Why Emotionally-Driven Audience Data Is the Biggest Advantage in Modern Marketing

Marketing is supposed to connect. But too often, it misses the mark. And badly.

Campaigns fall flat. Brand messages feel off. Creative choices seem disconnected from how people actually think, feel, and behave. And teams end up relying on “best guesses,” executive hunches, or outdated audience assumptions, even though the marketplace has changed dramatically.

The truth is simple: Most marketing isn’t built on real emotional understanding. It’s built on what brands assume people care about.

That’s where everything breaks.

Why Emotion Matters More Than Ever

Emotions drive attention.

Emotions shape behavior.

Emotions create loyalty.

Up to 95% of our purchases are driven by emotion. Each year over 181 zeta bytes of data are created. Only 0.00003% is about human emotion.

Most marketing efforts fail to align with – or even consider – emotional data. Additionally, emotional insight is notoriously difficult to measure at scale. It’s even harder to integrate into day-to-day marketing processes. Traditional research methods are slow, surface-level, or too narrow to guide fast-moving strategies. So marketers fall back on demographics, past performance, and internal opinions.

Audiences feel that disconnect immediately, and subsequently disconnect from your messaging and your brand.

Emotional Data is Key to Closing the Gap Between Real Brands and Real People

Quality emotional intelligence fills the gap that marketers have struggled with for years. Instead of assuming what audiences want, it captures what audiences actually feel, directly from the people themselves.

For example, Magid’s EmotionalDNA® (eDNA) dataset is one of the most comprehensive emotional datasets in the marketplace:

• 1M+ consumers engaged to-date
• 11,000 entertainment titles measured
• 700 consumer brands tracked
• 200 personalities evaluated
• 50 streaming services analyzed
• 3,200 biweekly U.S. respondents
• 36 individual emotional dimensions

This is not social listening. This is not sentiment mining. This is true human intelligence. A continuous, in-field dialogue with consumers at scale.

The result: marketers finally get a clear, data-driven look at why people connect, why they disengage, and what drives real-world behavior.

Move From Understanding Emotion to Applying Emotion

It’s one thing to have emotional data. It’s another to use it well. Marketing teams are drowning in information but starving for synthesis. The challenge isn’t knowing more. It’s knowing what to do with more.

This is why we built Collaborator Strategy, which automatically integrates eDNA intelligence directly into marketing strategy briefs. Think of it as the bridge between human emotional insight and actionable strategy.

It enables teams to:

• Turn audience emotion into strategic direction. Collaborator takes relevant eDNA data and translates it into messaging pillars, audience motivations, tone guidance, and content priorities.
  
• Build briefs that actually resonate. Instead of generic templates, the tool produces a strategy built around what your audience cares about most. Emotionally and behaviorally.
  
• Apply your own audience segments. You can integrate your internal segmentation with eDNA’s emotional dimensions, creating highly tailored and predictive strategies.
  
• Scale consistency across teams. Everyone, from brand to creative to media, works from the same emotional truth.

The goal isn’t automation. It’s alignment. Consistency. Clarity. And a strategy that starts with what real people actually want.

Marketing works better when it’s built on real human emotion.

Not assumptions, not gut checks, and not templated guesswork.

Actionable emotional intelligence provides brands with a concrete way to understand what audiences truly feel, and what drives purchase decisions. In a world full of noise, emotionally intelligent marketing is a major differentiator.