It is often said that marketing sells best when it evokes emotion in the customer. If you can make an emotional connection with your brand and the consumer, you have won the marketing battle for their loyalty. It is a matter of knowing your customer base and marketing to their mood at the right time. But right now, there are a lot of emotions circulating through our society. In fact, it seems like anything that is said or done right now gets a very strong emotional response. Is this really the right time to build your marketing on such strong feelings?

Right now, I would say the emotional response we are seeing has much to do with two polarizing viewpoints that are being argued publicly and politically. It is an election year, so you can bet that the public display of emotions is only going to heighten. As far as marketing to those emotions, keep in mind three key bits of information you need before you launch your next campaign. First, is there a general consensus among the demographic you are targeting that one side or the other is right? If not, it would not be worth promoting something that a portion of your target would love, but the others would hate. But if you are finding a general consensus, proceed to the next piece of information. Does your promotion brighten the mood of your target market? For instance, if your target market had a lot of vacation plans canceled this summer, many of them would be feeling despair. The summer ended before it began. If that is the general mood of the people you have targeted, work that emotion to your benefit. What if you worked it out to have an exclusive pass into Disney World while they are limiting their crowds, but this pass would be for a family vacation with a guarantee to get in the gates. If you promoted the vacation, what sort of emotion would you get out of your gloomy, lost-my-vacation target market? Joy, elation, anticipation, happiness – all these tied to your brand. It is all in how you read your audience. But before you proceed, there is one more group of people you need to evaluate.

How are the influencers going to react to your campaign? Influencers are not your target market: they will never buy from you, but they hold sway over those who will. In today’s world, influence looms large. For instance, let’s take that golden ticket for a family vacation and say you ran with that campaign. If someone from a group that your target market respected came out and said you were doing a bad thing by enticing people to take their young children to a theme park in the midst of a health crisis, it would damage your brand. You have to anticipate how the influencers of your target market will react to your campaign before you move forward with it.

If you get to the end of this little exercise and believe you can navigate the three areas I outlined, move forward with your marketing campaign. There is money to be made and positive brand recognition ahead of you. However, if you tripped up on any of the three, I would wait this emotionally charged season out and live to market to emotions another day.