If you think responsive design was a game changer, think again. Recognizing the screen size of a device and adapting to that resolution is a pretty awesome feature that has pretty much been an industry standard now. What if your website could recognize the emotional reactions of a user and be responsive to that as well?
In a previous post I talked about the power of senses and how they help forge emotional associations with a brand or a product. Now imagine if you could identify these emotions and adapt your messaging accordingly. Live, real time, on the spot!
No, this is not from a science fiction movie. It is quite real and it is happening. It will probably be a few years until it is a reality but there has been a mountain of investment behind emotion recognition technology lately.
Power of Emotions in Marketing
The most successful and widely acclaimed marketing campaigns are always the ones that manage to make an emotional connection with their audience. Think Dove’s ‘Real Beauty’ campaign, Apple’s ‘Think Different’ campaign or Kleenex’s ‘Unlikely Best Friends’ campaign. They all have elements that appeal to different emotions and create really powerful, long lasting connections with the brand.
If you are thinking ‘the purpose of marketing (or being in business for that matter) is not to create emotional connections but to increase revenues’, there is a Nielsen study that was conducted in 2015, which revealed that ads with the highest emotional response resulted in over 20% increase in sales.
The greatest thing about emotional marketing is the longevity of its results. Emotions are extremely powerful. In fact, they are the main drivers of most human behaviour including purchasing decisions. So you can imagine how long lasting the results would be for a business that manages to create positive emotional associations with its customers.
Given the power of emotions, it is not a big surprise that emotion recognition technology is a hot topic in marketing these days. According to Markets and Markets, emotion detection and recognition market is estimated to be worth $22 billion USD by the year 2020.
Of course we cannot talk about cutting edge technology without mentioning Apple. The company has been very interested in emotion detection technology and even acquired an emotion recognition company earlier in 2016.
How Does Emotion Detection Work?
The idea is to catalogue hundreds of thousands of facial images and expressions on a daily basis to create a library, based on which a computer can recognize the changes on somebody’s face and understand their mood instantly.
And that will not be the extent of that either. Thinking about the rise of wearable technology in the last couple of years, collecting emotional data becomes even easier and more real-time. Your mobile devices and computers can only collect data when you are actively using them. But wearables are always connected to us. They are constantly measuring signs like heartbeat and breathing patterns. As the technology for these devices advances and they become more capable of tracking signs such as temperature, blood pressure and other vital functions, emotion detection will be even easier and more precise.
What Does This All Mean For Marketing?
When implemented fully, emotion recognition will be nothing short of a revolution in the world of marketing. The trend in the last 5 years has been towards more and more personalized content whenever and wherever possible. Emotion recognition will only make this easier for marketers and allow them to calibrate marketing efforts mid-stream. Every individual will experience a brand differently based on his or her reactions.
The flip side to this phenomenon is the fact that users will never know if they are seeing “the real” content. When everything is being adjusted to one’s current emotional state in real time, the transparency between a brand and its prospects could diminish dramatically. As much as personalized content makes us consumers feel special, we do not want to feel that we are being sold. There is a fine line between a genuine interaction and a sales pitch that only tells the prospect what he/she wants to hear and brands that know how to walk this line will come out as winners in this new era.
When the German car manufacturer Audi was looking to improve its Le Man’s race car performance, the chief engineer presented his team with a constraint. He asked his team how they could win the race if their car couldn’t go faster than anyone else. In other words, he challenged his engineers to find a way to improve the car’s performance without increasing the vehicle’s top speed (the constraint). This self-imposed constraint forced the engineers to think outside of the box. Since they couldn’t increase the speed, they decided that making fewer pit stops during the race would put them ahead of the opponents if their car could go longer without having to refuel.
One of the benefits of UGC is the fact that consumers can bring their own perspective of the product to the table. If a company has 100 customers it means that there are 100 different ways that people are experiencing the product. What better way to make things interesting than to let your customers share these experiences? This can really help a brand develop its own personality in the digital space.
As great as it is to generate valuable content, what ultimately matters is the results. The return on investment on UGC is completely measurable through social media analytics tools and Google Analytics so that businesses can tell what is working and what is not. It is the ideal way to drive revenue and demonstrate value by measuring the engagement.
With e-commerce rapidly increasing in popularity among millennials, purchasing behaviour is naturally evolving with it. Millennials, otherwise known as Generation Y, are estimated to be the largest consumer group in the US history. According to market research reports by 
These days, consumers have inherent trust issues against corporations. Every time we see an ad that says “free …” we are immediately suspicious. Consumers know that there is no such thing as free when it is coming from a company that is looking for ways to increase its bottom line.
Social proof theory suggests that people are automatically drawn to things that they know others already like and trust. This goes hand in hand with building trust, as the more people are talking about a product (and hopefully saying good things), the better the chances of recruiting more customers. This works from both a consumer and a business perspective. When people don’t have enough information or are unsure of what to do, they turn to a larger group of people who have more knowledge than them. As for the companies, it is a great way to legitimize their claims about a product through actual users validating it for them.
As these cases indicate, sex in advertising works when it comes to creating awareness and buzz for your brand. The question is whether it’s the sex that sells or the controversy it creates. To answer this, let’s take a look at a study conducted in 2007 at the University College London. This research looked at the recall of sexual and non-sexual television commercials embedded within programmes, with or without, sexual content. To do this, the researchers divided 60 adults into four groups, two of them watching a sexual program (Sex and the City) and two of them watching a non-sexual TV show (Malcolm in the Middle). Each TV episode was embedded with either sexual or non-sexual commercials to measure brand recall. After the experiment, the participants were asked to remember the names of the brands they had seen during the commercials. The results, as you can see below, are quite fascinating in that the group that watched Sex and the City had a much lower recall rate than the other group, regardless of the content of the commercials. The researches concluded that the existence of sexual content in a program impairs the ability of the brain to focus on other content.