We want to feel happy, feel excited, tickled, confident, feel good, luxurious, valued, needed and loved. That’s what we are consuming online on social media as we flick thru our feed with social media dopamine hits. The more we feel, the more alive we are, the more human we think we are.
Theme parks makes us excited, Movies bring us on an emotional rollercoaster, different genre of Music lets us have different feelings on demand.
There is a pronounced trend over the past decade and especially in the past years that Brands are tapping into this economy of feelings to make you feel a certain way with their somewhat long form storytelling videos and slapping on their logos at the end of the film. They want to relate to you sufficiently, trigger your emotions to get you to like their videos, related to the personified you to get you to share their content with your friends. Convince you sufficiently to like their brand and purchase their products or subscribe to their services.
Some Brands just want to develop communications to make you feel a certain way sufficiently so that you will buy their stuff.
Some other Brands have great conviction on their purpose and world view and are consistent in the products they develop, the service they offer and provide cohesive communications in their marketing.
So in this economy of feelings, consumers get all the feels through the many branded content brands make and at the end choose for themselves what brands they want to buy into that makes sense to them. Brands who are just tapping into consumers feelings on the other hand might not get real customers if the wonderful feelings they deliver thru their communications are but empty promises as their product and services fail to deliver.
We are all consumers, we all have feelings and we have our money in our pockets. Don’t insult us, we are not stupid.