The power of emotion in advertising: what really moves your customers

Marketers are forever wondering what actually makes people notice a brand, act on it, and, if all goes well, grow fond of it. Time and again, the answer circles back to one thing: emotion. Studies repeatedly show that feelings sit at the centre of brand relationships, quietly steering decisions to follow, share, engage, purchase, and recommend. Emotion isn’t a decorative extra. It’s the engine behind why people choose one brand over another.

And in today’s fragmented media landscape, that matters more than ever. TV is no longer the reliable catch-all channel, and the digital world is crowded, fast, and fiercely competitive. So the key to capturing attention isn’t just sharper media planning; it’s crafting messages that cut through the noise and connect emotionally. Whether through mood, humour, or shared values, emotional resonance is what wins the pause, the look, the click. In fact, Nielsen found that advertisers who tapped into emotional appeal saw a 23x boost in sales compared to purely transactional ads.

Take Revolut as an example. They revolutionised how financial brands speak to their customers by shifting the narrative from "boring bank talk" to a "money super-app and lifestyle enabler." They captured the attention of young millennials with digital storytelling, memes, and a relatable, human tone. Their brand communication became fun, approachable, and contemporary.

The shift worked. Millennials and Gen Z connected with the brand’s promise of convenience, freedom, and control—far more compelling than a list of interest rates.

In short, emotion belongs at every stage of the funnel, from the lofty heights of brand building to the gritty bottom of conversion.

At the top, it helps create awareness and form long-term connections. At the bottom, it prompts action and helps customers commit. This holistic approach, known as brandformance, is a fully integrated strategy that combines the emotional pull of branding with data-driven tactics of performance. By aligning both emotional resonance and measurable outcomes, brandformance ensures that every touchpoint, from discovery to purchase, is designed to engage customers on a deeper level and drive results.

Understanding brandformance

Historically, many brands have treated brand-building and performance marketing as separate entities. Brand campaigns were designed to drive awareness, tell stories, and foster long-term brand equity, while performance campaigns were focused on achieving immediate results, like clicks or conversions.

Over time, there’s been a growing obsession with measurement and a relentless focus on ROI, areas where data-driven performance marketing excels. However, this shift towards short-term, performance-driven metrics posed a clear risk to long-term brand equity. Building lasting relationships, fostering loyalty, and ensuring customer retention, pillars of traditional branding, are often sidelined in the rush for quick, measurable results.

Understanding brandformance

At its core, brandformance is about building an integrated, dynamic funnel where every activity strengthens the brand while also delivering tangible outcomes. The goal isn’t to choose between brand and performance, but to align them so efficiency and long-term value grow side by side.

At the awareness stage, brandformance goes beyond impressions and reach. It prioritises measurable brand lift and data-driven creative optimisation, directly linking brand-building efforts to future business impact.

In the consideration phase, the focus shifts to emotional connection and personalised engagement. These interactions are tracked through real-time metrics, helping to pre-qualify leads more effectively while deepening relevance.

At the acquisition stage, strong brand equity does some of the heavy lifting. Brandformance drives sales and leads by leveraging emotions such as trust, urgency, and desire, resulting in higher conversion rates and lower acquisition costs. And it doesn’t stop there. The same principles extend into remarketing and retention, making the funnel more efficient and increasingly self-reinforcing over time.

The science behind emotion and action

When people feel something, their brains release chemicals such as dopamine, helping them remember the experience and associate it with pleasure.

This is why emotional ads are often more memorable and effective than purely informational or transactional ones. In digital marketing, the same principle applies. Emotional content tends to perform better, with ads that use storytelling, humour, or empathy generating higher engagement and click-through rates than neutral or purely functional messages. Even small emotional cues—positive language, expressive visuals, or human faces—can influence how users interact with content.

How to add emotion to your brandformance campaigns

You don’t need to turn every ad into a heartfelt story. The goal is to bring emotional thinking into your creative and optimisation process in a way that fits your brand’s tone and audience. Here are a few simple ways to do that:

1. Understand your audience’s feelings

Go beyond demographics and look at motivations, fears, and desires. What emotional needs are behind their behaviour? Understanding these helps shape more meaningful messages.

2. Use emotional triggers in ad copy

Focus on words that make people feel something, such as safe, excited, proud, included, or inspired. Match the tone of your copy to the emotional goal of your campaign.

3. Tell short, real stories

Even in performance formats like paid social or display ads, use quick storytelling techniques. A short headline or image can still tell a story that makes people care.

4. Design with emotion in mind

Visuals can strongly influence emotions. Warm colours, expressive faces, and dynamic layouts can instantly change how people feel about an ad.

