Emotions drive purchasing decisions more than logic ever could. While you might think customers buy based on careful analysis of features and benefits, the science of decision-making proves otherwise. Emotional marketing strategies help you elicit emotions from your target audience to foster more brand loyalty and inspire action. Gallup reports that 70% of consumer purchase decisions, including brand preferences, are driven by emotion, with rational factors accounting for only 30%.
Learn how to harness common emotional responses in consumers and deploy effective emotional marketing strategies that resonate with your audience’s hearts—and wallets.
What is emotional marketing?
Emotional marketing engages with your target audience on a deeper level by creating materials and campaigns that evoke emotions and build meaningful relationships between customers and your brand. Effective emotional marketing strategies transform casual customers into loyal advocates, drive purchasing decisions, and boost sales. For example:
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The Digital Transformation Institute found that 70% of customers who feel high emotional engagement with a brand will spend up to twice as much with those brands (versus only 49% of consumers with low emotional engagement).
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According to the same study, 81% of emotionally engaged customers will recommend the brand to friends and family, and 62% will promote the brand on social media platforms.
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Kantar reports that digital advertisements that evoke strong emotional responses are 2.6 times more likely to go viral and four times more likely to generate impact and drive long-term brand value.
Emotional drivers of purchase behavior and brand loyalty
- Nostalgia
- Fear of missing out (FOMO)
- Individuality
- Well-being
- Belonging
- Environmental concerns
- Humor
Emotional triggers such as nostalgia, belonging, and humor play a pivotal role in shaping consumer behavior and fostering brand loyalty. Here’s how specific emotions in emotional marketing can create opportunities for your brand:
Nostalgia
Emotional marketing can tap into your customers’ memories through nostalgic themes and references. Olipop successfully leaned into its millennial customers’ nostalgia for the 1990s to market its prebiotic soda brand as a healthy update to a much-loved product.
In the brand’s Soda Story marketing campaign, Olipop took a feel-good, relatable approach to reminding viewers of their own soda-centric childhood memories. They partnered with ‘90s celebrities to share how Olipop allowed people to bring soda back into their lives in a modern, health-conscious way. The brand also invited its customers to share their own Olipop stories on social media.
Fear of missing out (FOMO)
FOMO-based emotional marketing makes customers feel like they could miss a limited-time opportunity while supplies last, creating a sense of scarcity and urgency that drives immediate action.
Vicky Pasche, founder of Dapper Boi, saw success with FOMO when releasing new products with limited drops combined with discounts. After a period of struggling sales, the team experimented by launching a three-week-only campaign where they sold a limited quantity of their button-down shirts for 30% off. On the Shopify Masters podcast, Vicky says, “The limited drops went gangbusters; we had people waiting eagerly for each drop, then we would slowly launch every product this way. I think the key was FOMO—that sense of urgency for customers— they wanted to get in on it, and they knew they only had three weeks to get in at a special price before we sold out. It was all the hype.”
Individuality
The emotional marketing message of individuality empowers your target audience to express their unique qualities and makes them feel valued and special. It’s not just about offering a product, but making customers feel like they’re part of a brand that celebrates their personal identity.
Take the tea company Rocky’s Matcha, which made a bold choice by selecting blue tins over conventional silver or green matcha packaging. Founder Rocky Xu, on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast, explains, “We leaned into a color that isn’t commonly associated with matcha. We took what we learned from the industries that we come from and were able to be a bit more disruptive in an industry that is a bit more traditional.”
A product that bucks tradition appeals to people who embrace non-conformity. That seemingly small choice has resonated with customers seeking something different.
Well-being
This type of emotional marketing works to highlight how your brand can help customers achieve balance, reduce stress, and improve their overall sense of well-being.
Polar Monkeys sells high-end cold plunges and uses an emotional marketing strategy that goes beyond product features and benefits. CEO Eric Halfen explains, “We’re not just selling a product—we’re inspiring growth, encouraging transformation, and creating a community driven by wellness and self-discovery.”
They market the plunge as a tool customers can use for personal growth. In this Instagram campaign, they use images that invite customers to visualize themselves on a transformative journey to a better, healthier, more fulfilling version of themselves:
Belonging
This emotional marketing approach creates positive emotions of belonging and inclusivity. It invites potential customers to join an aspirational or like-minded community, making them feel like they’re part of something bigger than themselves.
For Orion Brown, community and representation were the driving forces behind Black Travel Box, a hair and skin care brand specifically designed for Black travelers. Orion explains, “My community is made up of millions of African-American travelers who love travel as a form of self-care and are looking for their tribe.”
Orion’s marketing approach encourages the Black Travel Box community to engage with each other and share travel tips, experiences, and connections that extend beyond the product experience.
Environmental concerns
If sustainability is part of your brand’s core values, focus your emotional marketing efforts on demonstrating what your brand does to improve the environment. Empty brand promises can create negative emotions that threaten your customer’s emotional bond with your brand, so you must take and showcase real action—not just express sustainability sentiments.
