My wife makes a wonderful triple-layered chocolate cake. The cake is the best I have ever eaten. The three layers are moist and baked just the right amount. Her homemade fudge frosting simply melts in your mouth. It has just the right amount of chocolate. It is rich, but not so much that you get a sugar rush with every bite. No, this is the perfect amount of sweetness coupled with chocolatey goodness. Anyone who has ever eaten it will tell you, they would never turn it down.
If you are a connoisseur of chocolate, you might be having a reaction to the last paragraph. My guess is you are dreaming of it right now. You can almost taste each bite as I described the cake. You know how it smells - delicious - and you can almost feel the texture of the cake as you take a bite. In just a description of the cake, your sense of taste, smell and touch have been activated. I might be able to do the same thing with the picture above. However, I would also guess that your reaction would not be the same if I had described something else to eat, like a tunafish sandwich. You may like tuna, but your reaction would not be the same as it was when you could taste the chocolate cake from just imagining how good it was. Why is this? It has to do with the way we think when we experience something that brings us pleasure. One of the reasons we have this reaction to chocolate is it stimulates our bodies to produce a neurotransmitter called endorphins. Endorphins interact with our brain receptors that help us feel energized and happy. When that happens, we begin to anticipate the experience. We dream about what it will be like and it occupies our thinking. After you have experienced these endorphin generating foods, such as chocolate cake, you need only engage your senses - especially to see, smell or hear about them - to cause a pleasurable reaction inside your head - one in which you have nearly tricked your sense of taste that it is being robbed of the pleasure and needs to get to the nearest restaurant to eat dessert. Chocolate does that to many people.
So if you know something triggers pleasure in your target market just by people thinking about it, it would make sense to marry your brand to these things in your marketing. The closer people perceive your brand is related to the thing that brings them pleasure, the more accepted your brand will become. So it stands to reason that if I were to advertise my brand in front of a slice of triple-layer chocolate cake, people would have a very positive reaction to it. By simple association, they would crave my brand! That is, until they don’t. There is a little more to this that relates directly to marketing.
Just as images and words can evoke positive feelings that cause people to engage with your brand, the same can be said about having negative feelings that lead people to disengage with it. What would cause someone to be turned off by the same thing that turned someone else on? Let’s say someone used to like chocolate cake, but they had a very bad experience with it. Let’s say they once sat down to eat a slice of cake and, when they were just about finished eating, they discovered something was moving in the cake. Upon closer inspection, they discovered it was not just one thing moving, it was hundreds of them! They discovered that the cake was full of red ants and most of them had been eaten with their cake! (Take a closer look at that picture above.) Oh no! What happens to that person every time they hear someone describe a chocolate cake? They can only think of the very bad experience they had. They are repulsed! It makes them sick to think about it.
The same thing happens when you are using a celebrity spokesperson to engage people with your brand. All of the sudden, the face of your brand does something stupid and the marketplace turns against them and, by inference, against your brand!
The images and words you use in your marketing can get a strong reaction. The same photo and headline might get two polar opposite reactions. Why? Because we live in a world of extremes and people often have experienced positive and negative from the same source. If that is the case, what should you do with imagery and verbiage in your marketing? First, figure out who your target market is and who it is not. Then build your marketing campaigns around images and descriptions that bring out positive emotions in your target. For instance, if you are targeting young men, aged 18-25, do you care if your imagery insults women aged 45-55? Maybe not if you are not selling to them directly. But here is the other tricky thing about emotions tied to marketing: there is always an influencer of your target market. They may not purchase anything from you, but they influence those who do. So what could you surmise about women aged 45-55? They might have sons who are aged 18-25. Do you think you can insult someone’s mother with your imagery and not be impacted by it?
So here is the conclusion of the matter: engaging the five senses in your marketing efforts is a great way to get your target market to think of you in a favorable way. However, choose the words and images you use carefully and do a little research on the people you are trying to reach. What makes them happy? What turns them off? Who is influencing them? What are the influencers' likes and dislikes? Once you have it nailed down, watch carefully what happens. Keep an eye on the reaction you get from your target market. The cake looks good until someone points out that it is covered with red ants.