5. Test emotional angles

Use A/B testing to compare different emotional tones, for example, curiosity versus reassurance. Measure not just clicks but engagement time or conversion rate to see which emotion drives better results.

6. Keep it authentic

The most effective emotional marketing feels honest. Forced or exaggerated emotion can make people distrust a brand. Stay true to your brand’s voice and values.

Examples of emotion in action

In today’s digital landscape, platforms like TikTok and Instagram have redefined how emotions drive engagement and performance. For instance, Duolingo’s and Ryanair’s TikTok presence both leverage humour and familiarity to build loyalty, creating a lighthearted yet emotional connection with users. 

Notably, for the Valentine’s Day campaign, Mediamarkt’s ad centred on the emotion of love and cherished moments, highlighting how a product like a speaker enriches the bond between an older couple. The core message emphasised that the true gift was the time spent together, enhanced by technology, rather than the product itself.

For Nespresso, emotional storytelling becomes real when their community shares life moments. A simple reel, showing someone making coffee, enjoying a quiet morning, or turning a routine into a ritual, transforms the brand from a coffee machine into a mood, a feeling, a moment worth sharing. By amplifying these everyday stories, Nespresso isn’t just selling coffee; they’re selling warmth, ritual, comfort. It connects because it feels human, familiar, and aspirational.

Examples like these show how emotion shapes behaviour. But how do you quantify something that’s felt, not seen?

Measuring the impact of emotion

Performance has become too transactional, and branding too self-indulgent. Meanwhile, audiences are emotionally overstimulated yet increasingly indifferent. Brandformance solves this by bringing feeling back where it’s needed most: inside the metrics.

A common challenge for marketers is quantifying the effect of emotion in campaigns. While feelings themselves aren’t directly measurable, their influence on audience behaviour and campaign performance can be tracked through multiple indicators. Here’s how to approach it:

1. Engagement and behavioural metrics

Emotional content tends to drive interaction. Monitor likes, comments, shares, saves, and video watch time. High engagement often indicates that the message resonated on a personal or emotional level. Additionally, returning visitors, repeat purchases, or longer site sessions suggest deeper emotional attachment and loyalty. These indicators show that emotion isn’t just driving one-off responses but building lasting relationships.

2. Conversion metrics

Emotions have the power to drive action. A boost in click-through rates, sign-ups, or purchases often indicates that your creative resonated emotionally with the audience. For one of our international clients, we conducted an A/B test on email campaigns, comparing emotionally charged versions to more neutral or transactional ones to isolate the impact of emotional messaging. The emotionally-driven variations clearly outperformed the others, demonstrating the significant effect of tapping into emotions.

3. Brand metrics

Track longer-term brand impact with tools like brand lift studies, surveys, or sentiment analysis. Metrics such as brand recall, favourability, and net promoter score help show whether your emotional messaging is strengthening brand perception.

4. Combining insights for impact

No single metric tells the full story. By analysing engagement, conversions, brand perception, and behavioural data together, marketers can demonstrate that emotional strategies not only enhance creativity but also deliver measurable business results. Over time, this data can inform optimisation, ensuring that emotion continues to drive both brand and performance objectives.

The future of emotion in brandformance

As marketing becomes more data-driven, creativity and emotion are sometimes overlooked. But automation and algorithms can only go so far. It’s emotional intelligence that makes brands stand out. The future of brandformance will depend on finding the right mix between human creativity and data precision.

AI tools can help identify emotional patterns in audience behaviour, but the creative spark still comes from human understanding. Successful brands will be those that use data to find opportunities for emotional connection, then bring those insights to life through strong storytelling and authentic messaging.

Moreover, creatives should be tested both before and after launch, as Avinash has emphasised in his blog posts. As a brandformance advocate, he notes that up to 70% of a campaign's success can be attributed to the creative content. This highlights the critical importance of ensuring that your ads are relatable, clear, engaging, believable, and, most importantly, capable of evoking the right emotional response from your audience. Again, this is where data meets creativity to attract, persuade and retain customers to generate long-term equity. Pre-testing ensures your ad will work.

As a marketer, how does this make you feel?

Emotions are not just for branding; they are essential to performance. When brands use emotion within a brandformance approach, they build stronger relationships, achieve better results, and create long-term value. Emotional storytelling makes people remember a brand, trust it, and act on it.

In the end, marketing that feels human performs better because it connects deeper. The more emotionally intelligent your campaigns are, the more your audience will respond, not just with clicks, but with loyalty and love for your brand.