Why should you use emotion in your label design?

Emotion helps you engage with your customers

Did you know that so much more goes on in the mind of a consumer than you might first think? And not all of it is conscious. With approximately 11 million sensory neurons firing around the brain every second, only 40 of these travel through conscious pathways.
Using emotion in your marketing is key to engaging with your customers from personalising your labels and stickers to your office accessories. Most of our decisions are made emotionally and then we try and back these decisions up with rational information. In the same way that you cannot consciously stop your heart from beating, and you cannot consciously ‘unsee’ an optical illusion, your emotional processes tend to beat your rational processes.

In our experiments, when it came to the labels that used emotion, we found the following: -

• An emotional image made people spend 13% more time than average looking at the product label.
• An emotional word on product labels increased looking duration by 10%, compared to the average.
• In the ‘shopping’ experiment, a label of a smiley face made people respond more automatically when choosing the product - their response times also quickened by 290ms.
• A cake label which simply had a small image and the text ‘Pure joy inside’ was very effective at improving engagement for a parcel. It increased the probability of loving the parcel by 264%, and people were 173ms quicker (i.e. more automatic) in loving it.
• Compared to average, an emoji made people 14% more likely to look at an envelope’s label at all, and increased duration of looking by 6%.

To summarise, labels which induce emotions in consumers will be more effective for two main reasons.
1. Emotion encourages involvement and engagement with an object.
2. Positive emotions ‘rub off’ on items through a process known as emotional contagion. For example, one study showed that gift-wrapped products receive higher purchase intentions and that this is due to the wrapping creating a stronger positive mood. Another study found that compared to a control label such as “Apple Pie”, an emotional label such as “Aunt Annie’s Apple Pie” increased the sales rate from 8.2% of customers to 13.8%.
In Design & Print you can personalise our successful label templates with your own text and images. Alternatively read our blog about designing the perfect labels and follow the advice to create your own.