The role of emotions in purchase decisions

Emotion is not the opposite of reason

The usual version of this topic says emotion beats logic, so you should aim your marketing at feelings. I think that framing is wrong, and it leads small businesses to decorate their content instead of fixing it.

The better-supported picture is that emotion is part of how a decision gets made at all. Antonio Damasio's work on patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex found people whose reasoning and intelligence tested as intact, but who made ruinous personal and financial decisions and could not learn from the results. His somatic marker hypothesis, set out in 'Descartes' Error' in 1994 and tested with the Iowa Gambling Task developed by Bechara and colleagues, proposes that bodily emotional signals mark past outcomes and bias future choices before deliberation gets going.

It is a hypothesis rather than settled fact. Critics have argued that bodily feedback would be an inefficient mechanism, and that the gambling task results may be explained by problems with reversal learning or working memory instead. Carry it as a well-evidenced idea with live disagreement attached.

What it does not support is the marketing version, where emotion is a lever you pull on a rational buyer. A buyer who feels nothing about a purchase is not a more rational buyer. They are a buyer who does not act.

Three claims about this you should stop repeating

This subject attracts confident numbers with nothing underneath them. I have used 2 of these myself in the past, which is part of why I am listing them.

'fMRI studies show consumers rely on emotions rather than information when evaluating brands.' You will find this everywhere, always without a study, an author or a year. An earlier version of this article carried it. There is real neuroimaging work on brand response, but this sentence is not a finding from it, and it is stated far more strongly than any single imaging study could support.

'Emotional responses process sensory input 5 times faster than rational thought.' There is no basis for the multiplier. Affective reactions can be quick, and some evaluative responses form before deliberate assessment, but the specific number is invented. If you need to make the point, describe the effect and drop the figure.

'95% of purchase decisions are subconscious.' Gerald Zaltman has argued that much of consumer thought happens outside conscious awareness, and the 95% figure is widely attached to his name. It is not a measurement of decisions. I set out what the source does and does not say in the science of consumer behaviour, which also covers why the fast and slow thinking shorthand is a simplification rather than a settled 2-system model.

The pattern is the same each time. A directionally reasonable idea gets a number attached to it, and the number then does the persuading. If a statistic about the mind arrives without an author and a year, treat it as marketing copy. The same filter applies to success stories, which I cover in survivorship bias in marketing.

What the commercial evidence supports

The most useful UK evidence is not neuroscience. It is advertising effectiveness data.

Les Binet and Peter Field analysed the IPA Effectiveness Awards Databank, described by Thinkbox as over 1,000 campaigns from 30 years of the awards, covering more than 700 brands in over 80 categories. Their headline finding is that emotional campaigns are around twice as efficient as rational ones and deliver roughly twice the profit, while rational campaigns produce stronger short-term sales effects. Short-term response metrics are a poor guide to long-term success.

Two limits are worth holding. The databank is built from campaigns entered for effectiveness awards, so it is a self-selected sample of work that agencies believed had worked and could evidence. And it is advertising data from brands with media budgets. The mechanism should carry over to a small business, but the effect sizes were not measured on one.

Read alongside Damasio, it points somewhere specific. The advantage of emotional work is not that it bypasses thinking. It is that feeling is what makes something memorable and worth acting on later, and long-term brand effects are built out of what people remember.

The emotions your buying process already creates

Here is where I part company with most writing on this topic. It treats emotion as something you add: a story, a nostalgic image, a countdown. In my experience with small businesses, the emotions that decide the sale are the ones your own process creates, and they are mostly negative and mostly unintentional.

You do not need to make a prospect feel inspired. You need to stop making them feel stupid, suspicious or exposed.

The emotion	Where it comes from	How it shows up	What reduces it
Confusion	Service descriptions written in your internal language	Long gaps between visits, questions that repeat on every call	Say what you do in the first screen, in the words a buyer uses
Suspicion about price	No pricing information, or a figure with no explanation	'Can you give me a ballpark' before anything else, then silence	Publish a range and say what moves it up or down
Fear of being sold to	A form that asks for a detailed brief before you say anything about yourself	Contact forms abandoned at the last field	Say what happens after they press submit, and when
Embarrassment	An assumed level of knowledge, or jargon a buyer will not admit to not knowing	Enquiries that apologise, or open with 'this is probably a stupid question'	Define the terms once, and answer the question people are afraid to ask
Fear of a repeat mistake	Nothing on the site addresses the bad experience they had with your predecessor	Long deliberation, then a request for references	Describe how you work, including what you do when a project goes wrong
Exposure to a third party	The buyer has to justify choosing you to a partner, a board or a spouse	Warm calls that stall for weeks with no objection stated	One page they can forward, covering scope, cost basis and risk

None of that is emotional marketing in the usual sense. It is removing the friction between wanting to act and understanding how, which is the same discipline I write about in how content design solves user needs.

Positive and negative emotions do different jobs

Positive feeling tends to work over time. It makes a brand easier to recall and more pleasant to return to, which is the mechanism behind the Binet and Field result.

Negative feeling works faster and costs more. Urgency, scarcity and the fear of missing out can move someone today, and they can also leave a buyer feeling handled. My view, based on watching businesses do both, is that negative appeals are borrowing against a relationship you have not established yet. A large brand can absorb that. A small business selling a considered service usually cannot, because it depends on referrals from people who felt well treated.

There is one negative emotion worth engaging directly, and it is the fear of making an expensive mistake. Do not amplify it. Answer it. That means being specific about what could go wrong, what you do about it, and who your service is not for. The same fear returns in a different form once someone has committed, which is the subject of what happens after we buy.

Where this becomes unlawful

Manufactured urgency is not only a reputational question in the UK.

The unfair commercial practices provisions of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 apply to practices from 6 April 2025, replacing the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008. Schedule 20 of the Act lists 32 practices that are unfair in all circumstances, with no need to show that a consumer was harmed. Falsely stating that something is available only for a limited time, to get a decision before a buyer can make an informed one, sits in that category. Drip pricing and fake reviews are also covered. The CMA has published what businesses need to know about unfair commercial practices.

The practical rule is simple. A deadline is fine if it is a real deadline. Limited availability is fine if availability is limited. A countdown timer that resets when the page reloads is a false statement, whatever it does to your conversion rate. I am describing the shape of the rules rather than giving legal advice, and it is worth reading the CMA guidance directly if you use any of these tactics.

What to do with this

Start by auditing the emotions you cause rather than the ones you want to cause.

Take your last 10 enquiries and read them for feeling as well as content. Note where someone apologises, hedges, asks for reassurance, or asks something your site should have answered. Each of those is a point where your content produced anxiety instead of confidence, and each one is fixable this week.

Then check your claims. If your marketing quotes a statistic about how buyers think, find the author and the year. If you cannot, cut the number and keep the idea. Being the business in your market that does not repeat the invented statistics is a small differentiator, and it costs nothing.