Emotion-Led Ads Cut Costs 30 | Dralys Dralys Journal

Sarah Levinger consults with ecommerce brands on marketing psychology. She says shoppers’ emotions drive ad performance, and success comes from aligning messaging with those feelings.

She did that with a D2C maker of hop-flavored teas, lowering acquisition cost by 30%. We discussed that example and other tactics in our recent conversation.

Our entire audio is embedded below. The transcript is edited for clarity and length.

Eric Bandholz: What do you do?

Sarah Levinger: I’m a consultant for direct-to-consumer companies. I help them understand consumer psychology in their marketing, specifically for acquisition and advertising.

I have been in ecommerce since 2018 and in marketing before then. In the last six or seven years I’ve focused on applying emotions and consumer psychology to ads.

I started by analyzing reviews. I would take thousands of reviews and categorize them into emotional categories. I could read a review and understand the emotion beneath it, which provided a direction for the marketing.

That evolved into a system in which I interviewed customers and fed those transcripts into AI for analysis.

Reviews are fun, but they’re short. Jennifer from Michigan might say, “I love this.” Nothing more. AI can quickly reveal the emotion behind it.

I would provide brands with the information, but they struggled to implement tactics to respond. Brands don’t have time to understand what to do with data on the emotions emerging from all these transcripts.

So I started analyzing the psychology not just of consumers but also of the brands’ personnel. I’ll assemble the entire creative team — designers, videographers, strategists, media buyers — and I’ll ask them a series of questions, such as, “What is your job? What is creative? What’s the purpose of ads? Who’s your target customer? What do those customers want?”

The answers are fascinating. They reveal the big gap between what customers want, how they view the brand, and what the internal team thinks.

Bandholz: Give us examples of those emotions.

Levinger: I focus on the nine in “Marketing to Mindstates,” a book by Will Leach, a behavioral scientist and CEO of the Mindstate Group. He has identified nine emotions that people typically apply when purchasing products.

I like his model because humans experience hundreds of emotions each day, and sometimes they blend. We can experience joy and sadness, and call it “bittersweet.”

When it comes to purchasing, people have definitive goals and problems to solve. That’s the reasoning behind the “jobs-to-be-done” mechanism.

For instance, I worked with a brand several years ago that sold a tea infused with hops. It was non-alcoholic and delicious. They ran ads emphasizing the non-alcoholic angle.

But the top emotion that kept popping up in their reviews was belonging. The brand sought to reduce alcohol consumption — a kind of achievement — but many consumers seemed to seek belonging. I still recall one of the reviews, which stated, “I want to thank this brand for giving me back a taste I thought I’d never have again.”

More and more of these responses kept saying the same thing: “I didn’t want to give up alcohol or my hoppy beers, but I was forced to do so.”

So I started running hop-focused ads, such as “You can have your hops and drink them too — without the alcohol.”

Those ads lowered acquisition cost by 30% within the first two weeks.

Bandholz: How can brands identify the right audience when customers buy for different reasons?

Levinger: We’ve gone too far with personalization in our landing pages, emails, ads, and all marketing. Personalization often increases ad costs because it targets a single group.

For example, Doritos sells to millions of consumers. How would Doritos ever map to all of them? There’s no way. Ditto for Pepsi, Coke, and Apple. People buy for their own personal reasons. But the emotions beneath them are pretty similar because humans are pretty similar, regardless of background, ethnicity, or family structure.

Bandholz: How does this translate to better ads?

Levinger: Keep the messaging short. Dial in the headlines, video, images. Understand which emotions people typically search for organically. Often it’s something bizarre, an emotion that makes them feel good.

Bandholz: Where can people follow you, hire you?

Levinger: My site is SarahLevinger.co. I’m on X, LinkedIn, and YouTube.