How to write emotion-led copy that makes your brand stand out like Magic Spoon

We’re wrapping up the final stages of a project right now and one of the themes we’ve repeatedly come back to is that old adage: people will forget what you said, but they’ll never forget how you made them feel.

(The jury is out on who actually said this. Most of the time it’s attributed to Maya Angelou, but there’s actually no evidence for that.)

But we digress… because ultimately, while benefits, features, headline techniques, reading age and all the other stuff we talk about all the time matters a lot, focusing on that also makes it easy to forget that copywriting, perhaps most of all, needs to make an emotional connection with your customers.

So let’s dig into it a bit 👇

💡 This week’s big idea: pick a feeling you want customers to associate with your brand and then bake that into everything you write.

Let’s take the most obvious example in the world: Coca Cola vs Pepsi.

Now, let’s ignore the famous Pepsi Challenge and boil it down to a simple question: can you remember more than 2 bits of copywriting by either brand?

You’ve probably thought “it’s always the real thing” right? And maybe “Share a Coke”. But then you’re stumped?

Yeah, us too. (And it’s our job to obsess over these things.)

But if we asked you what you feel when you think of Coca Cola (the drink), you’d probably say that it makes you feel nostalgic or warm or happy or festive?

Then compare that to how Pepsi makes you feel. They’re not the same, right?

Pepsi’s emotions are about boldness, confidence, youthfulness.

And yet they’re almost exactly the same product.

That’s because the best brands pick one clear feeling they want to live in your head and then wire every touchpoint you have with them to lean into that feeling. That way, long after you’ve read and forgotten the copy, your emotional associations with the brand linger.

👉 Studies show that we instinctively give brands human-like emotions and then buy on that basis. 

One of the foundational texts on branding shows we reliably ascribe personality traits and emotions to brands. And that gut-take on a brand’s personality guides our buying decisions. (It’s why we’re so big on brand voice and messaging because that’s how you control that gut-level takeaway.)

👉Other studies show that when you pair warm feelings with trust factors, you get repeat purchase and pricing power.
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A big, cross-category study by Columbia Business School showed a very strong link between brand affect (basically, that gut-level emotion people get when they think of your brand) and higher levels of customer loyalty, larger market shares and less price sensitivity (AKA, less need for discounts and offers to sell.)

👉 Emotion builds memory, facts keep us on the hook.
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​Les Binet’s work looking at hundreds of real campaigns shows that emotion-led messaging drives the big, durable brand effects and long-term profitability, but you still need rational messages to support and activate the customer into action.

Put another way, that gut feeling opens the door and makes our brands more memorable and more profitable, but customers still need rational reasons to buy too.

In other words, pick your one emotion and build your copy, design and offers to spark that feeling, then back that it up with supporting, related benefits and proof points…

… then you’re cooking with gas.

How Magic Spoon have absolutely nailed their emotion-led messaging to grow to $100M

It goes without saying that you need more than short-term growth hacks and PDP conversion tricks to grow a brand to $100M and 1M customers in just two years.

Consumer brands that grow that fast almost always tap into the power of emotion in some way or another.

And in Magic Spoon’s case, they tap into the power of the most potent emotion of all: nostalgia.

Just look at the copy on their website. They don’t mention cereal at all 👇

Instead, the copy is all about returning to the innocence of childhood, right down to getting a free gift.

(It’s not quite a plastic Power Rangers toy buried amongst the cereal, but still.)

And this message isn’t just in the product copy and headlines, it flows all the way through the testimonials they choose. They’re even getting their influencers and ambassadors to avoid talking about protein or macros or low-sugar and instead focus on how the cereal transports them back in time👇

Even on their About Page, it’s even more explicit in calling out Saturday-morning-cartoon cereal as their main inspiration 👇

(Side note: look at the clever use of the Labour Effect. Just like Bold Bean don’t just sell beans, Magic Spoon aren’t just selling cereal that’s nostalgic, it’s the result of a year of experimentation. That helps us justify the price in our heads. Smaht.)

In fact, almost everything they write on their website comes back to that feeling of nostalgia for eating sugary, not-good-for-you cereal in front of the TV as a kid or as a student.

(Big shoutout the X-Men and Spiderman cartoons from the 90s, they were our Saturday morning jam as kids. Banging theme tunes, too.)

Magic Spoon’s big brand messaging is almost never about protein or sugar-free or macros or health (unless they’re doing hygiene campaigns) but about nostalgia for more carefree times.

