01. Draw on basic emotional triggers 02. Design for holidays and seasons 03. Use a powerful combination of imagery and language 04. Design only for your audience

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How To Get Into The Hearts Of
Your Audience With The Emotional
Branding Tactics Used By Apple,
Nike & Coca-Cola
Source: https://designschool.canva.com/blog/emotional-branding/
Table of Contents
How To Get Into The Hearts Of Your Audience With The Emotional Branding Tactics Used By
Apple, Nike & Coca-Cola ............................................................................................................1
Emotional branding: What do you need to know?....................................................................4
01. Draw on basic emotional triggers......................................................................................6
Exemplify your brand values through your fans .......................................................................7
Design it luxuriously.................................................................................................................8
Provide a different perspective ................................................................................................9
Give something back to your users........................................................................................10
Immerse your consumers visually and mentally.....................................................................11
Use color and character to trigger emotions ..........................................................................12
Pair engaging quotes with complementary images................................................................13
Create emotional bonds between consumers and your product.............................................14
Form inspiring relationships...................................................................................................15

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02. Design for holidays and seasons.....................................................................................17
Encourage and evoke the emotions of the season ................................................................17
Channel the emotional values of the holiday..........................................................................18
Use social media to intertwine yourself with the holidays.......................................................19
Create a seasonal tradition between your brand and consumers...........................................20
Crowdsource holiday snapshots from your fans ....................................................................21
Celebrate all year round ........................................................................................................22
Collaborate with your followers..............................................................................................23
03. Use a powerful combination of imagery and language ..................................................25
Create a strong relationship between your copy and image...................................................25
Let consumers fill in the blanks..............................................................................................26
Use confronting imagery to get your message across ...........................................................27
..............................................................................................................................................27
Use iconic symbols to make an impact..................................................................................28
Contrast type and image in an emotionally jarring way ..........................................................29
Appeal to common cultural anxieties .....................................................................................30
Keep your copy and image simple but powerful.....................................................................31
Address the consumer, not the product .................................................................................32
Pose a question to consumers...............................................................................................32
04. Design only for your audience .........................................................................................34
Target the elite athletes.........................................................................................................34
Target the cool style makers..................................................................................................36
Appeal to the young and stylish.............................................................................................37
Appeal to the sharp and sophisticated...................................................................................37
Use your medium to enhance your message.........................................................................38
Create shareable content with a message.............................................................................39
Get Started With Emotional Branding ....................................................................................40

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How do some companies manage to build a cult-like following
of customers who fall in love with their brand and are devoted
for life?
In 2012 it was reported that 90% of iPhone users at the time were likely to upgrade
to the next version iPhone after its release (classing them as repeat customers) and
that Apple’s ‘total lifetime customer value’ was expected to reach almost $400
billion by the end of last year.
How did Apple manage to go from a two-man team working out of a tiny garage to
a company with a fiercely loyal customer base now worth about half a trillion
dollars?
They developed relationships. They spent half a century building products and
working out ways to sell them that fed the interests and emotional needs of their
target consumers.
Nike has done the same. It’s never really focussed on selling sports attire. Instead,
it’s spent billions of dollars on endorsement deals and marketing campaigns with the
world’s biggest sport stars, selling the idea that everyone can be an elite athlete if
they had elite equipment.

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Nike
Big companies have built their empires not on the products they make, but on the
relationships they have with their customers. By adding an emotional dimension to
their brands, they’ve managed to cultivate loyal advocates and legions of lifelong
paying customers.
In this article, we explore how the big companies have mastered emotional branding
to reach the top and we use them to demonstrate how small businesses, the online
and offline varieties, can achieve their own meteoric rise by leveraging some simple
but profound emotional branding techniques.
Emotional branding: What do you need to
know?
Emotional branding is the practice of building brands that appeal directly to a
consumer’s emotional state, needs and aspirations with a view to leveraging those

