A mental health blogger once said that a person’s emotional value is worth a million dollars. In all relationships, if one can master the key to emotional value, they can advance or retreat as needed, navigating any relationship with the ease of a butcher dissecting an ox. Extending this logic to the business realm, could the ultimate satisfaction of consumers’ personal emotions become the weapon that allows a brand to break through intense competition and carve out a path to survival in the brutal marketplace?
Building emotional value has been a long-standing challenge for brands. Previous consumer giants like Coca-Cola, Nike, KFC, and McDonald’s have been focusing on this for years. However, times have changed. According to statistics, in 2024, the number of brands that closed or dissolved reached a 14-year high. In this context, accurately understanding consumer psychology has become the first hurdle brands must overcome.
Xiaoxue, a white-collar worker in Shanghai, has been a long-time customer of Starbucks, but recently switched to Manner because she can bring her own cup there. Customers who bring non-disposable cups to the store to purchase coffee can enjoy a 5 yuan discount. In Xiaoxue’s view, environmental protection is a trendy thing, and she is happy to do so.
Xiaoxue’s male colleague Wang Ou prefers San Dun Ban coffee. This brand is committed to the environment and has launched several specialty drinks through its coffee taste map. Holding a cup of San Dun Ban coffee, Wang Ou feels a touch of loneliness yet a hint of artistic flair.
While these examples only represent individual consumer experiences and cannot be used to simply judge the merits of a brand, they do offer some insight into the interplay between emotional value and economic value.
The economic value of emotional value is first reflected in consumers’ willingness to pay a premium for positive emotional experiences. The concept of “brand premium” can be fully explained by emotional value. A brand premium refers to consumers having stable expectations for the emotional value a brand provides and being willing to pay for it. In other words, consumers align with the brand’s values, hoping to use it to showcase their taste, aspirations, and ideals, thereby constructing their self-identity. In this regard, besides luxury goods, blind boxes are a highly successful commercial case study.
Recently, the standard edition of Labubu blind boxes was resold on the secondary market for 2,800 yuan per piece, the hidden edition for 4,600 yuan, and the collaboration edition was even resold for over 30,000 yuan. The limited-edition brown Labubu was sold at an auction for 820,000 yuan. Behavioral economics research shows that consumers are not entirely rational; they establish “mental accounts” for emotional satisfaction. From a practical perspective, the doll figurines in blind boxes have limited functional value, but the design of hidden editions, the joy of collecting, and the thrill of opening the box impart unique emotional value to the product, prompting consumers to pay prices far exceeding the item’s practical value. Pop Mart has leveraged blind box marketing to achieve a market capitalization exceeding 30 billion Hong Kong dollars, establishing a vast trendy toy business empire. This fully demonstrates the powerful monetization potential of emotional value in the consumer market.
Maximizing experiential value can even drive the development of the offline economy. Why has Japan’s physical retail sector maintained such strong vitality? As early as two or three decades ago, the shift “from consuming goods to consuming experiences” became a frequent topic of discussion in Japanese media. After the bursting of Japan’s bubble economy, consumers whose material needs had been satisfied naturally turned their pursuit toward spiritual fulfillment, and offline consumption is an indispensable channel for obtaining such experiences.
Take Japanese agricultural products as an example: strawberries can be sold by the piece, allowing consumers to select the largest and reddest ones to purchase; apples are printed with blessings, and people can even go to orchards to personally adopt an apple tree; tomatoes labeled with sugar content values can be tasted to feel the differences between them… What consumers are purchasing is, in essence, a label of refined living. Moreover, farmland is transformed into theaters, rice fields grow Van Gogh’s famous paintings, orchards offer picking experiences, and farms design fairy-tale themed check-in points. Making tourists pay for the story is the ingenious aspect of Japan’s agricultural marketing.
In the social media era, the influence of emotional value is amplified to the extreme. Some seemingly “useless” yet emotionally comforting products have quietly gained popularity, such as virtual items like “Own Einstein’s brain for 0.01 yuan, and you’ll never fail an exam,” which have achieved significant sales and become a quick outlet for young people to release their emotions.
On TK, the view count for the “stress-relief toys” topic reached 43.8 billion. Products like stress balls and stress cubes stimulate the release of dopamine through immediate stimulation, helping consumers relieve stress; and mystical-themed items like electronic wooden fish and tarot cards have become psychological crutches for young people, adding a “boost” to their lives. Merchandise related to ‘Guzi’ (including badges, stands, figurines, cards, and pendants) has moved from niche anime circles into the mainstream, with queuing up to visit “Guzi stores” becoming a trend—all of which highlights the immense potential of the emotional consumption market.
In summary, emotional value, as a new driving force in consumption, is reshaping people’s values. It allows consumers to achieve spiritual pleasure and fulfillment while satisfying material needs, and also opens up new business opportunities for companies, bringing new economic growth points. In the future, deeply exploring the economic potential of emotional value will undoubtedly become one of the important directions for business development.
