Most emotional marketing aims at "the pain point", and that target is the wrong size. Pain is not one feeling. A buyer who is frustrated and a buyer who is resigned are both in pain, and they need opposite messages: the frustrated buyer still wants to get through the wall and needs to see which part of it moves, while the resigned buyer has stopped trying and needs cheap proof that trying again is worth it. Name the exact emotion, and the message, the offer and the call to action follow from it.
This article is written for Saudi companies of 50 to 250 people. The research on emotion in advertising and in B2B buying is more useful than the agency version of it, and more cautious. Below is what it shows, followed by five pairs of emotions that need opposite messages. The ethical line comes after them.
Everything here is also in The Emotion Map, a free PDF covering 24 emotions that show up in buying decisions and what to say to each.
The Emotion Map.
24 emotions behind buying decisions, what each one needs to hear, and where the line is. Free PDF.
Contents
Why is "pain point" a weak marketing brief?
"Pain point" is a weak brief because it names how big a feeling is without naming the feeling. A copywriter handed "pain point: lead generation" has to guess whether the reader is worried, fed up, embarrassed or past caring. Each guess produces different copy, and most guesses land in the generic middle.
The vocabulary gap is not special to marketers. In Atlas of the Heart (2021), Brené Brown reports that her team asked workshop participants to list the emotions they could recognize and name as they felt them. Across surveys from more than 7,000 people over five years, the average was three: happy, sad and angry. Those were workshop surveys, not a representative study, but anyone who has read a customer persona will recognize the pattern. Brown's book maps 87 emotions and experiences, and its vocabulary is the one this article and The Emotion Map draw on. BMD is not affiliated with Brené Brown or her publisher.
Precision is linked to better outcomes in psychology, although that research is about people naming their own emotions, not about advertising. A 2015 review by Kashdan, Barrett and McKnight in Current Directions in Psychological Science reports that people who tell their negative emotions apart more finely drank about 40% less alcohol when stressed right before a drinking episode and were 20% to 50% less likely to retaliate aggressively against someone who hurt them. The findings are correlational. The lesson for a marketer is narrower: a feeling you have not named is a feeling you cannot write to.
You can't write to a feeling you haven't named.
Does emotional marketing actually work, or is it an agency myth?
Emotional marketing works, but not the way it is usually quoted, and not as a replacement for reason. The most cited evidence is Les Binet and Peter Field's analysis of the IPA Effectiveness Databank, published as The Long and the Short of It (IPA, 2013). Among award-entry campaigns with a recorded message style, 29% of emotional campaigns reported very large profit growth, against 25% of campaigns that combined emotion with reason and 16% of purely rational ones. Those percentages are shares of case studies, not the size of the profit, which is why the popular line that emotional ads are "twice as profitable" is wrong.
Time changes the result. Among campaigns that ran for three years or more, 43% of emotional campaigns reported very large profit growth, against 23% of rational ones. Over one to two years, campaigns that combined emotion and reason led at 27%. On short-term direct effects, rational campaigns won: 38% reported very large ones, against 36% for combined campaigns and 26% for emotional ones.
For a company that reviews marketing every quarter, the verdict is not "go emotional". Give every piece of work one job. Emotion builds over years and reason sells this quarter, so most companies need both.
Emotion builds the brand. Reason closes the quarter. Budget for both.
Are B2B buyers really more rational than consumers?
B2B buyers are not much more rational than consumers. What differs is the object of the worry: a consumer worries about the product, and a B2B buyer worries about their own position if the purchase goes wrong.
The B2B evidence is thinner than the consumer evidence, so each result below comes with its limits. In Binet and Field's 2019 analysis for LinkedIn's B2B Institute, based on fewer than 50 award-entry cases and with findings the authors themselves call tentative, emotional B2B campaigns averaged 1.4 very large business effects, against 0.2 for rational ones. In a 2013 CEB survey of 3,000 B2B buyers, run with Google and Motista, 71.0% of buyers who saw personal value in a brand (professional, social, emotional and self-image benefits) said they would purchase, against 22.6% of buyers who did not. Both results are self-reported, and neither proves cause.
CEB's research also points to hesitation inside the buying company. In CEB's 2013 B2B Buyer Survey (n=590), 48% of respondents said they had wanted to buy a new solution but had not spoken up about it. The reasons come from a different sample: CEB's survey of 3,000 buyers charted fear of losing respect and credibility, and less often fear of losing one's job, as reasons for not acting that rose with the size of the buying team. Gartner surveyed nearly 1,000 B2B customers in late 2020 and found that buyers reporting high decision confidence were 10 times more likely to make a high-quality, low-regret purchase, which Gartner defines as buying the larger, broader, higher-priced solution with little or no regret.