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features of their consumer psyche to convert them into engaged (which often means
paying) customers and, better yet, long-term loyalists.
Emotional branding works when it triggers a buying response more profound than a
one-off, needs-based buying response. Toilet paper is a product that generally only
demands a needs-based buying decision. The reason you buy it can easily be
rationalized by your need for it. There is no deep, profound meaning lurking behind
your decision to buy — you simply just need it to stay hygienic. And while
manufacturers of toilet paper still vy for our wallets (and dabble in emotional
branding), they generally concentrate more on promoting the logical components of
the buying decision, like product softness and price, rather than investing in
developing a deep emotional connection between you as the consumer and them as
the brand.
The newest version of the iPhone or the latest release pair of Nike running shoes, on
the other hand, are both examples of products whose purchase cannot fully be
rationalized by logic. Though you might try to argue otherwise, they are not
traditionally needs-based purchases. You buy them (and pay top dollar for them,
mind you) for unique and profound reasons.
When you think about it, the results of emotional branding done properly are
mindboggling. For Apple, the connection they’ve cultivated with their consumer
audience is the reason why someone lined up for almost 250 hours to be the first
person to buy the iPhone 4S in 2011. When was the last time you flicked on the
news to a story of someone camping out for 10 days to buy the latest version of
double-ply, extra soft toilet paper?
For those of us on the consumer side, emotional branding is strange and difficult to
comprehend. But if you’re running your own business that relies on the relationships
you form with your customers (which is, you know, all businesses), then it’s
important that you understand it.
So what can small businesses learn from the emotional branding efforts of some of
the world’s biggest companies? Here’s 4 techniques you can learn and use as soon
as you finish reading this article.

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01. Draw on basic emotional triggers
Given the name, the first trick to mastering emotional branding is to draw on the
basic emotional triggers of your target audience. Marketer and consumer behaviorist,
Barry Feig, advised in his 2006 book, Hot Button Marketing: Push the Emotional
Buttons That Get People to Buy, that there are 16 emotional “hot buttons” you can
press to trigger a buying response from your target consumers:
1. Desire for control;
2. I’m better than you;
3. Excitement of discovery;
4. Revaluing;
5. Family values;
6. Desire to belong;
7. Fun is its own reward;
8. Poverty of time;
9. Desire to get the best;
10.Self-achievement;
11.Sex, love, romance;
12.Nurturing response;
13.Reinventing oneself;
14.Make me smarter;
15.Power, dominance and influence; and,
16.Wish-fulfillment.
Let’s hone in on these to demonstrate how they’ve been targeted in the marketing
efforts of some of the world’s biggest companies. Firstly, let’s look at Disney. A
company with a brand value in 2015 of about $180 billion, Disney has built
relationships with its consumer-base that have so far lasted 91 years. Can you
identify one of the 16 emotional “hot buttons” from the above list that they focus
on?

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Exemplify your brand values through your fans
Disneyland
If you guessed ‘family values’ you’d be correct. Disney fosters a magical, family-
friendly world that promotes bonding, happiness, and love, which is pretty evident
through all of their social media accounts.
Try and pick the hot buttons that these next few brands have promoted in the
following ads, campaigns, and designs.

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Design it luxuriously
Viktor Vörös
By using a sleek, dark design, and key terms like “state of the art”, “timeless”, and
“luxury”, this website design for Rolls Royce definitely manages to trigger the hot
buttons ‘desire to get the best’ and ‘power, dominance and influence’.

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Provide a different perspective
Nike
This campaign by Nike took a unique perspective by focussing on children working
to ‘find (their) greatness’ rather than elite athletes as was the norm. This fresh
campaign struck a chord with people emotionally, triggering the hot button of
‘reinventing oneself’.

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Give something back to your users
Burberry

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This campaign by Burberry took the new media platform and fitted it to suit their
brand campaign. Triggering the hot button ‘Sex, love and romance’ in the process,
Burberry allowed users to send ‘kisses’ to distant loved ones, tying the brand to
romantic ideals.
Immerse your consumers visually and mentally
Wildfoot

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The site design for travel agency Wildfoot channels the hot button ‘Excitement of
discovery’ by using luxurious full-screen images of each destination, with a simple
piece of copy that reads ‘Take me to…” which immediately immerses the viewer
emotionally and mentally.
Use color and character to trigger emotions
Pentagram and Sagmeister & Walsh
This playful brand design by Sagmeister and Walsh hits the hot button ‘Fun is it’s
own reward’ big time by using bright colors, vibrant characters and whimsical
concepts to promote the featured product.

