Emotional Marketing/Advertising: Good or Bad?

In recent weeks in China, one of the biggest and most heated topic in advertising and marketing industry is the SK II campaign focusing on a very popular community nowadays in China – the “leftover” women. (I saw another classmate was also trying to post on this topic, well, don’t worry, I am just using this campaign as an introduction of my post, you could still write yours lol)

In 2007, the Women’s Federation defined “leftover” women (sheng nu ) as unmarried women over the age of 27 and China’s Ministry of Education added the term to its official lexicon. Since then, the Women’s Federation Web site has run articles stigmatizing educated women who are still single.

And this ad focuses on describing the similar dilemma for all the “leftover” women in China. People’s stereotypes of leftover women and the pressure, both from peer and from parents and families of this community, and their opinions are well depicted in the video. The video culminates in the ‘leftover women’ delivering a personal message to their parents at the marriage market, saying that “I don’t want to get married just for the sake of marriage. I won’t live happily that way.”

The main big idea of the ad is trying to say that “leftover” women are not left over. They have the right to decide whether and when they would like to pursue a career and marriage. It was said to be a progress in women’s right and has generated a lot of debates.

Personally speaking, I like this video because leftover women is a very good topic. However, what I am wondering is that is there any other way to approach this same topic. This ad clearly goes with the way of emotional advertising/marketing and this is clearly a very successful strategy. But I was thinking that the reason because why it is so successful is that SK II is a beauty brand. Just think about Dove, one of the reasons why the beauty campaign they did is successful is that it is a very on-brand and suitable strategy and idea. But emotional marketing/advertising is probably not the strategy for every brand and campaign. Advertising should treat consumers as intelligent, reasoning people, and not as passive zombies. Advertising’s role should be to introduce people to a product based on where it may fit into their lives and how it might benefit them, in a charming, compelling or entertaining way. And when they become customers of the brand, their attitudes will change in favour of it as a matter of course. Emotional marketing/advertising sometimes will be very misleading. It could be a very impressive story-telling but it might do nothing to help with the brand. Many stories are not closely connected to the brand.

But when I was trying to think of any bad example of emotional advertising, I cannot think of one. What do you guys think?

References:

http://www.marketingmagazine.co.uk/article/1285626/why-emotional-ads-bad-brand-building

http://www.themarysue.com/sk-ii-leftover-women/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/chinas-leftover-women-this-emotional-advert-wants-to-empower-the/