Executive Summary

• Emotional marketing is a powerful tool for brands to humanize themselves, build lasting connections with consumers, and increase brand loyalty.
• Various brands have succeeded in leveraging emotional marketing to connect with their target audiences by creating empathetic, emotional experiences.
• Some challenges and pitfalls in emotional marketing include remaining authentic, perfecting the messaging for your target audience, and avoiding crossing boundaries.
• Emerging trends in emotional marketing include changing customer expectations, new technologies, and an increased desire for personalization.

Emotional Marketing Examples

Emotional marketing is a marketing strategy designed with the purpose of using messaging to elicit an emotional response from a target audience. This strategy provides a unique opportunity to connect with your target consumers in a way that’s meaningful.

Marketing efforts focused on emotional connections tend to be stronger and more memorable than those focused on information, cementing your brand in the hearts of your customers so they are more likely to turn to your products or services. Campaigns centered around emotions can drive consumers to associate positive emotions with your brand while positioning your company as relatable and worth buying from.

Some of the world’s largest and most popular brands utilize emotional marketing to build and solidify connections with their target audiences. Taking a look at a few emotional marketing examples and understanding how these brands utilize the strategy to remain in their audience’s memory can help you accomplish the same for your brand.

The Power of Emotional Appeal

Emotions have an important influence in our everyday lives—they guide our everyday decision-making and determine our actions. The power of emotions carries over into our purchasing decisions as consumers. Marketing that evokes emotions like joy, nostalgia, or empathy tends to be more memorable and more relatable. This power can create stronger consumer bonds as they are more likely to turn to the brand in a time of need or to make their lives better.

Positive emotional marketing helps associate positive feelings with a brand, making people more likely to turn to a brand to foster joy and happiness. Most powerfully, building emotional connections helps to humanize a brand, changing customers’ perspectives of a brand from a faceless company that they purchase from to a relatable partner that provides something helpful.

All together, emotions influence consumer decision-making and enhance brand loyalty. An effective emotional marketing strategy can establish a brand or a product in the minds of consumers, which offers benefits like encouraging them to share their experiences with their peers or leading them to turn to the brand in a time of need.

Leveraging the power of emotional connections in your marketing campaigns can lead to some of the following benefits:

• Increased brand loyalty
• Higher customer lifetime value
• Enhanced brand advocacy
• Improved customer engagement
• Differentiation in competitive markets

Successful Emotional Marketing Campaign Examples

There are many strong examples of emotional marketing campaigns that set brands apart in the minds of consumers. Some appeals to emotion are more subtle than others, but they all achieve the same purpose of resonating with consumers on a deeper level. Brands can turn to the following emotional marketing examples as illustrations of successful campaigns.

The Field Museum "Blood Appetite"

To fight Chicago’s winter attendance slump, the museum partnered with top restaurants on limited dishes using one unexpected ingredient—blood—then gave diners discount codes to the “Bloodsuckers: Legends to Leeches” exhibit. It turned squeamish into curious, foodie FOMO into family visits, and a cold season into a warm, shareable adventure. The result: a 42% attendance lift and the 2025 US Grand Effie.

Volkswagen "American Love Story"

To mark 75 years in the U.S., Volkswagen told a warm, time-hopping story about how a quirky outsider became part of American life. The campaign anchored the brand’s first national Super Bowl spot in a decade and rolled out with a two-minute extended cut set to Neil Diamond’s “I Am… I Said,” directed by longtime VW collaborator Lance Acord. The film stitches together family memories, pop-culture cameos and iconic models to feel less like an ad and more like a scrapbook America made with the brand.

Emotionally, it works because the car—not the company—is the protagonist. By framing the Beetle to the ID. Buzz as a character you grew up with, the spot taps belonging, pride and nostalgia without getting syrupy.

Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke”

Even brands with as much power and recognition as Coca-Cola benefit from effective emotional marketing campaigns. With its “Share a Coke” campaign, the brand replaced its name on its soda bottle labels with common first names and phrases like “Friend” or “Soulmate,” creating labels that read things like, “Share a Coke with a friend” or “Share a Coke with Lisa”.

The campaign generated joy and excitement, as consumers were excited at the prospect of finding a Coca-Cola label with their name, or a friend’s, on it. Not only did this campaign encourage people to buy sodas for fun, but it also associated Coca-Cola with camaraderie and friendship, as people sought the correct bottle for their friends. All together, the campaign united people through a shared experience and built a lasting connection between Coca-Cola and joy.

Dove’s “Real Beauty”

Beauty and cosmetic brand Dove has made a name for itself through its powerful, emotion-driven marketing campaigns. One of its strongest was the “Real Beauty” campaign, which focused on tackling unrealistic beauty standards and championing natural beauty instead.

Part of the campaign included highlighting stories of people who struggled with their own self-esteem and feeling knocked down by unrealistic standards or appearing different. The campaign highlighted how the individuals in these stories overcame these struggles to feel confident and comfortable in their own skin.