Because hundreds of other brands can compete on low-sugar and high-protein creds. But Magic Spoon own nostalgia.

Cue the one-and-only time we’ll indulge in a Mad Men reference 👇

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(When we started this newsletter, we swore an oath that we would keep Mad Men references to an absolute minimum. This video means we’ve hit our quota.)

Just like Don says, nostalgia (and other emotions) create a far deeper emotional bond between your products and your customers than copy that shouting about newness or about your features ever can.

• Nostalgia ads work through attitude and memory. Decades of work (most prominently by Muehling & Sprott) show nostalgic cues improve attitudes toward the ad/brand and aid recall.
• Meta analysis backs this all up. Broad analyses of marketing studies find that nostalgia reliably improves brand attitude, loyalty and word of mouth by connecting present choice to an idealised past.

And yet, nostalgia alone can’t make us buy. Nor can any emotion.

To close the deal you need to (as a rule of thumb) do two more things: overcome objections (or remove the risk) and show them some concrete proof of your claims.

And Magic Spoon know this.

Just look at the headline on their homepage 👇

Sure, it’s leaning into nostalgia from the off.

But then it does something more interesting. It overcomes the objection that nostalgia raises.

Because while nostalgia (and other emotions) might help us sit up and pay attention. We’re also all very good at telling ourselves narratives of “that sounds nice, buuuutt….”

And for Magic Spoon, that objection occurs in the form of a thought like this: “…but I can’t eat my that kind of cereal anymore, it’s not good for me.”

Because they’re speaking to an audience that has swapped their Coco Pops for overnight oats to be healthier and feel better, the line “grown-up ingredients” gives those customers permission to consider trying the cereal and keep scrolling to learn more.

This is all playing into something called hedonic justification, which is a behavioural quirk where we’re driven by a need to be able to rationalise and justify treating ourselves.

In fact, studies say that when contextual information surrounding a hedonic purchase gives us a way to justify it with “utilitarian” reasons, we’re far more likely to make the indulgent choice.

Which is why, as we go down the page, we see this 👇

Once you’re fully bought into the nostalgia and allowing yourself to imagine eating cereal that transports you back to being a kid, that’s when they hit you with the facts and features that will help convince your more logical rational brain into saying yes to indulgence.

(There’s some health halo going on here too: which is where health claims/numbers reduce guilt around treating ourselves too. Which was the secret behind Halo Top blowing up a few years ago. “Ice cream that I can eat a whole tub of and it’s only 200 calories? Let’s buy 3 tubs!”)

How to put this to work for your brand

If you’re selling hedonistic products or indulgent products or even just products that don’t have a utilitarian purpose, following this ladder of emotion -> objection -> justification is a really clever way to make sure your messaging is guiding your customer towards making a purchase.

But you don’t want to just pick an emotion based on your gut and then rewrite all of your messaging around it. That’s a wee bit of a risk.

So here’s how we find the data to make informed decisions👇

Step 1: Mine your reviews and social media for feeling-words

We know we go on about messaging mining a lot, but it really is a game-changer for going from working from gut feelings and vibes to writing copy that’s informed by how your customers actually talk and think.

On the project we’re just wrapping up, our gut feeling was that the dominant emotion customers associated with the brand was serenity and calm from being out in nature. Maybe a touch of an adventurous spirit, too.

Then we looked at the reviews and social media comments and found that those things were there, for sure, but the dominant feeling by far was joy. In fact, almost 65% of the reviews used words that related to joy and happiness.

For their customers, they were buying their products to feel the joy and love of being outdoors. Everything else was secondary to that.

☝️ And that insight gave us a whole new angle that we leaned into with their copy. It gave us taglines, headlines, mission statements… everything grew from there.

But what if you don’t have that many reviews yet? Skim Reddit, DMs, social media comments, even your competitors’ reviews can be pockets of super-valuable insights!

Wherever you look, try and find anything that starts with phrases like “I feel…”, “now I can…”, “this makes me…”

That’s the gold dust.

Then, bucket them into broader emotional themes and you’ll start to spot a winner, fast.

If you want, you can add something like this to your brand voice guidelines too:

“Our customers buy to feel [dominant emotion]. So our H1/H2 and hero creative should evoke (or at least nod to) this feeling immediately.”

