Onion Marketing: peel away the emotions, sell your soul and your product
Imagine an onion. Layer by layer, you start peeling it. This is emotional marketing. People only buy what they feel. They want to laugh, be moved, get angry. They want to recognize themselves. Emotional marketing does all this and does it very well, transforming an uninterested follower into a customer who would defend your brand like a hooligan.
What is emotional marketing or onion marketing?
Emotional marketing is a strategy that goes straight to the heart. It doesn’t matter if your product has more megapixels, more gigabytes, or 24-hour shipping. If it doesn’t excite me, I don’t want it.
According to Harvard, 95% of purchasing decisions are driven by emotions.
This means that if you’re still doing rational marketing, you’re talking to 5% of your audience’s mind.
Emotional marketing works on archetypes, symbolic associations, storytelling, music, colors, rhythm—basically, the pride of communication.
It uses the language of cinema rather than advertising, and it does so for a specific purpose: to be remembered. Because content that evokes emotion isn’t scrolled past, it’s saved, shared, discussed, and internalized. Emotional marketing, in a nutshell, is advertising that makes you cry over a cookie dipped in milk. Come on, who hasn’t done that?
Emotional branding: welcome to the exclusive club of brands that make you feel special
Emotional branding is creating an identity that customers can identify with.
It is a long, often invisible, but extremely powerful process that brands use to speak to their customers, making them feel part of something: a movement, an idea, a philosophy.
Coca-Cola does not sell drinks, it sells smiles. Nike does not sell shoes, it sells determination. Patagonia does not sell jackets, it sells ethics.
Emotional branding works because it uses neuromarketing as a relational lever and is based on trust, narrative consistency, and the ability to evoke emotions over time.
Onion Marketing: how to peel it (without crying too much)
Marketing, which we have nicknamed “onion,” has a golden rule: go deep to the heart!
Everything must speak the same emotional language: no more copy written as if it were a label. You have to tell a story, engage, and above all, you have to do it with the right tools.
Like a good Neapolitan Genovese, where onions are the star ingredient, in marketing, too, the potential customer must “pappuliare” (taste the onions). But let’s take a closer look at how to peel our main ingredient.
- First layer: storytelling. Tell a story that your target audience can relate to. Don’t talk about the product, talk about who uses it, their emotions, their problems.
- Second layer: visuals. Every image must be loaded with emotional meaning. Warm colors for nostalgia, strong contrasts for anger, pastels for tenderness.
- Third layer: the tone of voice. Consistent, human, recognizable. If you’re ironic, always be ironic. If you’re empathetic, make it heard.
- Fourth layer: cross-channel consistency. The emotion they feel on Instagram must be the same as the emotion they feel in your newsletter.
If I don’t make numbers, is that okay? Yes, that’s fine!
Nowadays, there are more brands than people, more creators than viewers, and the war is no longer about prices, but about attention.
Today, users don’t choose with their wallets: they choose with their hearts, and the battle is certainly not won by those with the biggest budgets.
Now we’re going to tell you something that perhaps no one has ever told you before: results are not immediately visible, and success cannot be measured in real time.
Sometimes it manifests itself in something more subtle, just like a layer of onion, and it is more powerful: in a memory, in an emotional connection, in that second when a piece of content touches you and stays with you, and then the numbers come later.
For example, even SEO knows this: it no longer looks for forced keywords or soulless texts.
An emotional tone is not only acceptable, it is strategic
Intelligently and naturally inserted keywords, evocative images, videos that tell a story, and meaningful calls to action are necessary.
If you evoke emotions, people stay. And if people stay, Google loves you too.
So yes: you may not see immediate results, but if you have created a connection, empathy, if you have stirred something, sooner or later you will win, because today this is the only real alternative to noise.
