Mastering emotional text analysis

Emotional text analysis is a powerful tool for enabling a greater understanding of how people feel about their experiences with your brand. Similar to grammar analysis, it helps you move beyond what people are saying to how they are saying it.

It’s important for us as humans to be in touch with our own emotions. The same principle applies to understanding how we influence others’ feelings, whether that be in personal or business relationships. Marketers who strive to understand the emotions of their audiences are better equipped to create impactful brand communications.

The importance of emotional advertising

Being able to convey and tap into emotion is essential to creating human-focused brand experiences. The importance of this is clear when considering up to 57% of consumers report they are more inclined to be loyal to human brands. While functional messaging targets the brain, emotional messaging gets at the heart – and the most renowned brands are masters of tugging at our heartstrings.

Take a moment to consider some brands who do this well.

Did Coca-Cola spring to mind with their “Choose Happiness” campaign? Or perhaps Nike with their empowering campaigns focused on racial and gender equality in sports? What about your favorite holiday ads that capture the joy and excitement of being with family and friends?

Consumer buying habits are intrinsically linked with our emotions. How we feel directly influences how we prioritize our needs and wants. Because of this, devoting proper attention to emotional analysis is essential to a robust and effective marketing strategy.

Sentiment vs emotion

The growth in popularity of social media monitoring platforms has brought sentiment analysis firmly into the vocabulary of marketers. Lexalytics defines sentiment analysis as “the process of determining whether a piece of writing is positive, negative or neutral”. It is commonly used to keep a pulse on the public discourse of brands as a tool for brand reputation management.

Classifying text on a spectrum of positive to negative can be informative, but it lacks the nuance that is necessary for informing appropriate actions. For example, negative sentiment may indicate the writer is sad, angry, confused or annoyed – but it is difficult to determine which emotion applies without reading the text for yourself.  Without this level of detail, it is hard to know the best course of action.

Emotional text analysis in Relative Insight

Emotions are more complex and nuanced than sentiments. Relative Insight’s text analytics platform offers advanced emotional analysis capabilities that help to overcome the limits of sentiment analysis.

SENTIMENT = 🙂 😐 🙁
EMOTION = 😠 😟 😕 😭 🤬 😤 😲 🤩 😂 😃 🤔 🤭

Enabled by a deeper understanding of how people feel about your brand, you can go about creating positive emotional brand experiences that create lasting impressions with the public while taking action to mitigate negative emotional experiences.  

Next time you’re using Relative Insight, consider how the emotional insights can be put into action. Here are some examples to help:

Building confidence

Analyzing customer reviews of a fitness brand surface confidence as a common emotional response. Previous marketing campaigns focused exclusively on physical benefits. Armed with this information, the brand develops a new campaign that focuses on confidence and self-esteem and in doing so opens itself up to an expanded audience.  

Conveying a sense of calm

Analyzing social mentions of weighted blankets reveals that users are more likely to report experiencing calmness than traditional bedding providers. Previously, brand messaging emphasized benefits for reducing anxiety. Equipped with this insight, brand messaging shifts to focus on calmness and appeals to a broader audience that may not identify as being anxious.

Reacting to customer worry

Analyzing discourse from health forums about a new medication reveals a sense of worry among patients who have been prescribed the medication. This is accompanied by a high prevalence of the phrase side-effects. Equipped with this information, you initiate a review of the medication and issue communications to doctors and pharmacists to better convey what patients should expect when using the medication.

Making emotional analysis easy

Relative Insight makes emotional text analysis easy by surfacing the emotions that are unique to different audiences. These insights can inform marketing, advertising and customer experience strategies and in doing so help embed your brand in the hearts of consumers.