The Great Marketing Debate

One of the longest-running debates in marketing is whether to use emotion or logic and facts or feelings when communicating with your target market. While emotions overwhelmingly drive behaviour, quite often consumers choose to apply the brakes of rational restraint.

Therefore, if you want to motivate your target market into taking the desired action, what do you use? The answer is both emotions as well as logic but at different times of the sales journey. It’s important to find the right balance between satisfying their emotional and logical needs.

Remember, the head and heart respond in different ways to stimuli and this can cause a lot of confusion when creating and interpreting an advertising message. Thus, should a brand try to evoke conviction or focus on clarity? Should the underlying marketing message aim to make the target market understand or make them feel?

Exploring the Customer Journey from Emotion to Logic

Let’s put it this way, people will forget what you said or did but will never forget how you made them feel.

Since conviction inspires action, we would suggest you start with emotion and then move to logic.

When a customer sees something new, they instantly make a judgement of it. That’s because the subconscious or emotional part of the brain works faster than the conscious or logical part.

The whole idea of a sales process is to make your target group ‘get a good feeling’ about your product. Once you feel like you’ve established that connection, focus on ticking off all those logical boxes.

Convince your consumers by highlighting the USPs of the product/service and how it can be beneficial to them.

Once their brain is satisfied that this is a viable option, bring emotion back into your messaging. When they’ve reached loyalty and reassurance, they will feel familiar and trusting of your brand.

Cadbury Dairy Milk has rooted itself into Indian consumers’ minds and hearts through timely product innovations, expansions and campaigns. Through campaigns such as ‘Kuch Achha Ho Jaye, Kuch Meetha Ho Jaye’ and ‘Shubh Aarambh’, they’ve represented a plethora of emotions, from shared values such as family togetherness to good feelings.

So who wins – the head or the heart? The duality of clarity and conviction is the backbone of effective marketing. Choosing the right marketing medium at the right time and fostering the right emotion is important.