To Feel or Not to Feel, That is The Question
Feelings, we all have them. Happy, sad, angry, disappointed, excited, dreamy, concerned, elated... the list goes on. And for the most part, we desire to keep ourselves within the 'Positive Emotion Category'.
As marketers, we, like most people try to keep our communications in the upbeat, happy, get to the good in everything way of behaving. We try to evoke happy thoughts with every piece of communications that we create for our clients. 'This is so going to make someone's day so much better'. God forbid us from ever presenting something that would convey a negative piece of information or a negative perspective. But why? Why does advertising, for the most part, have to live in this happy-go-lucky world? The world isn't like that, yet we try to sugar coat things and make people feel like the world is full of puppies, rainbows and unicorns.
One of the most impactful tools that we've used over the years is a simple emotion chart... you know, the kind that you see hanging in any psychologist's office. We ask our clients a simple question... how do you want people to feel when they see this campaign. More often than not, we get "happy", "excited", "engaged". And sure, those are some great emotions that we'd love to convey... but they are also expected... and expected is forgotten. So, do you want to have all that money and time invested to be for naught?
We try to provoke... provoke our clients to create something with teeth and drama. Communications that make people feel something... something different and something unexpected. Something that will provoke a response.
No, we don't push our clients to go down a path of "anger", "denial", or "frustration". But rather, we delve deep into what the tension is that we need to overcome. Pulling on this tension through an emotion is how you create communications that people play attention to.
Think about this...
Domino's Pizza... the recent Potholes campaign plays off "Frustration"... Say what? Sure, the entire story is built on the fact that people feel frustrated when the hot and steamy pizza they just bought gets all jacked up when the drive home.
Jack Daniel's Fire... when we launched Jack Fire, we wanted to convey the "Daring" connecting the daring launch of Fire with our brand, but also to connect with the daring mentality of our desired (and expanded) audience.
National Association of Realtors... home buying appears so simple on HGTV, yet for most first time buyers, it's "overwhelming"... we wanted to present Realtors as the solve for this "anxious" period in people's lives.
Provoking emotions gets complicated... and for the most part, mediocre clients don't want to provoke, nor do they want to be provoked. They want to live in a happy bubble where they move the needle ever so slowly. But great brands want to be provoked and they want to provoke... they want to capitalize on dramatic storytelling that makes people feel something... "excited", "aware", "isolated", "inadequate", "empowered"... Think about the communications that made an impact on you... each of them had a distinct emotion that they provoked in you... that is what made them impactful.
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