The marketing industry has to take responsibility for its negative emotional impact and make change.

Emotional marketing…if you get it right it's a golden ticket to commercial success. If you get it wrong, sad for the client, but that’s all, right? Wrong.

In a world where how you ‘feel’ about a product, human or movement is having a commercial, political and environmental impact every single day - the ripple effect of emotionally led marketing could be catastrophic.

Here’s why I think now is the time to address this and take responsibility for our future world and industry.

The marketing sector's emotionally persuasive tactics must be having an ongoing negative impact on an increasingly mentally challenged world. Is it a surprise that the growth of the global digital advertising and marketing market (anticipated to reach $786.29 Billion by 2026*) somewhat correlates with the rise of depression and anxiety? Even before the pandemic, anxiety and depression were becoming more common among children and adolescents, by 2020, 5.6 million kids (9.2%) had been diagnosed with anxiety problems and 2.4 million (4.0%) had been diagnosed with depression.* And let’s not forget those children and adolescents are consuming more digital content than any other generation before them.

I am by no means suggesting that the marketing industry is solely responsible for the global mental health breakdown, but I am suggesting it’s having a serious impact.

I’m here to appeal to all of us, myself included, to take greater responsibility for the chemical reactions we’re trying to incite from our audiences.

We know very little about the human brain, but one of the things we do know is that it is very good at compartmentalizing. It can take information and filter it into useful, and not useful categories, store it or seemingly ‘delete’ it from memory. However, when you’re faced with upwards of 10,000 pieces of advertising a day, more than we’ve ever experienced in the history of the human race, surely the brain will break down, burn out or malfunction.

So how can marketers ensure we’re responsibly tapping into audiences’ emotions, rather than causing even more anxiety or depression?

At Full Fat we’ve created a formula for campaign creation that promotes feel-good chemical reactions like Oxytocin or Dopamine, meaning that we can confidently say our campaigns generate good feelings from our consumers. We are also tracking this as well. Outside of this formula, we do all the below as well -

Focus on feel-good emotions.

Be contextually aware of the strains that the world is currently facing.

Build campaigns that help, hold and drive hope for audiences.

Campaigns that I think have nailed this recently are -

Uncommon’s creative studio on BA’s Take Your Holiday Seriously campaign. They’re using humour, a relatable concern and anticipation to address a challenging reality - burnout. Creating dopamine through comedy, a community through a shared reality and a helpful call to action outside of a clear sales message.
Burger King’s Non Artificial Mexico campaign embraced its consumers in their realities, and by doing so made them feel seen, listened to and cared for. This campaign produced a 98% positive sentiment rating, which is very impressive.

*Global Industry Analysts, 2022

*Georgetown University, United States of America