Follow your heart or listen to your mind? Emotional marketing: a bibliometric analysis and future research agenda

Purpose Emotion plays a significant role in consumer decision-making. Emotional marketing has emerged as a crucial aspect of modern marketing strategies. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the development and emerging themes in emotional marketing. Specifically, it seeks to identify the key research clusters, influential authors, and future directions in this field. Design/methodology/approach This paper uses bibliometric techniques, including cooccurrence analysis of keywords, citation, and bibliographic coupling, to systematically examine publications on emotional marketing from 1993 to 2023. Findings The result shows that customer loyalty, purchase intention, and perceived value are the motor themes emerging around emotional marketing research over the last decades. The state-of-the-art knowledge offers later researchers the ability to gear their research toward emerging issues, such as applications in the tourism industry and using digital tools. Practical implications The bibliometric analysis identifies some dominant clusters such as emotional engagement, brand attachment, and AI-driven personalization, as well as emerging technology-mediated emotional experiences. These findings offer actionable insights for practitioners by clarifying which emotional variables most strongly impact consumer responses. This enables the design of more effective, emotionally grounded marketing strategies to foster customer connection and brand loyalty. Originality/value This paper provides an overview of how the literature on emotional marketing has developed and a synopsis of the most influential and productive authors, papers, and countries. By mapping the landscape of existing literature, this study lays the groundwork for future research avenues and highlights the importance of emotional marketing in contemporary practices.