How Robert Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions can boost your brand
Understanding Feelings and Emotions
How do you feel right now? Happy? Sad? Anxious? While most of us think about our emotions in broad-brush terms like these, the reality is a lot more nuanced.
In fact, humans can experience around 34,000 different feelings. Though faced with a list that long, you’ll inevitably feel one overriding emotion: overwhelmed!
Thankfully, there is a way to make sense of all these emotions. It’s known as the Wheel of Emotions, and it provides a simple visual guide to understanding consumers’ feelings towards brands, communications, and experiences. The wheel plays a fundamental role in how we evaluate consumers’ emotions across many of our products and services, including our award-winning BrandVision (Brand Tracking), AdProbe and our messaging and Advertising testing approach.
Introducing the Wheel of Emotions
The Wheel of Emotion is the work of US psychologist Dr Robert Plutchik. According to his theory, all 34,000-odd emotions can fall into one of eight main feelings. He groups these in four pairs of opposites: Joy & Sadness, Fear & Anger, Acceptance & Disgust, Surprise & Anticipation.
The Wheel of Emotions is a great way to simplify complex emotions and identify how one emotion can lead to another. Emotions exist at a subconscious level – it takes effort to become aware of how others are feeling, and we excel at it.
About Robert Plutchik
Robert Plutchik is a psychologist who created a psycho-evolutionary theory of emotion. He was a professor emeritus at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and an adjunct professor at the University of South Florida. Plutchik identified ten postulates on which his evolutionary theory of emotions is based. Plutchik’s wheel of emotions illustrates the relationships between his primary emotions and other related emotions.
Wheel of Emotion Explained
Think of your emotions as a colouring book. Each main emotion is a different picture within the book, but look closer, and you’ll see that each emotion is made up of lots of smaller ‘sub-emotions’ – the sections you colour in in order to create the bigger picture. This approach enables a much more granular view of each emotion and its component parts.
Interpreting the Wheel
Reading the wheel couldn’t be simpler. The eight main emotions are arranged by colour. The more similar the colour, the closer the emotions are. For example, Joy and Ecstasy are very similar in shade.
As you move towards the centre of the circle, the emotions become more intense (hence the colours intensify too). So ecstasy is closer to the centre than joy, and so is a bolder shade of yellow.
The emotions are arranged opposite their opposing feelings on the corresponding ‘petal’. Rage is the opposite of terror, for example, and as you get further from the centre, the less intense emotions are positioned directly across from their opposites too: Anger versus Fear, and Annoyance versus Apprehension.
Lastly, the spaces between the petals allow new emotions to form from combinations of neighbouring primary emotions. Serenity plus Acceptance gives rise to Love, for example, while Annoyance and Boredom lead to Contempt.
How Robert Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions Can Boost Your Brand and Advertising
Why Emotion Is the Real Driver of Brand Success
We’re not as rational as we like to believe. Neuroscientists have largely proven that both consumer and, surprisingly, many business decisions are based on emotions and System-1 thinking. Understanding how your customers feel emotionally about your brand and communications is the secret to optimising your brand and brand strategy.
Why Emotions Drive Consumer Decision-Making
While consumers often justify decisions with logic, most choices are emotionally led.
Emotions:
- Influence attention and recall
- Shape brand perception
- Drive action and loyalty
Brands that successfully tap into emotion are more likely to be remembered, trusted, and chosen.
How Vision One can help
Vision One has developed unique tools to help understand emotions and System-1 thinking across our products and services (e.g. Emotional Branding is one of the nine key drivers of brand equity).
Tapping into emotions in consumer research can be achieved through a wide variety of techniques. Removing rational filters can be achieved by encouraging respondents to respond quickly to questions and stimuli before their rational brain has time to adapt their feedback. Facial Expression analysis is particularly effective in measuring reactions to TV advertising. The use of visual stimuli and music can also help evoke emotions and emotional responses. Qualitative research (e.g., online focus groups and in-depth interviews) is also a great way to understand people and gain deep insight into how they feel and why.
If you want to encourage more people to buy your product, then you should focus on growing the emotional side of your brand – cultivating positive emotions like Anticipation, Trust and Joy.
If you would like to know how advertising can help you, please talk to our advertising experts. Playing on these positive emotions will create a desire in your audience, build customer loyalty, and ultimately grow your business. Basically, you’ll help them find their happy place. Which is enough to make anyone emotional!
Turning Emotional Insight into Long-Term Brand Growth
Brands that consistently apply emotional insight outperform competitors over time.
By embedding frameworks like Plutchik’s Wheel into strategy, businesses can:
- Create stronger brand identities
- Deliver more effective campaigns
- Build lasting customer relationships
Emotion is not just a creative tool—it is a strategic driver of growth.
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