Tugging on your heart strings: Is emotional advertising effective?

By Michelle Robinson

Emotional, confronting, tear-jerking advertisements may become a popular choice of Australian companies after the success of this UK ad for retailer John Lewis.

According to online marketing site Mumbrella, the UK retailer recently released this advertisement that pushed their sales up by 39.7%.

Will Australian retailers make the same move and is emotional advertising effective or ‘too’ manipulative?

“Advertising is manipulative, that’s how we sell things. We need to manipulate people’s thought patterns and their wants and needs,” MCM entertainment copywriter, Ash Gazal, said.

“So much of what we sell, people have, or they’ve got four versions of it, or they don’t need it. We need to get an emotional response out of them that’s going to make them excited. If you rationally appeal to them it doesn’t really work,” she said.

Ms Gazal explained that when writing advertisements the trick is to create something that resonates with a consumer’s personal emotion or memory.

“We make emotional connections because it’s less work for us. When we build up those warm fuzzy feelings inside and those memories, it’s a very powerful thing, it can be quite subversive but it definitely works,” she said.

Australia is seeing a wave of emotional ads from the TAC , QUIT and Work safe government campaigns. Many of them are confronting and shocking.

“Emotional ads are a good short-term strategy but a bad long-term strategy,” Director of Retail Education services pty ltd, and Monash University lecturer, Andrew Cavanagh, said.

“With the TAC ads, the shock wears off. If every ad they do is an emotional tug, people are going to get tired of it pretty quickly,” he said.

click here to listen to Andrew Cavanagh audio.

Creative Director of Grey Group Australia, Nigel Dawson, has been the writer of the TAC campaigns for 13 years. He explains that the ads are a positive impact on the community.

“People need to be confronted with the realities of what happens in a crash. Confronting them will force them to assess their driving behaviour,” he said.

“The TAC ads have been around for years, and our road tolls are some of the lowest in the world. It isn’t all credit to the ads but they certainly have raised our awareness of dangerous driving,” Mr Dawson said.

Results from a recent survey conducted by Market Juice found that emotional ads did have an impact on viewers.

Participants were asked to view the John Lewis advertisement and the Australian TAC ‘pictures’ advertisements.

When asked if they were emotionally moved by the ads, 70% responded yes. 64% said the TAC ad would influence them to assess their driving behaviour.

42% of participants said the John Lewis ad would not convince them to buy at the store, even if the ad were for an Australian retailer.

According to Andrew Cavanagh, emotive advertisements only work well if the same attitude is reflected in stores.

“The critical thing for retailers when using emotional advertising is that they’ve got to back it up when the customer walks into the store,” he said.

“If they’ve got this wonderfully emotive ad that pulls on the heart-strings and then the customer walks into the store but the salesperson doesn’t care, then consumers are probably going to have a negative perception of the retailer,” he said.

Emotional advertising seems like an effective way to grab consumer’s attention, but the question still remains as to whether it alone is effective in changing behaviour or increasing sales.

What’s your view on the John Lewis and TAC pictures ad?

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