How the brands winning Gen Z loyalty treat emotional triggers as design inputs — not landmines.
Here’s something most marketers know but rarely say out loud: the same campaign that makes one customer feel seen will make another feel gutted.
Valentine’s Day emails that spark joy for couples trigger loneliness for the recently divorced. Mother’s Day promotions that sell flowers also surface grief, infertility, and estrangement. Best Friends Day posts meant to celebrate connection remind isolated people of exactly what they lack.
This isn’t new. But we’re marketing to a generation that experiences it differently — and the data shows why that matters for your bottom line.
The Generation That Feels Everything (And Shops Accordingly)
Gen Z doesn’t just report higher emotional sensitivity. They live it, quantify it, and make purchasing decisions based on it.
Post-pandemic data shows their mental health has deteriorated faster than any other generation. One statewide survey found the share of Gen Z reporting poor mental health more than doubled between 2019 and 2023 (Colorado Health Institute). The Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey reports 44% of 18–24-year-olds feel persistent anxiety and 33% report persistent hopelessness. 40% feel stressed “all or most of the time” (Deloitte 2025, 23,000+ respondents, 44 countries).
Social media amplifies it. McKinsey’s survey of 42,000+ respondents found Gen Zers spending 2+ hours daily on social platforms show particularly pronounced negative mental health effects. Research in Media Psychology describes social comparison on these platforms as “the thief of joy” — feeds almost exclusively provoke upward comparisons that intensify inadequacy.
But here’s the strategically interesting part: 84% of Gen Z need to share values with a brand to buy it (Edelman 2024). 79% say brand trust matters more now than in the past. 33% have tried a new brand because of creative marketing — higher than any other generation.
Emotionally reactive and emotionally available. The brands that understand the difference are the ones winning.
The Duality Problem
Marketers think of emotional responses as binary: positive or negative. The research tells a more complicated story.
89% of U.S. adults feel more stressed during the holiday season (APA 2023). 70% feel loneliness as holidays approach. 23% have specifically negative feelings about Valentine’s Day — loneliness, sadness, disappointment, or stress. 26% of single adults feel lonely thinking about Valentine’s Day, versus only 6% of those in relationships.
Mother’s Day? Mental health experts call it “an emotional minefield” for those facing infertility — a form of “disenfranchised grief” society doesn’t acknowledge. A UK survey found 69% of people trying to conceive feel anxious during their journey. 41% have muted or unfollowed friends over fertility-related content.
Even friendship content — seemingly the safest territory — creates duality. Gen Z is the loneliest generation: only 15% say they never felt lonely in the past year, compared with 54% of boomers (GWI 2024). 29% say they feel lonely “often” — several times the rate of older adults (Barna 2025).
The Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health crisis in 2023. Baylor University’s nine-year longitudinal study found a feedback loop: lonely people turn to social media, but the usage only intensifies isolation.
The mistake isn’t celebrating. It’s assuming everyone in your audience shares the same emotional context when they receive it.
The Opt-Out Revolution
In 2019, UK florist Bloom & Wild did something simple that changed how smart brands think about emotional marketing. They added a link: opt out of Mother’s Day emails.
The results:
→ ~18,000 customers opted out → 1,500+ thank-you messages flooded in → Twitter engagement jumped 4x on launch day → A Member of Parliament cited the brand as an example for other businesses
And the number every CMO should know: opted-out customers had 1.7x higher lifetime value than customers who didn’t opt out.
The people who said “please don’t send me this” became more valuable. Bloom & Wild expanded to Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day, added the ability to hide seasonal products on-site, and launched the Thoughtful Marketing Movement — now 170+ brands strong.
This wasn’t a PR stunt. It was a design decision.
Then it went mainstream. By 2023, DoorDash reported 80,000+ consumers opting out of Mother’s Day marketing. Etsy, Levi’s, Kay Jewelers, Ancestry, and Canva all added opt-outs. Luggage brand Away saw 4,000+ subscribers use the feature and received 250+ messages of “customer love.” Canva publicly framed their approach as “empathy-first communications” and is expanding to Christmas and seasonal moments.
No longer niche empathy. Emerging infrastructure.
Beyond Opt-Outs: Widening the Emotional Door
Opt-outs are the floor. The more sophisticated play is emotional optionality — keeping the celebration but creating multiple ways in.
60% of adults now believe Valentine’s Day is for both romantic and platonic relationships (YouGov). 40% of women said they’d buy themselves a Valentine’s gift in 2024, up from 31% the year before.
The market has moved. Some brands are meeting it:
Victoria’s Secret PINK reframed Valentine’s around Galentine’s Day — messaging about “all forms of love,” friendship, and self-care. 1-800-Flowers ran an emotional campaign centering female friendship. The Body Shop encouraged celebrating girlfriends rather than defaulting to couples. Eco-beauty brand Niluu went furthest with a Self-Love Campaign reframing the holiday around mental wellbeing. Even Ryanair found an angle: anti-Valentine’s “single fares” encouraging singles to “escape the nonsense.”
