Emotional appeals in marketing: The case of Gen Z consumers

This bachelor’s thesis examines the role of emotional appeals in digital marketing communication aimed at Generation Z. It focuses on four emotional appeals – curiosity, fear of missing out, belonging, and pride – and explores how they differ in the ability to generate early-stage engagement with short marketing messages. The theoretical part explains emotional appeals in marketing, their relevance in digital environments, and their connection to Generation Z as a highly active online consumer group. The practical part is based on a quantitative online survey with 81 valid respondents who evaluated four short messages differing only in the emotional appeal used. Although the results did not confirm statistically significant differences in engagement across the tested appeals, they revealed a repeated descriptive pattern across the engagement and preference results. FOMO showed the strongest descriptive tendency, pride the weakest, while curiosity and belonging remained relatively close to the stronger-performing appeals. Overall, this thesis suggests that emotional appeals remain an important tool in digital marketing, but their effectiveness should be considered in relation to the specific communication context and the type of response being measured.