Associate your brand with positivity

The greatest trick Coca-Cola ever played? It convinced us that it is not an unhealthy, overly sugary drink.

And thanks to the company’s decades-long effort to make us feel positive emotions whenever we see a Coca-Cola bottle on the shelf, this drink is now associated with happiness, rather than its list of harmful ingredients.

Lesson for you: A lot of top-of-the-funnel stuff can seem like a vanity metric at times. But carefully curated branding with defined values and a strong voice will ultimately place you above competitors in due time.

Here’s an example of a small retail ad that tries to position its brand as the ethical hunting gear:

Ethical hunting? That may sound like an oxymoron to some, yeah. But it works.

Place time constraints, but emphasize your brand’s upsides

In 2000, a group of psychologists led by Melissa Finucane published a study revealing that if people are put under time pressure, they will turn to affect rather than analytical thinking.

Also, when given favorable information about an activity, participants judged it as beneficial and low-risk.

So the more positive things we know about something, the less we even tend to care about the negative—especially if there’s a limited amount of time to make a decision.

That’s why just putting limited-time offers and other time-related pressure might not be enough. There also has to be enough upside for a snap decision without second thoughts.

Nowadays, you can easily combine the two by saying the offer is limited in the copy while accompanying it with a video that highlights the benefits. Like these three:

Keep the mood upbeat

One way to always have an edge is to make people happy just by looking at your ads.

Think about which brands make you joyful—or the ones you trust. They usually sprinkle a lot of positive visual cues in their branding and messaging.

And by “visual cues,” we mean a mix of:

• Color. Calming tones like blue or green can have a trustworthy effect, while yellow or orange can elicit energy. But we’ll talk about color psychology in a separate newsletter.
• Imagery. Use images that align with their desired emotional outcomes. A happy, healthy family is usually depicted in life insurance ads, clean visuals suggest organization, and so on.
• Copy. Try to include emotionally-charged words where possible to make the most out of the affect heuristic. Stories and testimonials can also work.

Here’s a landing page for Amazon Flex—a service that allows you to deliver Amazon packages for extra cash:

Calming color. Inspired, smiling face, and a vast, scenic neighborhood in the background that amplifies the feeling of freedom.

It looks like a nice side hustle. Yet, it invites you to deliver packages for minimum wage…

And it works.