Consumer Psychology:

Emotional Benefits And Buying

By James Atkinson, LLB

Consumer Psychology - Emotional Benefits And Buying:

I want to put a strong caveat on emotional benefits: in marketing you can’t simply directly express emotional benefits or pure emotions.

For example, don’t tell prospects they will be sexy because they buy your fast sports car. If you do you could get a response somewhat like this:

“Oh how silly, buying this product does not make me a different person.”

This response occurs because most people are unconscious that they are motivated by emotional benefits. Prospects don’t want to believe that their purchases are emotionally motivated – they find the idea threatening.

This is good for marketers because it works to keep the emotional benefits unconscious and thus unable to be analyzed. This is precisely why they are so powerful. Because they are not raised to the level of conscious awareness, they are actually more persuasive and motivating.

You need to go below the surface, beyond the capability of the prospect to easily admit or expressly state the emotional benefit.

You must communicate the emotional benefit INDIRECTLY. You have to make the prospect’s mind WORK.

If prospects were directly confronted with an emotional benefit statement, as in the example above, their rational conscious mind would kick in and the emotional benefit would lose much of its power because they were able to consciously assess it.

In the age of the internet, with keyword research tools and online surveys, you can quickly discover the very fine nuances of your market – its segments, language, and associated needs, fears, and desires.

And then of course, it remains up to YOU to make your prospect’s mind do the work!

This is the creative that propels you to marketing success. This is where you can use your persuasion psychology to enhance sales.

Prospects don’t want to be to be emotionally influenced. So, emotional motivation should be kept as the marketer’s purview and not left for the customer to contemplate or brood about.

Marketing via emotional benefits is something you do in a roundabout way. It’s not “in your face” marketing but it IS marketing nevertheless.

Emphasizing emotional benefits is not emotional manipulation – it’s just more efficient as a communicative process. You are after all, your prospects’ advocate. This is where your relationship with the prospect is very important.

You build your emotional benefits from within that relationship – though blogs, content, videos, free information and so on – before you send them to a sales letter.

The sales letter, through the correct persuasion techniques, should then reinforce the emotional benefits message you have already proffered.
So, don’t make the mistake of lifting emotional benefits to an “in your face” level by telling the consumer directly about those benefits. That simply takes away the immense power of this type of marketing.

Whilst your marketing messages support the consumers’ self-esteem you also let them feel that:

• Their buying decision is governed by objective recognizable criteria and that
   
• Their feelings and emotions are expressed via acceptable displays of ideological and cultural standards.

That is, convey the emotional benefits INDIRECTLY and let the consumer’s mind do the work for you.

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