People empathize with being held to unrealistic beauty standards that affect their confidence. Today, Dove has a loyal audience that uses its products, largely because of the emotional appeal and the common ground consumers feel with the brand.

Google’s “Year in Search”

Google has boosted its marketing by creating an emotional marketing video campaign that highlights some of the most searched-for events and concepts of each year. This is a yearly campaign that Google has released at the end of every year since 2013.

Compiling search data from around the world, these campaigns hit close to home for many users. The campaign taps into feelings of nostalgia for the year behind while resurfacing emotions felt earlier in the year to establish personal connections. The emotions in the yearly videos range from sadness and anxiety to hope, happiness, and inspiration.

Whether viewers saw a moment that impacted them personally or saw a search that they made, the campaign helped unite people and make them feel like a part of something bigger. The 2022 campaign resulted in almost 300 million views on YouTube and millions more impressions across various social media platforms. Using the power of emotion, the yearly campaign solidifies Google in people’s minds as the best search engine option out there and equates the search engine with togetherness and unity.

Challenges & Pitfalls in Emotional Marketing

Emotional marketing is not always simple and straightforward, and there are a lot of nuances involved in getting it right. Brands that utilize emotional marketing must be able to do so without erring on the side of overdoing it or appearing disingenuous.

Some of the most common challenges and pitfalls include:

• Authenticity – Brands may struggle to meet consumers’ high expectations of brand authenticity and convey genuine emotions without it appearing disingenuous or forced.
• Relevance – Emotional marketing is difficult, but it’s most difficult to pinpoint the target audience’s appropriate interests or values and ensure campaign success.
• Cultural sensitivity – Attempting to address difficult or emotional topics can sometimes result in misinterpreting cultural nuances or norms and lead to misunderstandings.
• Risk of backlash – Addressing sensitive and emotional topics can be a difficult balancing act, and in some cases, it takes a careful approach to avoid sparking controversy or backlash.
• Measuring success – Choosing the correct tangible metrics to quantify emotional impact and campaign effectiveness can be challenging.
• Consistency – It can be difficult to maintain a consistent emotional tone across various platforms and campaigns over time, especially as the social climate changes.
• Overwhelming emotions – If emotions in the campaign are too strong or overwhelming, they may run the risk of overshadowing the brand message or product benefits.

Finding a balance between the right amount of emotion can be difficult. It’s important that brands perform a detailed analysis of their target audience and comprehensive market research in order to refine their messaging and anticipate the best approach for connecting with consumers.

Once these efforts are in place, it’s also crucial that brands perform a detailed analysis of the campaign results to decide whether to pivot and inform future campaigns. Having established engagement metrics like social media mentions, clickthrough rates, unique site visits, and overall conversions can help brands understand campaign success and whether refinement is necessary. This information can help brands overcome the pitfalls of emotional marketing and adjust when necessary for increased success.

Emerging Trends in Emotional Marketing

Emotional marketing as a strategy for connecting with consumers is only becoming more popular as brands realize its benefits. However, as technology improves, so does the potential for maximizing your emotional marketing efforts. Brands that stay ahead of the curve are able to build even more powerful emotional marketing campaigns that personally resonate with customers for greater impact.

Some emerging trends with the potential to boost emotional marketing efforts include:

• Artificial Intelligence (AI)
• Augmented reality (AR)
• Virtual reality (VR)
• Voice assistants

These tools can provide new touchpoints for consumers and added opportunities for brands to increase emotional engagement. For example, creating a virtual or augmented reality scenario can provide a more immersive and emotion-evoking marketing experience. Some examples of this in action include Ikea using virtual reality to add furniture pieces to your home and spark emotions of comfort and confidence or Volvo creating a virtual reality test drive experience to foster an excitement for driving in their cars.

Consumer expectations are also changing, which will influence business decisions—for example, consumers expect personalization, as 46% of customers will buy more when given a personalized experience. Tailoring emotional marketing campaigns to unique customer interests can increase their impact and leverage the customer desire for personalization into more meaningful campaigns. Utilizing the right data to inform your brand strategy can give you unique insights into your customers and their interests so you can harness detailed personalization in your messaging.

Engage Your Audience on an Emotional Level

Emotional marketing is a powerful strategy for connecting with consumers and building a reputation as a relatable, reliable brand that is worth buying from. Brands like Dove, Google, Coca-Cola, and more have successfully used this marketing strategy to engage consumers and build lasting relationships. Using these brands as a guiding star can help you develop an emotional marketing campaign that checks all the boxes.

At PETERMAYER, we help brands build strong emotional marketing campaigns that resonate with consumers. We’ll assist you in refining your messaging and utilizing analytics to maximize the impact of every campaign. Most of all, we help you unlock the inherent joy that exists in your brand to help you captivate your target audience for long-term customer connections.

Contact us at PETERMAYER to discover your Joy Score and learn more about how we can unlock your brand’s potential and build lasting relationships with your target audience.

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