The joy of joyful marketing

We love studying, writing about, and embedding joy into our culture here at our marketing agency. So, National Day of Joy is another excuse to look at the power of joyful advertising, and which brands manage to capture it perfectly.

Joy can be delivered to consumers in a wide range of ways. Adverts can be sentimental, contain inspirational quotes or simply something that is so insightful that it raises a smile. Anything that allows a brand to make a deeper and more meaningful connection with your audiences can create powerful feelings.

Bringing joy to your customers may not seem like your top priority, but there are many positive benefits. Researchers found that “Happiness is essential to consumer behavior” as it creates feelings of trust, loyalty and goodwill towards brands. Even better, joy can impact on businesses’ bottom lines. 86% of companies which believe it’s important to make people happy also experience revenue growth.

So how easy is it to fill your customers with joy? In a world where customer satisfaction is paramount and customer expectations are continually increasing, making your customers smile isn’t always that easy. But, if you succeed, you can reap the benefits.Creating joy isn’t about great service or personalised communications, it’s about tapping into your audiences’ emotions and making them happy. It’s about finding those insightful, personal and beautiful moments which are commonly experienced by many of us, but that feel unique. Easy then!!

Brands that are effortlessly spreading joy with their marketing

McDonald’s: #Imlovinit24 This global campaign may be seven years old but it still tops our list. Focused on creating memories, it aimed to bring the world together on 24^th March with 24 ‘gifts of joy’ in 24 cities over 24 hours. The hashtag got nearly 40,000 mentions and trended across the globe on Twitter and Facebook.

IKEA: #thehappinesshunter

This clever campaign from IKEA wanted to find out how the Danes created the ‘hygge’ feeling in their homes. Rather than simply conducting research, IKEA created a global competition to find an official ‘happiness hunter’. Inundated with entries from across the globe, two lucky winners spent two weeks in Copenhagen visiting Danish homes. The findings were captured in a TV documentary into creating hygge.

So how do you create a campaign that brings your customers joy?

1. Identify the ways that joy links into your brand and its advertising. Those emotional and deep-seated moments that bring natural joy – remember this will very much depend on your business and target market.
2. What are the best ways to communicate with your audience?
3. How can you best demonstrate joy? Is it through imagery, testimonial quotes, a film, a competition?
4. And finally – monitor your campaign’s success.

Here at ThinkOTB we’ve mastered the art of understanding emotions. We love to help our clients delight their customers with joyful marketing. If you’d like to find out more about creating campaigns that resonate with your target market, please get in touch.