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Pair engaging quotes with complementary
images
Dove

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This social media post from Dove evokes the ‘Desire to nurture’ hot button by
pairing a simple quote and image in a way that evokes an emotional response.
Create emotional bonds between consumers
and your product
Skype
This image from Skype definitely hits the ‘Family values’ hot button by creating a
connection between the love of family and their product.

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Form inspiring relationships
General Electric
Triggering the hot button ‘Make me smarter’, this visualised quote posted by
General Electric conjure a strong relationship between the brand and education,
curiosity, and inspiration.
In the above examples, the emotional “hot button” each brand is trying to press can
easily be identified, which leads us to the golden rule when it comes to drawing on
the basic emotional triggers of your audience — you need to clearly identify what
those triggers are. Your emotional branding efforts will fail if you can’t identify the
emotion you’re targeting at the outset, or if the emotion you’re targeting is not
relevant to the product or service you’re marketing.
The lesson to be learned here for any business wanting to launch into emotional
branding is to firstly think about what emotion, need or aspiration your brand aims
to meet in your target consumer. You should go further than just thinking about it
abstractly— for emotional branding to work effectively, you need to have a

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bulletproof understanding of what emotion(s) you’re aiming to target. You can use
the 16 “hot buttons” above to direct your thinking.
Action tip: Sit down with a pen and paper and write down a short blurb describing
the purpose of your business. If you run a commercial blog about personal finance,
for example, your blurb will look something like this: I run a personal finance blog
that aims to give people tips and advice about how to better save, earn and manage
their money. With that blurb at the top of your page, write down the list of the 16
“hot buttons” above (write them all down), and think about whether each is relevant
to your business as described in the blurb. When you’ve finished writing the “hot
buttons” down, start from the top and cross off those that are not relevant to your
business. You’ll hopefully be left with a handful. Choose just one to begin with, and
start to build your brand and your marketing campaigns that focus on it.

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02. Design for holidays and seasons
This one is a bit of a sneaky tactic, but if it’s good enough for the big brands then
it’s good enough for us. Take note of what ads start popping up on television around
Christmas time this year. The brands we love are acutely aware that emotions run
high during holiday periods and make us more susceptible to targeted emotional
branding tactics. Arnold Schwarzenegger spent an entire film (the 1996
classic, Jingle All The Way) going to absurd lengths to buy his son a sold-out action
hero figurine for Christmas. If you’ve done something similar (which we all have to
some extent) why do you think that was?
Encourage and evoke the emotions of the
season
Tiffany & Co

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In 2010 Tiffany & Co. company ran a Christmas advertising campaign with the
slogan ‘Give Voice To Your Heart’, which clearly targeted the emotions of its target
consumer audience (men) at a time when their love could be triggered to buy
expensive jewelry.
Channel the emotional values of the holiday
GAP
The US-based clothing chain, Gap, launched a multi-channel interactive campaign
in 2009 aimed at celebrating winter. Their ads focused on the holiday value of
togetherness and developed a playful winter theme (see “hot button” item 6).

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Use social media to intertwine yourself with the
holidays
Diet Coke
By taking a step into the modern times and running a 12 days of Christmas themed
social media campaign, Coke managed to intertwine themselves with the positive
aspects of the Christmas experience each day leading up to Christmas.

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Create a seasonal tradition between your brand
and consumers
The Dieline
Every year at Christmas coffee retailers Starbucks switch out their typical white cups
for festive red cups. This simple change has become a beloved Christmas tradition
amongst consumers.
“The red cups have taken on almost a cultural role, at least in the US, and now in a
lot of other markets around the world as well. When the cups turns red at Starbucks,
that’s one of the first cues that the holidays are upon us,” says Starbucks senior vice
president Terry Davenport.

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Crowdsource holiday snapshots from your
fans
Starbucks
Starbucks also gets heavily into the holiday season on social medias, by posting
Christmas-themed (and Starbucks-themed) images, both crowd-sourced and their
own content, on platforms like Instagram.