B2B advertising rarely gets an emotional response at all. In a System1 analysis of 1,700 B2B ads for the B2B Institute (2021), 76.7% scored one star, the lowest rating, on a scale built from viewers' emotional response and brand recall. The B2B buyer is moved by emotion, and the typical B2B ad barely registers.
The B2B buyer isn't only buying a product. They're protecting a position.
Which emotions need opposite marketing messages?
Five pairs of emotions look alike from the outside and need opposite messages. Each pair comes from a situation that Saudi companies of 50 to 250 people run into, and each emotion has a fuller entry in The Emotion Map.
Stress or overwhelm?
Stress is carrying more than you can handle while still keeping things moving. Overwhelm is the point where the load freezes you. A marketing lead running campaigns, reports and agencies at once is usually stressed. A founder who is personally the marketing department, and has stopped making decisions about it, is overwhelmed.
The stressed buyer wants relief from the load: what can be handed off or automated, and what can be stopped without losing control. The overwhelmed buyer needs the opposite of a menu. Three packages shown to someone who is frozen are three reasons to postpone, so show one small first step instead.
Frustration or resignation?
Frustration is hitting a wall while still wanting what is on the other side. Resignation is what frustration turns into after long enough: the belief that effort will not matter. A company that pays agencies every month and cannot say what the money brings in is usually frustrated. A company that tried marketing twice and now says marketing doesn't work in its sector is resigned.
A frustrated buyer still has energy, so give that energy a direction: explain the mechanism behind the wall and which part of it moves. A resigned buyer hears the same energetic pitch as proof that nobody is listening. Resignation moves with cheap, bounded proof, meaning a small test with a set budget, a set end date and a number agreed in advance.
Anxiety or dread?
Anxiety is unease about an uncertain future with no single threat in view. Dread is the heavy expectation of a specific bad thing that is on its way. A company launching its first product in a new market is anxious. A company that knows it will miss a growth target at next quarter's board meeting is in dread.
Anxiety eases when the unknown becomes visible: what will be measured, when, and what happens if it fails. In a new market, the anxious buyer also needs arguments before feelings. A 2001 Journal of Marketing Research study of 72 TV ads for one medical referral service across 23 US markets (Chandy, Tellis, MacInnis and Thaivanich) found argument-based appeals particularly effective in new markets.
Dread needs a dated action that comes before the thing being dreaded. A meta-analysis of 248 samples, mostly of health messages (Tannenbaum and colleagues, Psychological Bulletin, 2015), found that fear appeals had a positive average effect, and that the effect was roughly twice as large when the message assured people they could carry out the recommended action or that it would work. That research supports the step. It says nothing about the date.
Envy or admiration?
Envy is wishing a rival's advantage were yours. Admiration is being moved by someone's work in a way that makes you want to grow. A founder watching a competitor win a contract feels envy. The same founder, reading how that competitor rebuilt its sales process, can feel admiration.
Marketing that feeds envy sells imitation: do what they did, only louder. Marketing that turns envy into admiration shows the system behind the result, step by step and with the numbers, so the reader can see a path they could build themselves. A case study that shows only the outcome leaves the reader with envy and nowhere to put it.
Shame or guilt?
Shame says "I am the problem". Guilt says "I did something wrong". A marketing message can provoke either one, and the two lead to different behavior. Copy that implies the reader is behind, careless or out of date reaches for shame. Copy that names the cost of a specific delay, and the repair still available, reaches for guilt.
The evidence favors guilt, in moderation, and it favors problems that can be fixed. In a meta-analysis of 90 samples (Leach and Cidam, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2015), shame was linked to constructive action when the failure was more repairable, and to less constructive action when it was less repairable. In a study of guilt appeals in advertising (Coulter and Pinto, Journal of Applied Psychology, 1995, n=60 working mothers), moderate appeals produced more felt guilt than weak or strong ones, and as appeals got stronger, attitudes toward the ad and the brand got worse, with anger the main emotion behind that drop.
This is why BMD says marketing departments are built to underperform. The sentence moves the problem from the people to the structure, and a structure can be repaired.
Put the problem on the structure, never on the person.
Where is the ethical line in emotional marketing?
Emotional marketing crosses the ethical line when it uses a feeling to stop the buyer from thinking instead of helping them decide. Three tests catch most cases. Does every fear message come with a step the buyer can actually take? Is the guilt moderate, specific and repairable? Is the problem placed on a structure rather than on the person reading?
The law sets only a floor. Saudi Arabia's E-Commerce Law (2019) prohibits electronic advertising that contains a false claim, or wording that could directly or indirectly mislead the consumer (Article 11), and allows fines of up to SAR 1,000,000 for violations (Article 18). It has no provision on fear appeals as such. The voluntary ICC Advertising and Marketing Communications Code (2024) goes further: marketing should not play on fear without a justifiable reason, and should not use high-pressure tactics that hamper the consumer's choice.
