Emotion: The Missing Ingredient

I stared for a long time at the wall of colorful stir-fry and marinades bottles in my local store, unable to make up my mind. Giving up, I moved to the adjacent condiments section, also stocked with beautiful jars. Same reaction. Later, surfing these categories online, I felt the same sense of confusion.

Weird, I thought. These brands are eye-catching and have so much information. Why don't I feel like picking any of them? I was struggling, as a consumer. The marketer in me wondered what was going on. And then it hit me.

Most of these brands are doing an amazing job describing their products and stopping there. What's in them, how they're made, how to use them. On a general level, this sounds exciting. On an individual level, it left me cold.

I proceeded to scan a few more challenger brands across mustards, sauces, condiments, oils, sorting what I found into three buckets: what's in the product, what it lets you do, and how it makes you feel. Overwhelmingly, the content sat in the first two. Clean ingredients, natural processing, sustainability claims, flavours, and recipes fill social media posts, PDPs, and the pack facings. Emotional material, like founder stories, feels restricted to the 'About Us' page on the brand's website and, sometimes, the pack. Even then, it tends to be used to establish that the brand is trustworthy and authentic, not to signal what a consumer should feel when they reach for the product.

I sat back, unsettled.

The focus by brands on attributes and uses is not wrong, but in low-stakes categories like these, a missing emotional promise is a costly business gap.

Here's why. Consider a bottle of marinade: it costs about $6, and if this one wasn't the right call, a consumer can easily buy another one next month. The risk of regret and the actual cost are both low. Plus, there's little to be gained from comparing two bottles side by side as, in the real world, they're rarely different enough to reward the effort.

In a situation like this, a consumer's brain defaults to skipping the due diligence, saving the energy and effort of deliberation for complex categories that actually warrant it, like cars or laptops. For simpler choices, it looks for a shortcut. And when nothing else distinguishes the options, feeling is what decides it.

Emotion isn't decoration sitting on top of a decision. It's part of what makes choosing your brand possible.

Coming back to condiments, sauces, and oils, this leaves an uncomfortable conclusion for categories being built almost entirely on attribute and function claims. If those first few seconds of attention don't trigger an emotional response, the other stuff may not be enough to close the purchase. That is, in fact, what I experienced.

It's not that this is impossible. Naked and Saucy describes its peanut sauce as "tastes like cheat day" (ie no guilt). Cozy, a brand selling chewy organic bars, talks about the satisfaction of "soft comfort." In both cases, the feeling is earned, and it's directly linked to the product's composition or texture, not a vague or generic statement.

If you're building a brand in a low-stakes category, ask yourself right now: how does your consumer feel when they use your product? If you can't answer that in one clear sentence, you've just found a gap. What's costing you at the shelf isn't the flavor variant you haven't launched yet, or the claim you haven't added to the label. It's the feeling you haven't sparked.