Striking the right chord

Part 1 of this article (“With emotion as the trigger”, cat.a.lyst dated November 25) looked at the role of emotion, attention and memory in advertising and how brand campaigns can best leverage the interplay of these factors to influence people’s choices. Here is the second and concluding part of the article

How does emotion influence how stimuli are processed in memory?

There are well-established models of memory. The first way in which we separate areas of memory is to think of things we process and forget (short-term memory) and things we process and keep for later (long-term memory). The area of memory we are interested in is long-term memory, things we keep and can later retrieve.

The two key areas of long-term memory are explicit (conscious) and implicit (non-conscious). Memories of things such as events and our environment are considered part of our episodic memory, while facts and concepts are stored in our semantic memory. Think of going to a French lesson. What you remember about the lesson, the people, how you got there and so on are stored in episodic memory, while the grammar and vocabulary you learned is stored in semantic memory. The two may, at times, be remembered together but are more likely to be retrieved and used separately.

Our implicit memory capacity is far larger and stores things that may influence us, but in a less conscious way. Perhaps some of the experiences we had in class make it a compelling event in our calendar and we feel very positive towards the next class for reasons we can’t articulate. Or the class fits neatly into a time of day that is part of a standard routine, so we find ourselves at the French class more out of habit than conscious desire.

Memoy creation and retrieval Psychology has long abandoned the idea that memories are stored together in neat, discrete parcels located in particular areas of the brain. It is now demonstrated that memories are distributed all over the brain and linked together by our network of connections.

It was assumed (and still is to a large extent) that active processing would create stronger and more durable memories than low-level processing. In fact, in much the same way that we can process emotions without conscious appraisal, implicit learning occurs without conscious attention.

In addition, Joseph LeDoux (The Emotional Brain 1998) outlines the fact that memories, even explicit ones, are not carbon copies of the experience from which they were taken. In between the unevaluated response and the appraised response, we each apply elements of our subconscious biases and heuristics to arrive at a suitably analysed memory for storage and retrieval at some later date. These encoded experiences are often referred to as engrams.

For advertisers, this means that whatever is communicated in an ad will be most likely be filtered through the lens of current mental networks before becoming a memory. The implication is that trying to overcome poor brand perceptions or to disrupt, rather than reinforce, mental networks will need more than a good story or subtle brand cues.

Emotion and the process Emotional arousal (a response to an emotional stimulus) undoubtedly attracts resources to facilitate some sort of encoding in memory. Evidence has shown, however, that this arousal leads to selective effects on memory.

Emotional stimuli increase the likelihood of select components of an event being remembered. These components include details that capture attention, aspects of the event that are somehow integral to the emotional focus or things about the stimuli that are relevant to the goals or motivations of the individual.

Details that come to mind easily and vividly make people feel more confident that their memory is accurate, regardless of how accurate those details actually are. These are often related to how the event made people feel, rather than the actual details around the event. As an example, supporters of a particular football team will remember a key match they won against a rival in a different way from those on the losing side. The victorious supporters, happy that their team won, remember the overall experience more than the details.

Those on the losing side will most likely remember more of the specific detail and less of the overall feeling of the game. Over time, however, much of the negative detail is lost and the memory becomes more general.

That means that the way we encode and subsequently retrieve memories of emotional events depends not only on the degree and valence of arousal, but also on our current networks or engrams and our underlying goals or motivations.

How the trio interact This brings us back to the idea of branding as a heuristic. We can see that the use of emotional stimuli can indeed attract more of our conscious and non-conscious resources to pay attention to, and aid the encoding of, advertising into memory. The challenge is to strike the right balance in the way memories are encoded and the way in which they are subsequently retrieved.

This requires an integrated and holistic approach — using distinctive assets and creating emotional connections to things that matter to people in order to facilitate the reinforcement of positive, associative memories or the disruption of those memory structures to encode new information. The more consistent and appealing the emotional connections created and the brand cues accompanying an emotion-based advertisement, the more likely they are to be retrieved in the way that the advertiser desired at a suitable “relevant moment”. In behavioural psychology this is known as the “priming effect.”

We know from research conducted by the IPA that this combination of priming and ensuring that the key information required for short-term action together deliver highly effective advertising. On the other hand, emotion for the sake of emotion can easily be ignored if it does not deliver a brand message that is resonant with the story being told.

Can the impact be measured? Defining an ad as emotional or not at the outset is a subjective exercise but, as identified above, we can conclude whether or not an ad generates an arousal response through our approach and metrics.

When we test advertising, we measure both active and passive aspects of attention and brand impact. By showing the advertisement in a distracted media environment we do not force highly focussed attention. And by separating the measures of visibility and brand recognition we also ensure that the balance has been achieved between paying attention to the ad and absorbing the brand information.

Facial coding and other neuro-based techniques offer a moment-by-moment assessment of exactly where emotional responses take place, both positive and negative. This continuous observation also shows us where the ad is supporting increased longer-term engagement and attention, making the ad more likely to be adding something to that vital mental network.

Making sure all of these aspects are measured and assessed means that we can see exactly how the emotion is working with other aspects of a piece of brand communications, leveraging both the areas where asking is better (cognitive evaluation like brand linkage) and where observation works best (understanding where engagement and attention are built and sustained).

What about the diamonds? Coming back to the new campaign by the Diamond Producers Association, it ticks many of the right boxes. It shows real people in real relationships. It includes subtle but consistent cues linking special moments to diamonds. It links the same motivational needs that pull people towards diamonds using a different social context. It moves away from tradition, yesterday, “not us” and leverages things millennials relate to, millennial icons on Facebook and Instagram and displaying diamonds implicitly rather than ostentatiously. It remains to be seen whether or not emotion alone can overcome the more general issues facing the diamond industry in terms of trust and fashion. For other brands, the implications are clear. Capturing people’s attention and making sure your emotional advertising is both encoded and retrieved as you would like requires more than a good story with moments of intensity.

Summing up Emotion-based advertising can be highly effective but must work within a strong and consistent brand framework.

Brands need to have a range of distinctive iconography or assets that are consistent, engaging and understood so that they reinforce the stories and emotional stimuli in your advertising.

Advertisers should ensure that emotion-based advertising links to the brand through association with the cues — needs, functions, situations, sounds, sights or smells — that are most relevant in the key moments.

Effective emotional priming means having stories that are relevant to people’s motivations and goals, so that engagement with advertising is sustained and so that people associate the brand with the things that matter most to them.

Advertising assessment needs to take account of all of these aspects. It is also worth noting that emotion is not the only route to effective advertising. Cognitive stimuli are very effective at delivering desired brand outcomes when they align people’s needs and wants and many of the most effective campaigns demonstrate this. In the end, you still need to offer people something that matters to them.

Yannick Carriou is Global CEO and Gailynn Nicks is Global Chief Research Officer of media and brand expression firm Ipsos Connect

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