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Feelings – nothing more than feelings

As it faced stiff competition in digital cameras, Nikon (www.nikon.com) was marketing its Coolpix line with the tag lines ‘passion made powerful’, ‘brilliance made beautiful’ and ‘memories made easy’. The advertising campaign was designed to evoke emotional feelings in consumers. Nikon based this campaign on a study conducted to identify feelings that were intuitively evoked. A total of 655 feelings were reduced to a set of 180 that were judged by participants to be most likely to be stimulated by advertising. This group was clustered on the basis of judgements of similarity between feelings, resulting in 31 ‘feelings’ clusters. These were divided into 16 positive and 15 negative clusters, as shown in the table.

Thus, 655 feelings responses to advertising were reduced to a core set of 31 feelings. In this way, advertisers now have a manageable set of feelings for understanding and measuring responses to advertising. When measured, these feelings can provide information on a commercial’s ability to persuade target consumers, as in the case of Nikon cameras.