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Celebrate all year round
Peters
Target Canada celebrates the big holidays as well as the lesser known ones, such as
‘National Tiara Day’, which helps emotionally tie their brand to the positive aspects
of every holiday throughout the year. It also helps promote their emotional branding
of being a fun-loving company that doesn’t treat itself too seriously.

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Collaborate with your followers
Zocalo Group
Coffee-Mate chose to take on Valentine’s Day by releasing a campaign that
encouraged users to submit love notes, which would then be made into visual
valentines in under 15 minutes.

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Zocalo Group
“Hundreds of coffee-loving fans penned passionate odes to their friends, families
and even cherished pets, and posted them on Facebook and Twitter,” design
agency Zocalo Group said. This campaign linked Coffee-Mate to the emotional idea
of love and romance while creating a strong user-brand relationship.
Action tip: If holiday-themed marketing isn’t already a part of your strategy, spend
some time thinking and planning for it this year. Start by thinking about what
emotions are generally triggered around holiday time and choose the ones most
relevant to your products or services. Returning to the example of our finance
blogger, while the Christmas holiday period is generally a happy time, it can cause
a lot of financial stress for families too, which gives rise to a number of emotional
trigger points.

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03. Use a powerful combination of
imagery and language
When it comes to emotional branding, the visual assets that go into making up the
brand and the marketing campaigns it delivers can often work best when they
combine imagery and language to deliver a powerful, highly impactful message. The
starkest examples of this are usually found in cause marketing campaigns.
Create a strong relationship between your copy
and image
Jung von Matt
In this anti-smoking ad, the dark filtered image of the boy leaning against his father
combines powerfully with the text in the boy’s thought bubble (designed as a label
on a cigarette packet), to trigger the campaign’s target emotions.

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Let consumers fill in the blanks
Amnesty International

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This ad from Amnesty International uses a striking image and copy that doesn’t
immediately mention the issue at hand, leaving consumers to fill in the blanks, which
triggers an instant emotional response.
Use confronting imagery to get your message
across
Worksafe Victoria

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The same level of impact is achieved here with the confronting image of the man’s
disfigured arm sitting alongside the equally as powerful copy.
Use iconic symbols to make an impact
Draugiem

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Contrast type and image in an emotionally
jarring way
WATERisLife
This cause marketing campaign by WATERisLife contrasts popular “first world
problem” tweets against images of the impoverished population of Haiti. This
contrast creates a striking emotional effect that gives this campaign a big effect.

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Appeal to common cultural anxieties
Timothy Goodman
This piece for Women’s Health Magazine contrasts a scary visualisation of
‘melanoma’ against the names of loved ones to give the image a much more
personal, emotional impact. By playing up the common cultural anxiety of loved
ones contracting a serious disease.
But the combining of powerful imagery and language as an emotional branding
technique is not restricted to brands that rely heavily on cause marketing to build
relationships with their target audiences, and the message delivered does not need to
be a grim one. Take a look at this advertisement for Australian airline, Qantas, for
example:

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Keep your copy and image simple but powerful
Qantas
This ad is a part of Qantas’ ‘Feels Like Home’ campaign which is based on the idea
of people travelling home. This ad uses a very simple, image and pairs it with the an
even simpler piece of copy, ‘Welcome home’ to appeal greatly to consumers’
emotions. This one definitely triggers the hot button ‘family values’ and perhaps
even ‘the desire to belong’ and ‘a nurturing response’.
This advertisement proves that a skilful combination of imagery and language can
be just as powerful in triggering positive emotions as it is triggering negative ones.

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Address the consumer, not the product
Apple
Pose a question to consumers
Another example is from brand powerhouse Apple. By launching a campaign that
consisted of various images of people using their iPhones to achieve different things
with the simple tagline “You’re more powerful than you think”, by addressing the
consumer, not the product, Apple managed to form an emotional bond between the
iPhone 5 and its consumers.