The tone varies. The strategy is the same: acknowledge that not everyone shares the same emotional relationship to this holiday, and you widen your addressable market.
At the platform level, this is becoming architecture. Following backlash from bereaved parents receiving baby ads after a stillbirth, Facebook and Instagram added “Hide ad topics” tools. Google launched controls to block ads about pregnancy, weight loss, dating, alcohol, and gambling worldwide. Not privacy features — emotional infrastructure.
The Business Case
If this still feels like a “nice to have,” here’s the number:
Emotionally connected customers deliver 306% higher lifetime value versus merely satisfied customers. (Motista, 100,000+ customers, 100+ retailers.)
They stay 50% longer. Recommend at nearly double the rate. Spend 2–2.5x more. Harvard Business Review confirms they’re 52% more valuable than even “highly satisfied” customers.
SAP Emarsys found emotional loyalty grew 26% from 2021–2024, now at 34% of consumers. It drives 3x greater brand advocacy than transactional loyalty. And 52% of brands planning loyalty programs envision “emotional-first” experiences.
The Joy Dividend math: give someone agency over how they experience your brand — the choice to engage, step back, or enter through a different emotional door — and you deepen the connection. That connection has a measurable return.
The Tension
Before you conclude the answer is to sanitize everything, let me complicate this.
A 2024 meta-analysis in Clinical Psychological Science found trigger warnings increase anticipatory anxiety but don’t reduce distress. ~90% of people approach warned content rather than avoid it. Less than 6% opt out when given the choice.
Grief counselor Terri Daniel has called opt-out emails “manipulative” — grieving people already know the holiday exists. Email marketer Tabish Bhimani warned that repeated “opt out of this painful thing” messages can reinforce the trigger.
These are legitimate concerns. And they point to the real lesson:
Emotional optionality is not about avoidance. It’s about agency.
Bloom & Wild, DoorDash, Canva — they aren’t removing celebrations. They’re not sanitizing calendars. They’re adding doors. Letting audiences choose how to walk into a moment rather than assuming everyone arrives the same way.
The reverse is just as instructive. In 2024, Bumble ran billboards telling women “a vow of celibacy is not the answer.” The backlash was immediate — from women who’d chosen celibacy after trauma, from the asexual community, from people pointing out that reproductive rights were under attack. Bumble pulled the ads within days. The mistake wasn’t taking a position on dating. It was assuming their entire audience had one relationship to sex and intimacy — and shaming anyone who didn’t. It’s the Bloom & Wild lesson in reverse: they never asked “who might experience this differently?”
Three Design Principles
If you’re building any celebratory campaign this year:
1. Treat triggers as design inputs, not landmines — and ask before you map. Bloom & Wild didn’t brainstorm who might be hurt by special occasion emails. They talked to bereaved customers, to people with complicated family relationships, to LGBTQ+ parents navigating a holiday that wasn’t designed with them in mind. The opt-out was a research output, not a creative hunch. If you’re building a celebratory campaign, the first step isn’t ideation. It’s listening.
2. Widen the emotional door. 60% of adults already see Valentine’s as both romantic and platonic. Self-love, friendship, chosen family — these aren’t consolation prizes. They’re the larger market.
3. Offer agency, not avoidance. A one-click opt-out that keeps them on your main list. A “hide this category” toggle. A campaign wide enough that multiple emotional states can find a way in. That’s where the 1.7x lifetime value lives.
But agency goes beyond mechanics. Stress psychology consistently shows that perceived control reduces the stress response even when the actual situation doesn’t change. An opt-out link is a tiny thing mechanically. Psychologically, it says: you have a say in how this reaches you. That’s why those opted-out customers became more valuable, not less.
And the deepest form of agency is narrative — the ability to tell your own story about a difficult experience rather than having one imposed on you. There’s a difference between a brand that says “Mother’s Day is for celebrating amazing moms!” and one that creates space for someone to say “Mother’s Day is complicated for me because…” The first prescribes emotion. The second holds space for it. Acknowledge the tension before you offer the solution. People need to feel seen before they can move forward.
The brands doing this best go one step further: they provide a platform where customers connect with each other. Peer acknowledgment — “me too, this day is hard” — activates something a corporate email never can. The brand becomes the host, not the therapist.
The Joy Dividend isn’t about making marketing painless. It’s about making it intelligent enough to hold both joy and pain at the same time — and letting your audience decide which door to walk through.
Hamutal (Tula) Schieber is the founder of Schieber Research and author of The Joy Dividend: How Brands Win by Reducing Stress and Sparking Delight. With 25 years of strategic research connecting consumer psychology, competitive best practices, and market intelligence, she helps companies understand what consumers actually want — not what brands wish they wanted. Book Tula to speak
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