Keys to an Appealing Emotion-Enabled Campaign

By: David Mario Hutabarat – PR Consultant of Fortune PR

An emotion-enabled campaign takes products that customers need, use, and love, and utilizes emotions as a mode of persuasion, reminding them exactly why they love these things.

Before starting an emotion-enabled campaign, brands need to find out what really resonates with their audience. Whether it’s using a recent event or playing up a sensitive topic, brands strive to truly understand what’s going to appeal to a greater audience. If done well, this can captivate new and old customers alike. Moreover, to appeal to consumers, companies and brands need to tell genuine stories. They need to make customers feel something about the product.

Let’s analyzed deeper about one brand example. Always, a sanitary pad brand by P&G, needed a way to appeal to the next generation of consumers in the face of growing competition from rivals and engage Millennial girls via social media. By bringing an emotional and empowering message, Always finally created the award winning #LikeAGirl campaign.

From 2015 to 2016, Always created an emotional video campaign that can leverage the brand’s legacy of supporting girls as they make the transition from puberty to young adults. Always wanted to reinforce the brand’s relevance to its audience and create a campaign that understands the social issues girls face today during puberty.

The video shows viewers that being “like a girl” is often taken as an insult, as many of the men and women in the video giggle, flip their hair, and flail their arms around when they are asked to run, throw, and fight like a girl. Yet when young girls are asked to run, fight and throw like a girl, the results are drastically different. When one little girl is asked what it means to run like a girl, she responds by saying “it means run as fast as you can”. At the end of the video, Always asked the audience: When did doing something like a girl become an insult?

As a result, the video has been viewed more than 90 million times and shared by over 1 million viewers. During the campaign, use of the #LikeAGirl hashtag skyrocketed on social media and also offline, including displays at schools and even chalkboards outside Manhattan’s coffee shops, all proudly stating to do things #LikeAGirl. There are a few important lessons that we can highlight from Always #LikeAGirl campaign:

1. Strong research as a foundation

Always clearly understood their target market, their audiences’ needs and wants, their behavior, and issues that are relevant to them. Research conducted for the campaign showed that over half the women claimed they experienced a decline in confidence at puberty. Always sees this issue as an opportunity and decided that empowering girls during this time of their lives when confidence is at its lowest, would make an emotional, powerful, and a relevant campaign message.

2. Emotion matters

People rely on emotions rather than information to make brand decisions. Emotional responses are proven to be more influential. Be unique, creative, and audience oriented when crafting the key messages. Reflect again and again to the campaign’s objective and the target audience. We have seen that Always spread an emotional and relatable message by showing that “like a girl” should be a meaningful and powerful statement all women should embrace.

3. Choose the right channel

You don’t need to use all advertisement tool or issue high funds for publication. Just use the channels that match your target audience. Always #LikeAGirl campaign optimized digital channels, mainly social media for the campaign’s platform. The brand also debuted a 60-second spot during Sunday night’s Superbowl game and made it more viral.

4. Measuring the success

When measuring a campaign’s result, reflect back to the objectives. Is it to build awareness? Is it to build brand equity? Is it to engage the target audience? Or even aiming for behavioral change which will take longer time and continuity?

5. An integrated campaign

Always #LikeAGirl campaign effectively integrate across social and traditional media channels. They also successfully modified and enhanced the content for each platform, worked together to create a unifying message, and succeeded in meeting its goals.