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Dove
You’ve probably heard about Dove’s ‘Real Beauty’ campaign that has been in the
works for a handful of years now. One of the first elements of their campaign was
the ‘tickbox posters’. By asking viewers to vote on whether pictured women were
“grey or gorgeous”, “withered or wonderful”, “fat or fit”, Dove managed to
emotionally align themselves with many consumers.
Action tip: With your target emotions clearly identified, it’s time to get creative with
your brand visuals. Pulling off a powerful combination of imagery and language
isn’t as simple as it might appear from the above examples (especially when you’re
trying to deliver a positive message). To give it a go, we suggest you create or curate
a small collection of images you think best represents the target emotion you’re
aiming to trigger. With your images chosen, think up and write down 5 slogans for
each image (each with a maximum of 5 words) that you feel best complements the
image to target the emotion(s) and deliver the message you’re aiming for. When
you’re done, scrap the ones that don’t work and choose the best one to lead your
newest marketing campaign. A word of warning here: for this technique, there is a
fine line between being skilful and appearing manipulative, so be careful about how
the images and text you choose come across.

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04. Design only for your audience
The composition of a target audience is often made up of a number of features: age,
gender, marital status, core interests, etc. To succeed with emotional branding, the
designs you create to market your brand and its products and services need to
specifically target your audience.
While both companies sell sunglasses, Oakley’s target audience is far different to
Ray-Ban’s, and the difference is clearly evident in their respective visual marketing
campaigns:
Target the elite athletes

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Oakley

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Target the cool style makers
Ray Ban
What differences can you see between the two? The woman in the Oakley campaign
is on her own, riding a bike, with the blurred outdoors in the background. The pair
in the Ray-Ban campaign are sitting together, clearly enjoying a night out with a
horde of people in the background. While the same product type features in both
campaigns, the companies are clearly aiming to trigger a different emotional
response from their very different target audiences.
The same can be said here, with obvious differences between one shoemaker,
Converse, and another, Julius Marlow:

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Appeal to the young and stylish
Converse
Appeal to the sharp and sophisticated
Julius Marlow

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When targeting specific audiences, don’t be afraid to get clever with your medium,
especially if it helps your message pack a punch.
Use your medium to enhance your message
WWF
This campaign by WWF was released via Snapchat, a social media platform that
only allows images to be seen for 10 seconds before they are deleted. This medium
was perfectly paired with images of endangered animals on the brink of extinction
to create a heavily emotional campaign that targeted millennial audiences perfectly.

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Create shareable content with a message
Dumb Ways To Die
Another brand that used the medium to target a specific audience was Metro
Melbourne with their campaign to promote safety around trains and train tracks,
because that was just a ‘dumb way to die’. The ‘Dumb Ways To Die’ campaign was
comprised of a series of cute, funny animated characters that appeared in catchy
YouTube videos, fun apps, and funny posters. By linking the message and brand to
humor and personality, it created a strong message that was perfectly tailored to the
target audience.
Action tip: How do you make sure to pitch your brands and designs to your target
audience?
Step one, naturally, requires you to know who makes up your target consumer
audience. Are they male or female? Young or old? Clearly identifying your target
audience is often one of the most challenging parts of starting/running a business
(and one of the most often overlooked) because knowing who you’re marketing to
generally seems like intrinsic knowledge you have in the back of your mind. If you

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haven’t identified your target audience yet, read this Forbes article written by Chuck
Cohn — Steps To Identify Your Target Market.
Once you’ve clearly identified your target audience, you lead into the same process
of determining what emotions your brand, product and services will likely trigger in
them, and then you go about building the brand and marketing the products and
services in a way that triggers those emotions.
Get Started With Emotional Branding
For an outsider, mastering emotional branding can seem like a daunting branding
approach. But, hopefully this article has stripped the concept back and revealed some
simple ways to implement it. The key takeaways here are these:
1. Know your target audience and what they feel, want and need;
2. Know the emotions your brand and marketing materials should target; and,
3. Craft marketing messages that skillfully trigger the emotions in your target
audience in a way that aligns them with your brand.
Already given emotional branding a go? We’d love to hear how it went in the
comments section, below.
Written by
Mary Stribley
See Mary Stribley’s latest posts
Mary is a recent graduate from a Perth university where she studied creative writing and graphic
design and got the bug for both. She has a knack for vector art and for taking on projects that are
ambitious to a fault. When she’s not freelancing, she’s usually hunting for cheesy 80’s music
videos.