effectiveness of the advertising media.
Where a decision is more rational, growth tends to come from non-advertising factors.

A 2019 analysis of Australian Effie winning campaigns confirmed that emotional campaigns are more effective at
building long-term market share growth but rational campaigns are more effective in acquiring new customers -
so both are needed to deliver brand profitability over the short and long term.

Read more in: New lessons from Binet and Field - media in focus: Marketing effectiveness in the digital
era, What you need to know about the Australian Effies database analysis and Media in focus: Marketing
effectiveness in the digital era

11. Ads which evoke a strong emotional response are more likely to be noticed and
drive sales
Research looking at creative characteristics that drive attention found that ads which evoked a strong emotional
response drove stronger potential sales impact and gained more attention. The type of emotion elicited was also
important – those which created a physiological reaction such as getting your heart racing, outrageous laughter
or made your skin crawl were more likely to get eyes-on-screen attention and impact sales. However, sales
impact was also affected by branding quality, indicating the importance of effective branding of highly emotive
ads to deliver in market success.

Read more in: How advertising attracts attention

12. Emotional advertising uses motivational messaging to succeed

Scientific analysis has given a deeper understanding of emotions and their relation to purchase decisions. There
are two physical aspects to emotion: arousal, the degree to which the body responds physiologically, and
valence, how we assess if something is positive or negative. These dimensions drive the emotional response
and consumers’ feelings. To leverage the potential of arousal, it is the brand/product not the ad that needs to
trigger the emotional response, and if the ad is emotionally engaging, people are more likely to recall it. The
higher the arousal, the greater the chance of the communication being shared. Similarly, communications that
trigger a positive response will help build a positive attitude towards the brand and also more likely to be shared.
But not all emotional ads work. It is motivation, not the emotional response from viewing the ad, that triggers the
purchase. If there is no motivating message in the ad, the effect on brand sales at best will be random.

Read more in: How emotion really works in advertising, Why emotional response does not guarantee
advertising success and 2018 IPA Effectiveness Awards: Insights from the winning campaigns

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Further reading
How Mars uses attention testing to create more effective ads
As delivery services disintermediate, QSR brands should build emotional engagement

SoundOut: A large-scale investigation into the effects of music in advertising

Emotional realism and the many brands that reject it

How moment-to-moment EEG measures enhance ad effectiveness evaluation: Peak emotions during
branding moments as key indicators

Setting the tone: How a splash of colour creates a wave of emotion

Algorithms of scent and experience: Using machine learning to pair aromas with emotions and
motivations in the personal care category

How Viagra repositioned to reflect evolving definitions of masculinity in the UK

Why pharmaceutical advertising doesn’t connect emotionally with its target

Why is B2B marketing so irrational? Buyers have feelings too

ServiceNow builds an emotional connection with B2B customers using B2C ad techniques

The role of emotion in human decision-making: Implications for brand success

Why FedEx is researching consumer emotions to help deliver a new brand strategy

In tech we trust: Accelerating growth by elevating emotion over effort

The effects of communicating passion in advertising: How messages like “We Love What We Do!”
shape people’s product and brand evaluations

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