Marketing with emotion — how to combat ad fatigue

No matter how adept a marketer you are, it is very hard to get around one fundamental fact: your job is to create more marketing — in a world where many people wish there were less of it instead.

Ad fatigue has been on the rise since the dawn of digital communication. And we have no reason to expect it will magically go away by 2030, considering the omnichannel bombardment that audiences are constantly being subjected to.

To cut through the noise and reach your target audience — crucially, with messaging they actually want to be reached by — it will be important to adopt new strategies and approaches.

“It will get tougher and tougher with communication when you look at the younger generations. They are spending big parts of their lives on social media, it is natural for them, and in the future it becomes more complex to communicate with these generations also in business environments,” Katarina Raičević, Head of SME Sales at Dun & Bradstreet Europe, says.

Create groundbreaking new concepts

No matter how much AI and automation will change the marketing landscape, your audience will still consist of people, which means it will still be necessary to find what resonates with them, on a deeply human level. Experts believe that achieving this, by creating groundbreaking new concepts with a high level of creativity, will be one of the main areas where successful marketing departments will differ from average ones toward 2030.

This is where the emotional aspect of marketing comes into play. Considering how crowded the landscape already is and will continue becoming, simply churning out content for the sake of being seen will take a back seat to establishing an emotional connection with people. When they go out of their way to steer clear of traditional advertising, it is important to offer them something valuable instead, in the form of relevant stories and offers which are actually helpful to them. “The empathy paradigm is growing stronger in a tougher competitive landscape. Soft values are becoming increasingly important to create a perceived uniqueness of brands. We apply our consumer behaviors and expect the same thing as B2B buyers.

Companies strive upwards in Bain & Co’s B2B Value Pyramid towards ever more organizational empathy that can be added to more unique marketing of products and services,” Henrik Larsson Broman, Researcher at Mercuri International Research speaker, says.