Marketing’s seven deadly sins: The pitfalls of ’emotionless advertising’
Brand tracking platform Tracksuit has launched a new whitepaper exploring the sins associated with ’emotionless advertising’. Speaking exclusively to Mumbrella, founding partner James Hurman said that if marketers are only developing rational communications, and not focusing on the emotional, their effectiveness is being greatly restricted.
The new paper, ‘The Emotion Effect’ explores fueling brand growth and the importance of emotional advertising over rational. It plays on the seven deadly sins in a marketing context, providing a manual on how to avoid greed all the way through to envy when it comes to brand growth.
For over a decade, marketers have grappled with the tension between short-term sale spikes and long-term brand building, as highlighted in the landmark study ‘The Long And Short Of It’. And while most marketers understand the value of emotional advertising for sustained, profitable growth, pressure still lies on the other side of the spectrum – rational, product-focused campaigns.
“The marketing community is way too rational and it’s primarily because those rational communications do drive short-term sales, so they often think they are the ones that are working,” Hurman told Mumbrella.
“But they’re short changing their future selves when only marketing rationally… If you look over the longer term, they’re really just restricting their ability to growth as well as they could.”
He said there is still a place for rational marketing – listing and communicating facts at the consumer will always remain important – but its time for marketers to shift their focus on the emotional if they want to see long-term success.
“There’s a role for both of these things, right? They’re actually equally important. But brands that lean into the emotional stuff, they’re unforgettable.”
James Hurman
Greed
An insatiable desire for more is often seen across the marketing world. It manifests itself when marketers use their resources to buy their target – in this context, brand awareness – but Tracksuit’s research showed that’s not always effective.
Instead, brands should consider the metric of ‘fame’ and how earned impressions can drive a campaign, making it more effective, efficient, and memorable in the long-term.
“If a marketer wants to benefit from the amazing ROI that fame can bring us, they need to be using emotion and developing emotional content to do so,” Hurman said. “We’ve very unlikely to ever do that with a functional piece of communication.”
Wrath
Forcefulness and aggression is something marketers can be seen using in their rational messaging, especially without emotionally connecting to the audience first. Tracksuit’s whitepaper outlines that this is ineffective and restrictive, and brands need to reconsider before pummeling the consumer with information.
“Like I was saying before, if all we do it pummel the market with rational messages, we restrict ourselves to creating future demand, to building the brand over the longer term,” he continued.
Sloth
Sloth refers to laziness, and for marketers, it’s no different according to Tracksuit.
Focusing on rational messaging to achieve short-term sales targets, prioritising volume over profitability, and neglecting to foster the brand’s pricing power, is the lazy and easy path to take. However, if brands avoid this, the potential is huge.
“Without investing in long-term brand building, there are flow on effects and you’d lose out on profitability,” Hurman said. “When people feel emotionally close to a brand, they’re more likely to buy it when it’s not on discount, for example, but with only a rational kind of connection, they’ll choose something cheaper.”
Lust
Lust is a sin many trip and fall into, according to Tracksuit. It speaks to a lack of self-control and an urge for instant gratification where the marketers, again, focuses solely on the short-term.
“That’s how less sophisticated marketers tend to look at marketing effectiveness. Do I do an ad and do sales go up,” he continued. “When actually, the more sophisticated marketers understand that over the long-term, it works very differently from that.
“Avoiding lust is avoiding that urge for instant gratification, and instead understanding that there’s a bigger game to be played here.”
According to ‘The Long And The Short Of It’, “marketers need to drive both short and long-term effects, continually feeding the funnel with new prospects who may not buy for some time, as well as stimulating purchase amongst… existing customers. This requires two different kinds of marketing activity”.
Pride
Similarly to wrath, where marketers pummel consumers with rational messaging, arrogance and excessive vanity of a brand is not an effective marketing tactic.
In marketing terms, pride is the belief that a brand only needs to talk about its product’s features for it to be successful, and no emotional connection is created.
Hurman said: “Consumers don’t need an ongoing lesson about how great a product is, they actually respond much more to things that meet them where they are and that’s often achieved through emotion.”
Gluttony
The sin of overindulgence manifests in marketing when a single ad is used to achieve multiple objectives across the entire marketing funnel.
According to research from Google, 50% of ads that attempt this fail to achieve top performance on any single goal. Less than 10% manage to achieve top performance on three objectives.
“This is a question the marketing community asks quite a lot, and I think it’s probably one of the stupidest questions in marketing, is ‘can we make just one ad that does everything?’,” Hurman said. “The reason I say it’s stupid is because you can try, but you’re extremely likely to fail, and it’s just so easy to make two executions.”
Envy
Finally, we have envy.
In the marketing world, envy is certainly rife as brands blatantly copy one another, or follow category norms.
According to Tracksuit’s data, people only consider (on average) between two to three brands in a category – and more often than not, the ones they remember are the ones they are emotionally connected to.
“We know that brands are much more successful when they are distinctive, when they don’t look like the others,” Hurman explained. “Without being unique, a brand becomes really easy in consumers minds to be swapped out, so marketers really need to be using creativity to make themselves different and distinctive.”
The full whitepaper is available here.
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Lauren McNamara was the associate editor at Mumbrella. She joined in November 2022 as editorial assistant, after completing a Bachelor of Communications (Journalism) at UTS. She left Mumbrella in August 2025.
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topics
brand building
brand growth
effective marketing
emotional advertising
James Hurman
marketing effectiveness
rational advertising
Tracksuit
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