Thinking rationally about emotion
Introduction
In advertising, using emotion is entirely logical.
Creative agencies have made this case consistently. But in 2013 Les Binet and Peter Field brought some much-needed data to the discussion.
In their seminal report, The Long and The Short of It, the duo analysed 30 years of IPA effectiveness award submissions. The study found that emotional campaigns outperformed rational campaigns on all seven brand metrics that had been measured: awareness, commitment, trust, differentiation, quality, fame and image. If a campaign significantly improved a brand's score on any one of these metrics, the report referred to this a "brand effect":
“Rational campaigns on average produce 1.0 brand effects (…), whereas emotional campaigns produce on average 1.7 such effects.”
And it wasn't just brand effects. The same story could be seen in business effects as well. Emotional advertising outperformed their rational counterparts on profit, sales, market share, penetration, loyalty and price sensitivity.
Avoiding the rational, it seems, is the only rational decision.
But why?
Here’s Robert Heath, in his book Seducing the Subconscious:
“Everyone in the ad industry agrees that emotion is important to advertising. Quite why it is important is the subject of considerable debate.”
This article aims to answer this seeming simple question. It argues that emotional, brand-building communications are more effective because they attract more attention, create stronger memories and are more likely to be shared.
Let’s dive in.
Emotional ads garner more attention
Studies have found that our attention is directed by our emotions. But to understand why, we need to take a step back. Way back.
As a species, we evolved in environments where the resources that we wanted to find, and the threats that we wanted to avoid, often occupied the same space. Survival in such an uncertain environment relied upon our ability to quickly spot one or the other.
The two, however, are not of equal importance.
If we couldn’t find food for another hour, we’d be ok. If we didn’t spot a predator, we wouldn’t have another hour to keep looking.
And so, we evolved two ‘modes’ of attention.
Here’s Arne Ohman, Anders Flykt and Francisco Esteves in a paper published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.
“Researchers have commonly distinguished between active and passive attention. The former is conceptualised as goal-driven and voluntarily controlled in a top-down fashion, whereas the latter is stimulus driven and governed by bottom-up perceptual processes.”
When searching for food, the team hypothesised, active attention would be used. This is slow and deliberate. When surveying for threats, on the other hand, passive attention would be applied. This is fast and automatic. Our active attention focuses on finding food in a narrow area. Our passive attention keeps a look-out over everything else.
To test this, the researchers exposed people to two 3x3 grids of images. One grid featured eight non-threatening images (e.g. flowers) and one threatening image (e.g. a snake). In the second grid the proportions reversed. Participants were asked to press a button when they had identified the outlier image. The results were clear:
“Participants proved faster in detecting fear-relevant targets among fear-irrelevant distractors than vice versa. Thus, snakes and spiders against flowers or mushrooms resulted in shorter detection latencies than flowers and mushrooms against snakes or spiders.”
In 8 of the 9 grid locations, respondents identified the emotional, fear-inducing image faster than when the non-threatening image was in the same cell.
This led the researchers to their conclusion, and to the title of their paper, ‘Emotion Drives Attention’.
We are neurologically wired to give attentional priority to emotional stimulus in our environment. But does emotional advertising benefit from a similar effect.
To understand this, we have to turn to Professor Karen Nelson Field, of Amplified Intelligence.
In a study in collaboration with ThinkTV, 2,583 Australian subjects were exposed to over 18,000 adverts. Respondents used a grid of 16 emotions (including positive, negative, strong and weak) to label their response to the stimulus and eye-tracking was used to measure the attention each received.
Overall, only 22% of adverts elicited a strong emotional reaction. However, these ‘strong-response’ ads received more attention. Here’s Nelson-Field:
“Ads which generated a strong reaction – irrespective of whether or not the reaction was positive or negative – garnered 16% more attention than ads which elicited weak reactions.”
This effect may not be as large as our biologically evolved ability to spot a snake in the grass, but it is significant nonetheless.
The study found that these high emotion, high attention ads also saw a 30% increase in ‘short term advertising strength’ (STAS), a measure of the incremental sales gained from advertising exposure.
So, advertising that triggers emotion receives more attention.
But the benefits of emotion are only just beginning.
Emotional ads create stronger memories
David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Stanford University, noticed that time seemed to slow down in life-threatening situations:
“David and his older brother, Joel, had ridden their dirt bikes to a half-finished adobe house about a quarter of a mile away. When they’d explored the rooms below, David scrambled up a wooden ladder to the roof. He stood there for a few minutes taking in the view—west across desert and subdivision to the city rising in the distance—then walked over the newly laid tar paper to a ledge above the living room. “It looked stiff,” he told me recently. “So I stepped onto the edge of it.” (…) He remembers the feeling clearly, he says. His body stumbles forward as the tar paper tears free at his feet. His hands stretch toward the ledge, but it’s out of reach. The brick floor floats upward—some shiny nails are scattered across it—as his body rotates weightlessly above the ground. It’s a moment of absolute calm and eerie mental acuity. But the thing he remembers best is the thought that struck him in midair: this must be how Alice felt when she was tumbling down the rabbit hole.”
There are hundreds of accounts similar to Eagleman’s. In moments of great danger, an eerie calm occurs, time slows down and our ability to think speeds up.
But why might this happen? Phil Barden, Managing Director of Decode Marketing, provides a succinct answer to this question:
“If we are in a state of high arousal, our attention span increases and our senses are sharpened to be able to deeply process the object that triggers that arousal.”
When we find ourselves in a dangerous situation (such as spotting the snake in the grass) all of our cognitive resources become focussed on the stimulus to ensure our safety and survival.