When Danielle Close, CEO of My Skin Feels, felt disappointed in the beauty industry’s lack of progress in sustainability, she made several strategic marketing commitments she shares on Shopify Masters. One was to design packaging that felt bright, joyful, and happy. She explains, “Yes, sustainability is really important, and food waste is really important, and natural products are really important, but it’s packaged in a really fun way that makes it feel non-threatening, and it doesn’t judge you if you’re not those things.”
Another commitment focused on product naming, aiming for inclusivity over pretension to reach people who may not consider themselves sustainability experts. Rather than using scientific or technical terminology, her products are named after how she hopes they make customers feel. Simply put: “My Skin Feels Clean” for a cleanser, “My Skin Feels Moisturized” for a moisturizer, or “My Skin Feels Amazing” for the duo.
Humor
Emotionally intelligent humor can delight customers, creating positive feelings and an emotional connection with your brand. A comedic approach to emotional marketing is about more than creating viral marketing moments; it infuses a unique personality into your brand identity that competitors can’t easily replicate.
Canned water company Liquid Death used humor to build a cult following and a $1 billion valuation through hilarious ads. Consider this activation the brand did at the Las Vegas Sphere:
On an episode of Shopify Masters, Andy Pearson, Liquid Death VP of Creative, shares, “It floors me that more brands don’t try to employ genuine humor, because it’s the fastest way to actually reach somebody and have a really powerful moment with them. Laughter literally is an involuntary response to making a connection with somebody or something.”
Tips to build an emotional connection with your customers
- Use data to understand your audience’s emotional needs
- Tell stories that make a lasting impression
- Demonstrate radical authenticity
Creating a strong emotional connection with your audience is vital for fostering loyalty and driving sales. Here are actionable strategies to help you connect with your customers on a deeper, emotional level:
Use data to understand your audience’s emotional needs
Before launching your emotional marketing efforts, conduct market research to identify the emotional drivers that resonate with your target audience. Focus on your most highly engaged, top-spending customers rather than trying to appeal to everyone.
Start by conducting user interviews, using survey apps to ask open-ended questions, and leveraging social listening tools to gauge customer sentiment. These methods help you uncover the emotional language and patterns that can guide your marketing strategies.
Tell stories that make a lasting impression
Brand storytelling uses a mix of facts and feelings to craft stories that tell people what you’re about and why they should care. Every compelling story needs characters (you, your customers), a conflict (personal or customer pain point), rising action (your journey to solve that problem), and a climax (the launch!). Most importantly, it leaves the reader or viewer with a feeling.
For Marc Barros, serial entrepreneur and CEO of photography marketplace Moment, learning to focus on emotional connections (feelings) rather than product specifications (facts) was a key business lesson. On an episode of Shopify Masters, Marc explains, “The number one takeaway from my first company is that consumers are very emotional. It’s not really the best product or focusing on functionality that wins. When you’re trying to reach end customers, you have to connect at the heart level, not the mind level. Emotional marketing works.”
Demonstrate radical authenticity
Brand authenticity is the perception that a brand’s actions and messages align with its mission and beliefs. Lindsey Carter credits much of her success at SET Active to giving audiences a behind-the-scenes look at the brand. She explains how building a deep emotional connection with fans naturally attracted celebrities and influencers to the brand.
“People want to see how their product is being made, the work that goes into it, and how hard people are working every day to bring it to life,” Lindsey says. “That’s something that we always prioritize at SET, because it works.”
To start building transparency and authenticity with your audience, follow the SET approach: Leverage social channels to build community, ask for customer feedback, and reveal what’s under the hood so your audience knows they can trust your product.
Emotional marketing FAQ
What is an example of emotional advertising?
When Airbnb relaunched its experiences platform in early 2025, the company created an emotional connection with its audience by emphasizing authentic travel experiences that connect people to communities and places, setting it apart from the more anonymous or impersonal experience of a typical hotel stay. The company took a social media-first approach to the campaign, launching a video called “The Grand Adventure,” which used nostalgia, belonging, and optimism to inspire a childlike sense of wonder and magic.
How does Coca-Cola use emotional branding?
Coca-Cola taps into emotions of joy, togetherness, belonging, and nostalgia. In 2025, it brought back its “Share a Coke”viral marketing campaign, in which bottle labels are replaced with names and emotional phrases to evoke excitement (e.g., “Sister” and “Bestie”). The relaunch successfully engaged younger audiences and encouraged emotional connection and belonging at a time of loneliness and digital isolation.
What are the cons of emotional branding?
Without empathy, authenticity, and emotional intelligence, emotional marketing can be viewed as manipulative. Brands that trigger emotional reactions without delivering on their promises risk backlash, negative feelings, and reputational damage. To avoid this, be authentic, transparent, and honest with your audiences so that your emotional marketing efforts accurately reflect your brand offering and your customers’ experiences.
