Business strategy
When it comes to business strategy, advertising has been categorized under promotion, and this is a home territory for marketers that aims at ensuring their products and services are noticed by the consumers for purchase. Promotion can be termed as the communication made by companies to their target markets by the use of different marketing channels to ensure the consumers can learn of the company’s products and brand. The use of advertising appeals has been adopted by marketers as a way of influencing the views of the consumers towards purchasing a particular product. It is the message in the advertising appeal that determines whether the consumer may deem the product necessary or not and hence, the message should be persuasive in its unique way. The following paper looks at the effectiveness of rational and emotional appeals in advertising.
Emotional appeal is where the marketer uses a message that triggers either positive or negative emotions of the consumers when reaching out. Studies show that before a consumer makes a purchase, his attention should be captured first and by the use of emotions, the attention of the consumer is captured. The use of the feelings to capture attention enhances the attractiveness of the products. Humor is an excellent example of an emotional appeal and it has been stated to have a great impact on attracting the consumer. While combined with elements of surprise, humor is said to be transformed and as a result, the attention of the consumer is retained, they feel happy, and as such their inclination towards buying the product increases. For instance, the Squatty Potty is a toilet stool and whose company engaged in use of humor as an advertising appeal. The company used a video of a unicorn relieving itself into the ice cream cones made for the prince. The humorous video swathe company approaching a sensitive topic in a special way increasing the value of the product. As a result, the company saw an increase of 600% in their sales.
Another form of capturing attention by use of emotions is through the use of provocative messages such as sexual content. The appeal is said to increase the attention of the consumer since it release stress hormones that arise as a result of provoking the consumer. However, they have been termed to be effective when compared with informational adverts.
Rational appeal is a persuasive way of convincing consumers by appealing to their sense of logic or sense. As such, the marketer tries to convince the consumer that the product at hand is the best by listing facts, benefits or the statistics of the product. The effectiveness of the rational appeal is based on the features of the product or service that appeals to the consumer. For instance if the marketer is aware of the massive unique feature that his vehicle has, he may go for the rational appeal instead of emotional appeal. Products that bear technical features also call for rational appeal for by viewing the uniqueness of the products, the audience are left amazed and just saying how they need that powerful product. An example of a company that uses rational appeal mode of advertising is Nokia and Huawei in their theatres, where they show the possible consumers what the product is capable of. Automobile companies also tend to use rational appeal.
In conclusion, emotional and rational appeal are both effective forms of capturing the attention of the consumer. To the marketer, however, he need to choose wisely on which appeal to use based on the products and its functions.