Resonance builder 5: Emotiveness
How many times have you justified a purchase you really, really want with facts, features, statistics and specifics, where you really know it’s just because you really want it? A better-than-you-need piece of technology; a premium brand of clothing; a slightly higher-spec of car. Emotion distorts want and need, and uses fact to rationalise. Therefore it should be of no surprise that emotion plays an integral role in creating ideas that resonate. Ideas that bring emotion to the table don’t do so for the sake of it. They’re not created like tearjerker movies to get you weeping. Instead, the goal of emotional ideas is to get you to care. Put another way: make them laugh of make them cry – don’t make them bored.
Current scientific theory states that emotions developed in our ancestors because they facilitated responses to recurring problems. Emotions quickly communicate what’s important directly to the decision making part of the brain and form the basis of useful common ground like values and ethics. Emotional decisions are generally made faster than those that require the logical brain to process. In fact emotions are 5x faster than logical decisions, so for time-poor decision makers if you aren’t engaging emotionally you’re increasing your chances of not capturing attention at all. In a study of how emotion affects memory retention, participants were more likely not to recognise a target object if it had no emotive quality and were even more so if they were surrounded by other stimuli. Emotional arousal increases the chance of memories and ideas being retained when they are encoded in the brain for retention. This applies to both long- and short-term memory retention, with some evidence that emotion can have an even greater effect in the long run. But emotion can have a trade-off. When emotions are recalled later, details can tend to be forgotten. This is why emotions need to form part – but not the whole – when creating ideas that resonate.
The important takeaway here is that emotions are a driver of response – and since the goal of the inception is to both resonate and drive a desired next action, emotion’s purpose here should be readily apparent. Brand affiliation is one example of an emotional connection. Brands can be perceived as high-quality, fashionable, ethical cheap or offering poor customer service, but why these values become associated with them can be hard to unpick. Ask someone what they think about a particular brand and they’ll give you an emotion response quickly; a data-driven answer that’s holistic of their entire experience can require deeper memory retrieval and few select examples.
Brand marketing campaigns tend to focus on driving emotional resonance of the brand, but may miss the mark during demand generation because they don’t attach emotion to an idea that will drive action. Understanding that the goal of your emotional strategy is to ultimately drive action can help frame how to deploy emotion within your inception device. Emotions can be both activating and pacifying, and of course both positive and negative, so we can plot them in a matrix.
A balance of emotion and analytical consideration will come into all decisions, and the goal of marketing is to add weight and context to those choice points. However, a word of caution. Emotions are always an internal sensation and as such can be hard to pre-qualify or test. Because of this it can be easy to misjudge the context gap and to miss the emotional mark when developing messages. Emotional triggers can also be perceived differently across cultures and languages, all of which reinforce the importance of message and creative testing before campaigns launch. Emotional responses will always be based upon the identity that a person associates with themselves, but collective identities can be identified by reviewing data from target segments and audiences.
Consider these examples of emotion in communication:
Save The Children is an organisation dedicated to improving the lives of children across the world through better education, health care, and economic opportunities, as well as providing emergency aid in natural disasters, war, and other conflicts. Adverts for Save The Children frequently rely on the personal empathic connection we feel with people that are suffering by showing images of children in great hardship or starving. So powerful are these images, that there has been discussion on whether charities should be prevented from showing them.
The New Zealand road safety advert ‘Mistakes’ is powerful viewing on YouTube. A car approaches a junction; the driver sees another car approaching but decides to pull out anyway. As it becomes apparent that they will collide, time stops. The two drivers get out of their cars, and in that moment of time-freeze they walk towards each other. “I thought I had time,” says one. “I’m going to fast,” says the other. “Please, my boy is in the back,” he says again. The cars shift as time starts to unfreeze. We see the boy sat in the back. “I’m sorry,” the other driver says. Knowing the inevitable they both return to their cars. The first driver looks at it son. The second driver checks his speed. They take a breath. Time unfreezes and they slam into each other in a horrifying accident. It is shock and fear and a terrible sense of the unavoidable that smashes home the road safety message. Watch it and please never speed again.
Microsoft’s 2014 superbowl advert ‘What is technology?’ starts with the question ‘what can it do?’. It then goes on to see a boy walking again with prosthetics. A man that has lost his eyesight painting again. ‘How far can it go?’ We see a doctor reviewing an x-ray in 3d by using hand gestures. Children communicating from school over remote video. ‘Technology… gives hope to the hopeless… a voice to the voiceless.’ Swelling music communicates joy and hopefulness. It is a positive, life affirming story, and was an important early step in Microsoft’s transformation under Satya Nadella’s new leadership. Microsoft, the brand that had – in their own words – lost its way, began a transformation from the corporate leviathan that was sued by its own government for greed and anti-trust violations to becoming the organisation that helps business and people achieve great things.
Donate to the starving, drive safely, buy Microsoft. None of these ideas needed an emotion connection to communicate their point. Microsoft makes office productivity tools; there is a rational argument for whether you should buy this versus a competitor. Road safety should be obvious and beneficial to everyone. And donating to the less well-off should not need justification. But these messages all stick with us, stand out and stand above other messages because of their use of emotion.