👋 Top tip: 

We like to do the messaging mining manually so we can spot nuances and little things, but if you’ve got thousands and thousands of reviews or are short for time, you can export all of your reviews into a PDF or spreadsheet, upload it to ChatGPT and ask ChatGPT to run an emotion and theme analysis of the data to find the dominant feelings and the language customers use to express them.

Step 2: Find your obvious objections

Like we said, for every emotion, there’s an equal and opposite objection.

Now you’ve got your key emotion nailed down, you’ll need to figure out the flip side of that.

Here are some of the most common objections we see a lot 👇

• Joy/indulgence → Is it unhealthy? Is it wasteful? Can I justify treating myself?
• Adventure → Is it too hard? Can I do it? Will I fit in with the crowd?
• Calm/serenity → Will this work? Is it a lot of effort? I’ve tried things like this before…
• Belonging/identity/style → Will this fit? Is this for people like me?

Your goal is to figure out that nagging thought that stops customers from buying into your messaging fully? What’s their objection? What’s the sense of risk for them?

When the copy gods shine on you, you’ll often come across the answer in your reviews or on social media. (“I was a bit apprehensive about…” or “I didn’t think this was for me because…” statements are the Holy Grail.)

Other times, you’ll need to search Reddit or social media comments to get a bit of an idea. Or run a survey to people on your email list who haven’t bought yet.

Then, once you’ve got the big thing that’s stopping people from buying, it’s time to take its power away, just like Magic Spoon did with “grown-up ingredients”.

Here, we want to find a neat phrase that refutes the doubt and stack up some proof points on top of that. (Think ingredients. Think eco-creds. Think features of your products.)

Then, we’ll bring it all together, like this 👇

Step 3: Bringing it all together

OK, let’s pretend we’ve been tasked with a big messaging piece for a brand called Flint & Fleece.

Flint & Fleece make outdoor gear for the parents, families and casual hikers that aren’t scaling Everest or doing the 3 Peaks Challenge, but who love to spend their weekends in nature.

Their products are mid-range items with a strong focus on versatility and quality. Internally, they say “we do all the thinking for our customers so they feel confident to just buy the items they like and hit the trail”.

For their customers, being outdoors is a big part of their identity, but they wouldn’t define themselves by one particular hobby. Some weekends they’re foraging, some weekends they’re roaming the woods, some weekends they’re camping…

(This fake brand may or may not be inspired by Jack preparing for week hiking in Snowdonia in two weeks…)

The team at Flint & Fleece know that outdoor activity is on the rise in the UK and they want to position themselves as the entry point for new people and the go-to brand for their core audience as they look to scale up their ad spend and hit ambitious growth goals.

So, off to Trustpilot we go…

After combing through all of the reviews, we come across a few key findings 👇

The dominant emotion is a sense of easy-going calmness and serenity being outdoors. Customers say things like “it clears my head” and “I feel at one with myself” and “I like just seeing where the day goes” in almost all of the reviews. Customers talk about wanting to be care-free and living in the moment.

The top objection is that they’re not sure if the gear is too technical for them. They’re not sure what DWR and HH ratings are. We see things like “I don’t know gear/lingo, so I bet I feel like I’ll buy the wrong thing.” There’s also comments that show people feel put off by the clique-y language some brands have. (“I checked out another brand but all the jargon made me feel a bit put off.”)

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Now, first of all, from that, we get a really good steer on how to adapt our brand voice. (Less lingo, more of a focus on making people feel seen and welcome.)

But we also start to see a messaging ladder we can follow.

Emotion: “I belong out there. It’s my calm place.”
​Objection: “I don’t speak the lingo. I’ll pick the wrong gear.”
​Proof points: Products designed by experts. Tested in the elements. Reliable and beginner-friendly.

You put that altogether and you end up with something like this 👇

The headline is both empowering and laid back. The language is a little languid and chilled out. It’s basically saying: there’s no right way to be outdoorsy.

Plus, that headline nods to the versatility and the “I like just seeing where the day goes” insight we pulled from the customer research.

Then, in the subhead, we build on it a little more. We give the customers permission to not know all the lingo (or even care about the lingo) and then nod to a shared love of the outdoors and reassures about the quality and reliability of the products (a common objection for beginner-friendly products).

It’s all congruent. The message and the voice are all pulling in the same direction. (Which customers love.)

Ultimately, our language is all designed to evoke that chilled out, go-with-the-flow emotion that the customers are looking for.

☝️ And that’s the thing they’ll remember after they close the tab.