A Guide to Getting Smart about Emotion in Advertising
People respond strongly to emotional content, and advertisers are adjusting accordingly. When consumers connect emotionally to a brand through a spot, ad recall and brand lift measurements go up. But too often we get the feedback, “ add more emotion,” with no clear direction. And despite some measurements showing success, sometimes “emotion” just doesn’t drive sales. Phil Barden’s Decoded offers a framework that can help us focus the vague concept of “emotion” so we can employ it with purpose.
Yes, emotion resonates with consumers.
Generally speaking, connecting with consumers on an emotional level is a great move.
In our brains, thinking of two things in conjunction with one another fires two neurons, and creates a neural pathway between them. When people frequently experience two concepts in relation to one another, these neural pathways become automated. For example, you might hear peanut butter and automatically think of jelly. After a lifetime of experiencing peanut in relation to jelly, your brain makes the connection automatically as a shortcut. Emotion quickly builds these automated neural pathways, which is why it’s great for efficiently building positive associations with your brand. But sometimes emotional campaigns drive sales, and sometimes they just aren’t as effective as we want them to be. Let’s dive into why:
Emotional connection with consumers may lead to positive perceptions, but positive perceptions don’t necessarily change consumer behavior. First of all, people don’t humanize brands to the degree that some marketers would like to believe. They process brands as objects, not people, and don’t attribute human traits to brands. But even if they did, subjective like-ability is not predictive of sales. Liking and wanting are actually regulated by different neural circuits in the brain, and wanting drives purchasing behavior. So you might feel connected to a brand’s message, and “like” it as a brand, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to buy it. Further, competing brands aren’t putting out negative messages. People may think positively about your brand, but they feel positively about your competitors as well. To address the disconnect between liking and wanting, Barden provides a framework to guide creative strategy.
A Goals-Based Approach
In Barden’s Decoded, he offers a new approach to understanding consumer behavior and sheds light on why emotional content doesn’t always deliver. My last blog post discussed how people make purchasing decisions, and it comes down to perceived reward minus perceived cost to the consumer. These elements, assessed by the brain’s system 1 “autopilot,” can be influenced by a variety of factors, many of which are emotionally driven. But based on extensive psychology research, Barden argues that activated goals are the main purchase drivers. The more relevant a product is to an active goal, the higher the autopilot will assess its reward. For example, when we’re hungry (active goal: eat) we are willing to pay more for food, a concept I’m sure we can all confirm. Our goals operate on two levels: the explicit and the implicit. Explicit goals are obvious while implicit goals have to do with underlying human motivations. On an implicit emotional level, people seek security, enjoyment, excitement, adventure, autonomy, and discipline in their daily lives.
Explicit goals tend to define categories while implicit goals tend to differentiate brands, based on which motivation they implicitly satisfy. For example, the explicit goal activated when looking to buy a car is to get from one place to another. In that sense, all working cars are the same. But car brands frame themselves as fulfilling different implicit goals. Volvo frames itself as safe, satisfying the human need to be secure, but Jeep positions itself as exciting, fulfilling a craving for adventure. So when we’re looking for a fun new car to go off roading, we may think of Jeep. But when we’re buying our child’s first car and searching for a sense of security, we may think of Volvo. This framework of implicit goals can actually help inform the role of emotion; an ad trying to appeal to our sense of adventure will probably deal with different emotions than an ad that is appealing our need to keep our children safe. The emotion should serve a specific role.
According to Barden, a good question to ask yourself is: what implicit goals are people typically trying to satisfy when they purchase my brand? The answer to his question can give context for emotion in our work. Creative content works the hardest when it aligns with the explicit and implicit goals associated with the brand; emotion helps these associations stick.
The point of this article is not to dismiss the power emotional connection, but rather to argue that the approach to “emotional” advertising should be more nuanced; emotion should be in direct conversation with the explicit and implicit goals that the brand satisfies for consumers. “Emotion” alone is just too vague to guide effective creative. So when you get, or give, feedback on a creative concept that generically suggests more “emotion” to connect with consumers, ask yourself how to provide an emotional context to the implicit and explicit goals that brand or product accomplishes.
