Can We Incorporate Emoji in Marketing Communications or Not?

Generally, Emoji is very popular for daily communications on social media because it is the way people can express the feeling by using pictographs of animals, human beings, objects, and symbols. Also, in marketing, Emoji is used to integrate the business’s communications with their audience and it is called “Emoji Marketing”, which is referred to incorporating Emoji into the text or graphics in a marketing campaign. However, Emoji is also considered as an informal communication so it should be used intelligently and selectively in business because some sectors cannot incorporate it into their communication such as the legal sector. Without considering its informality, businesses will be able to gain more benefits from using Emoji marketing.


Emoji will let your customers understand your brand more than what you can tell them.

1.  Inform Audience How You Feel

Potentially, Emoji is a very effective tool to influence your customers more on an emotional level and to show your brand identity. Moreover, Emoji is considered as a universal photographic script that most people from different regions can understand its meaning.

For example, if you are running a marketing campaign for a tour agency, you might use the Emoji of the beach, wave, surfing, coconut tree, and so on, aiming to show people’s enthusiasm for having a trip during summer and to encourage people to plan for a holiday.

2. Connect Emotionally Between Brand and Customer

To build more emotional attachment with your customers, you cannot be formal because, without body language, it is difficult for speakers to express their emotion and feeling in digital communications through plain text, email, post and etc. Therefore, to capture their attention, Emoji can potentially help generate more human feeling and conversational tone in your text.

3. Create Storytelling for Brand

Typically, Emoji is an eye-catching message and it can be understandable at first glance quickly. Thus, it can highlight the key message and convey a message that words hardly express on an emotional level. An example of this is “KOUPREY is unbelievable” and “KOUPREY is unbelievable 😍”. With the use of Emoji, the text will easily grab your attention and enable you to truly understand how the writer felt toward the brand.

4. In Conclusion

As it is generally mentioned that “one picture is worth a thousand words”. Therefore, it is highly recommended that you must think wisely and carefully about incorporating Emoji in your marketing because people will describe your emoji differently. For instance, the Emoji of strawberry is slang, which is used among Thai teenagers and referred to as “liar”. Therefore, before choosing any Emojis to include in your plain text, you should carefully consider both your business type and your target audience. Moreover importantly, you need to understand explicitly the meaning and the trend of each Emoji.