This ‘deep processing’ of emotional stimulus happens in a region of our brains called the amygdala, which is situated in the older, lower levels of our temporal lobe. The amygdala is our brain’s ‘emotion centre’, and it’s located next to our hippocampus, the ‘memory centre’.
The result is that emotionally stimulating experiences forge stronger memories. And those stronger memories help protect us when we come across the same danger in the future.
Phil Barden goes on to explain how this system relates to brand communications:
“Due to its deeper processing, emotionally engaging communication is more likely to be remembered. To understand this positive impact on recall we need to look at the brain’s geography. The hippocampus is a brain structure that manages what we store and where, and it is positioned right beside the amygdala – our emotional centre. This shows the relationship between emotional response and memory formation: to survive, and to optimise future decisions and actions, it was especially important to store and remember those objects and situations that evoked a strong emotional response. Hence, we are more likely to store episodes (e.g. TVCs) and objects (e.g. brands) if they are delivered with high arousal.”
Emotional advertising embeds our brands in the minds and memories of our audiences.
Or, to put it another way, more affective advertising is more effective.
Perhaps the clearest, and most poetic, articulation of this comes from Brand Strategy Director at Anomoly, Claire Strickett:
“Emotion is the ink memories are written in.”
So, advertising that triggers emotion receives more attention and forges stronger memories.
But there is one final benefit of emotional advertising.
Emotional messages are more widely shared
We are a social species. And for hundreds of thousands of years, stories have been used to entertain, to connect and, perhaps most importantly, to share information.
Here’s Ajeetha Vithiyananthan:
“Since our ancestors evolved to live in groups, they likely used storytelling to gather and communicate information about their environments and increasingly complex social relationships. Stories served as a way to make sense of the world and its benefits and dangers. The use of narratives allows people to remember information far more than facts alone. Thus, stories allowed our ancestors to transmit and remember important information about their environment, such as where to find food and water, and how to avoid dangers, such as predators and illnesses.”
Whilst our ability to attend to and remember situations improved our own chances of survival, the sharing of information improved the chances of survival for those around us.
But not all information is worth sharing.
In the early 20th century, the German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt argued that emotions could be plotted along two distinct axes: valence (from positive to negative) and arousal (from strong to weak).
In the strong-positive quadrant you find emotions such as excitement and happiness. Weak-positive emotions include calm and contentment. In the weak-negative quadrant are emotions like sadness and boredom. And finally strong-negative emotions include anger and disgust.
But which of these quadrants elicits the most social sharing?
To find out Jonah Berger, Marketing Professor at Wharton, ran a series of studies. In one Berger recruited 40 students and split them into two groups. The first, a control, was asked to sit still for 60 seconds. The second, on the other hand, was told to jog on the spot for the same duration (a task that has been shown to boost physiological arousal). Both groups then read a neutral online news article and were told they could share it with anyone they wanted.
Here’s Berger:
“Arousal (…) boosted sharing of information. Compared with sitting still, running in place increased the percentage of people who e-mailed the article from 33% to 75%.”
2.3x more participants in the high emotional arousal condition shared the article than did in the low arousal condition.
In another study, Berger coded almost 7,000 articles published in The New York Times for their emotional valence (positive or negative) as well as the specific emotions they evoked (e.g. anger, sadness, awe).
Berger and his collaborator Katherine L. Milkman then calculated the likelihood that articles that triggered each emotion had of appearing in the publication's “most emailed” list.
As you may have guessed by now, more emotional stories were more likely to make the most-emailed list. More specifically, articles evoking awe, a high-positive emotion, were 30% more likely to be shared. And those that inspired anger, a high-negative emotion, were 34% more likely to make the list.
In short, the more emotional the content, the more it is shared.
Sharing emotional stories gave our social species an advantage. The transmission of highly emotive information, whether related to risks or rewards, improved the survival rates of those in our group. And in turn, of ourselves as well.
Let’s bring all of this together.
Conclusion
So there you have it. For brand-building communications, emotional advertising is more effective than rational. It more effectively delivers brand effects and business effects. And it is more effective for three clear reasons. It attracts more attention, it creates stronger memories, and it is more likely to be shared.
In their book Unlocking Profitable Growth, advertising pre-testing experts System 1 Group push this conclusion to its extreme.
“Creating those positive emotions is advertising’s greatest benefit and should be its primary goal. The System 1 rule of thumb is short and sweet. If you feel more, you buy more. And if you feel more, you’re likely to pay more too.”
But despite the evidence, most advertising doesn’t make the most of emotion.
System 1’s methodology codes consumers’ reactions to every TV advert aired in the UK and US using seven universal emotions: contempt, disgust, anger, fear, sadness, happiness and surprise.
Which of these do you think might be the most common response to advertising? Take a guess. The answer might surprise you.
In 47% of ads in the USA, and 52% of ads in the UK, System 1 found the dominant response to be neutral. Or to put it another way, half of all advertising elicits no emotional reaction at all. Zero. Zilch.
If you’re a strategist like me, this should make you angry (an emotion evoked by 1% of ads, incidentally). But if you’re a marketer it should make you happy (around 29%, if you were wondering). And it should make you happy because this represents a significant opportunity for you and your brand. Half of your competitors are not benefitting from the triple win of emotional advertising. And it’s much easier to win the race, when others are asleep at the wheel.
So it’s time to embrace emotion as the rational approach. It’s time to uncover the effectiveness of the affective. It’s time to get attention, get remembered and get shared.
Because if you want your brand to move the needle, you first have to move the people.
Notes
A big thank you to Toby Ososki for his guidance and support on this essay.