Add one internal test to the three. If a buyer would feel manipulated on learning how a message was designed, the message needs redesigning.
Use emotion to help the buyer decide, never to stop them thinking.
How do you find the emotion your buyer actually feels?
The emotion your buyer feels is already written down in their own words, usually in sales notes nobody reads for feelings. Finding it takes an afternoon.
- Collect the words. The last 10 sales calls, the reasons given for lost deals, WhatsApp inquiries and reviews. Use their language, not your summary of it.
- Mark the feeling words and the situations. Most will be vague: "stuck", "tired", "we tried everything".
- Name the closest emotion, then test its neighbor. Frustrated or resigned? Stressed or overwhelmed? The neighbor is where the message changes.
- Give each asset one emotion. A landing page gets one emotion and one message move from the map.
- Run the three tests from the section above before anything ships.
The emotion is rarely hidden, so the work sits in step 3: naming it precisely enough to write to it.
What is in The Emotion Map?
The Emotion Map is a free PDF with 24 emotions, grouped by the moment they tend to appear, from the first scroll to the renewal. Each entry gives a plain-language definition, what the emotion sounds like, what to say to it and what to avoid. The map also includes six common business situations with the emotions each one tends to carry, the evidence with its limits, the ethical tests, and a one-page worksheet.
The Emotion Map.
24 emotions, what each one needs to hear, and where the line is. Free PDF.
Frequently asked questions
What is emotional marketing?
Emotional marketing is marketing designed to create, or respond to, a specific feeling in the buyer, such as relief, trust, pride or dread, rather than relying only on product facts. The evidence suggests it does a different job from rational messages, and most companies need both: emotion builds effects over years, while rational messages drive short-term response.
Does emotional marketing work in B2B?
The available evidence says yes, with caveats. Binet and Field's 2019 B2B analysis, based on fewer than 50 cases and described by its authors as tentative, found that emotional B2B campaigns averaged 1.4 very large business effects against 0.2 for rational ones. In B2B, many of the emotions concern the buyer's own professional risk.
Are emotional ads twice as profitable as rational ads?
No. That line is a misreading. In the IPA data, 29% of emotional campaigns reported very large profit growth, against 16% of rational ones. That is a difference in how often campaigns reported very large gains, not in the size of the profit.
Is it true that 95% of buying decisions are subconscious?
No study is cited for that figure. It traces to a 2003 Harvard Business School interview in which Gerald Zaltman's 95% describes all cognition, not purchase decisions. The rewording as a claim about purchase decision making appears only in that article's teaser.
Is using fear in marketing unethical?
Not automatically. In a meta-analysis of 248 samples, fear appeals had a positive average effect, and a larger one when the message assured people they could take the recommended action or that it would work. Fear becomes manipulation when the threat is not real, when there is no real step, or when pressure is used to stop the buyer from comparing options.
Where the numbers come from
Every figure in this article was checked in September 2026 against its primary source, or against the published abstract where the full text is paywalled: Binet and Field, The Long and the Short of It (IPA, 2013) and The 5 Principles of Growth in B2B Marketing (The B2B Institute, 2019); CEB, From Promotion to Emotion (2013); a Gartner press release of 17 May 2021; The B2B Institute, Cashing In On Creativity (2021); Kashdan, Barrett and McKnight (2015); Chandy, Tellis, MacInnis and Thaivanich (2001); Tannenbaum and colleagues (2015); Leach and Cidam (2015); Coulter and Pinto (1995); Saudi Arabia's E-Commerce Law (2019); and the ICC Advertising and Marketing Communications Code (2024). Survey and award-entry data are self-reported, and several samples are small; where that matters, the text says so. The emotion vocabulary draws on Brené Brown's Atlas of the Heart (Random House, 2021). The definitions are BMD's own wording, and BMD is not affiliated with Brené Brown or her publisher. The full source list is in the PDF.
Want every source in one place?
The Emotion Map lists each one, with what it measured.
About BMD
Most companies don't have a marketing problem. They have a marketing department that was built to underperform. BMD is a boutique consultancy based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, that builds structured, measurable marketing departments inside mid-market companies across the GCC. We don't run your campaigns, and we don't hand over a strategy deck and leave. We build the structure, the measurement and the clear responsibility that turn marketing into a function leadership can rely on. Delivered in Arabic and English, founder-led.
Redha Alayesh
Redha Alayesh, Founder of BMD, is a marketing consultant who has worked with 40+ marketing departments.
Let's build it properly
The buyer this article opened with was described as "in pain". You now have better words for them.
Stop writing to the pain. Write to the feeling your buyer would name, if they had the word.