The return of Emojimania – Part 1

It’s emoji not emoticons, yeah?

Because most of us don’t know what’s the difference between these two. There might be a resemblance in the, ehem… let me say, “final result”, but structure-wise there is a major distinction.

To understand the differences between Emoji and Emoticons we have to go back to origins.

Let’s start with what an emoticon is.  To build an emoticon you have to use punctuation marks, numbers and letters to express your feelings or your mood. The first person to ever be recorded to make use of the emoticons is Scott Fahlman, more than 35 years ago, in 1982. So, as you can guess, the origin of emoticons is USA. Now here’s where the emoji confusion comes from? Instant messaging applications like AOL Messenger and Yahoo Messenger represented the emoticon 🙂 with a smiley face. And of course, there are variations of the feelings you can express, from laughing to feeling sleepy to annoyed or in love. But emoticons are all about the past.

The present day is all about emoji

Our dear Wikipedia tells us that Emoji come out Japan, they were created in 1999 by Shigetaka Kurita, who was inspired from weather forecasts symbols, Chinese street signs and of course, manga. They are basically a graphic representation of an action, mood, fruit, animals and so on, that people use to communicate to each other. Emoji are pictograms, they are not supposed to be created by punctuation marks. In native Japanese, emoji means “picture word”. So, now you know where that comes from.

In the wild wild west, the emojis were first brought by Apple, as a result of, legend says, Steve Jobs’ trip to Japan to promote his first iPhone.  Afterwards, iOS 5 was launched and the keyboard had a new feature. It enabled people to use emoji. Android followed up in 2013 once with the launch of Android 4.3.

What is the impact of the emoji culture on the popular culture?

Consider this: Oxford Dictionaries named the “face with tears of joy” emoji the Word of the Year. Yass, the emojis are so widely used and their impact to our culture is so massive that the most popular of them became the word of the year, and that happened just a few years ago! Marketers, did you spot your opportunity here?

Hold off your horses, don’t jump up in the bandwagon, because emoji might hurt your marketing. So here are some things you should remember when you are including emoji into your campaigns.

1. Know their real meaning

For example, if you want to use the eggplant/aubergine emoji to promote your healthy brand, just don’t. But why? The eggplant even got voted the “Most Notable Emoji” in a the American Dialect in 2015. Seems the ideal choice, no? Well … not. The emoji is indeed popular, but not for the right reason because youngsters use this emoji in most of the cases because of its affinity to a penis. And you really don’t want to get that kind of notoriety.

For “Hi – Five” emoji the situation is a little bit different. The creators thought about two persons that hi-five, but in the popular culture this emoji is used to signify a prayer. In this case, what meaning should it be used with? For me it’s obviously the second, because you’d like to be on the same line with the majority of people who could also become your customers.

Bottom line, definitely do a research before inserting any emoji in your copy and most probably it will pay off.

2. Emojis are not only about Millennials and Gen Z

It is fair to say that millennials, or let just call people that are now slightly over 30 or less are more familiar with emojis and even made them the next cool thing (if you’re asking me, I consider a millennial a person that is a rather early adopter of a tech trend, don’t worry, there will be another blog post about this, but for the sake of this discussion there are more people that are under 30 and tech savvy than over 30)

But back to tonight’s subject Adweek has done a study and more than 95% of people under 30 use emoji at least occasionally. What about the people in their 30’s or more? Well, their emoji usage rate is not as bad as you would expect. More than 90% use emoji and if we don’t make any difference between ages more than 92% communicate this way.

What is more interesting, 59% of people under 34 or more consider that brands are trying too hard if they use emoji and they overall seem to be more reluctant to any way of advertising. In conclusion, it is very likely to get very good results if you target people over 35 with your emoji marketing tactics, so why don’t you give it a try?

I don’t want you to get bored (and I keep my fingers crossed to still have your attention), but I must leave you on a non-intentional cliff-hanger caused by the massive amount of information I’m trying to feed you. So, I’ll see you next week with 5 more Emoji Marketing recommendations.