With emotion as the trigger

We have always known that stories with the ability to stir our emotions get remembered. They also have the capacity to influence our behaviour. So emotion-based advertising can be highly effective, but to be truly effective it needs to be more than just a good story.

This article outlines how advertisers can make optimal use of emotional stimuli to influence people’s brand choices. To do that, we look at how people pay attention to, and both encode into memory and later retrieve, emotion-linked stimuli. Finally, we look at this evidence in the context of advertising to draw some conclusions about how these interact to deliver desired brand outcomes.

The Diamond Producers Association recently released a new set of ads. They aim to reintroduce the idea of diamonds to the relationships and aspirations of millennials. This is a group for whom “forever” is a meaningless concept along with tradition, eternity and commitment. Their focus is the journey, not the destination.

The new theme is about honesty, authenticity and truth, separating the fake from the real. The campaign moves away from “Diamonds are Forever” which has been used since 1947, to the new, “Real is Rare. Real is a Diamond” theme. It is a thoroughly emotional campaign at every level and leverages story-telling in both traditional and digital media.

Diamonds symbolise the dilemma of many major products and brands with regard to millennials. Although very familiar with the traditional role of diamonds and other brands, younger generations have a different set of motivations and brand relationships from their predecessors at their age.

They have more choices than ever, but this comes with a volume of exposure to abundant and complex options and continual bombardment from brands. This has consequences, selective attention being one. How can brands capture their attention to reinforce familiar ideas or to introduce new ones?

The goal of using emotion in advertising is, of course, to influence brand choice. So we need to link emotional stimuli with what we know about attention and memory if we are to use it to influence how people make choices.

The ideas outlined below also link with theories of decision-making. It is fairly widely acknowledged that we use a system of dual processing to make choices, the primary proponent of which is Daniel Kahneman. In summary, they propose that we have two parallel systems for making choices: System 1 is based on automated, non-conscious processing, commonly referred to as “emotion-based thinking” and System 2 which is based on more cognitive, reflective or more conscious processing, often referred to as “rational thinking”.

Equating System 1 with emotion and then “irrationality” is an inaccurate view of the role of emotion in decision-making. System 1 is really about using automated processes or shortcuts in preference to reflective or cognitive processing, to achieve what remain rational outcomes.

Our brains make use of these shortcuts or heuristics to select which decisions require cognitive thinking but this is still an inherently “rational” choice. Heuristics help us to process large amounts of information and brands can make use of these to their advantage.

How? We know that brands exist in people’s minds as associative memory structures. These are networks of thoughts, feelings, images, associations, colours, sounds, symbols and memories related to the brand in question. Branding, or the “marque”, acts as a heuristic, a shortcut enabling people to draw quickly on this large body of associations and knowledge to facilitate choice when they are called upon to make a decision.

Brand communications can play an important part in capturing attention to either reinforce or disrupt this mental network, creating new ideas and memories or adding strength to those that already exist.

“Emotional advertising” has become very fashionable, but why? Is it down to advertiser FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) or is there clear evidence, both in outcomes and underlying theory, that it works?

The idea is that “emotion” in the form of story-telling performs three key functions:

Emotion can capture attention with novel, surprising or engaging ideas

Emotional messages can be processed automatically, using lower levels of conscious attention so placing a lower cognitive load on our processing and memory encoding faculties. Emotional advertising creates emotional connections that make a brand easier to retrieve at a moment of choice, i.e., making it highly salient

The amount of information we are exposed to vastly exceeds our ability to process it. If we think of attention, we can call it the set of processes that enhance our perceptions and processing of some information over others.

Like a spotlight, attention helps us focus on some stimuli in preference to others. It works in two ways: by helping us to filter information “top-down” depending on things we are interested in or motivate us; and “bottom-up” based on the perceptual properties of the information itself, like movement or colour, novelty or surprise.

In capturing attention, emotional stimuli take priority over neutral stimuli — we notice an angry or happy face quicker than a neutral face. Top-down, relevant emotional stimuli, combined with attention-grabbing, bottom-up emotional stimuli get priority. Good emotional content first creates attention engagement at an automatic level, and then sustains engagement through relevance to an individual’s personal goals and motivations.

So the nature of the interaction between emotion and attention is dynamic, develops over time and is dependent on both the nature and relevance of the stimuli. Think of watching a movie trailer. It is exciting and features one of our favourite stars, but we only keep watching if the story is one we like and relate to.

For brand communication, it also means that attention is related to both the immediate stimuli (attention salience) and how those interact with the individual’s motivations or need states (memory salience).

The link to motivations and needs is often lost by advertisers in a rush to simply capture immediate attention.

What is less clear is the degree to which we pay attention to emotional stimuli in the presence of a high cognitive load. Indications are that the attention paid to emotional stimuli is lower when there is a high cognitive load.

In other words, if I am busy doing something on my phone or computer, like banking or shopping, then I am less likely to pay attention to emotional stimuli than if I am doing something that doesn’t require so much cognitive effort. Alternatively, when watching TV, I may be in the ideal state to pay attention to emotional stimuli.

There is also some evidence that attention to emotional stimuli reduces the resources available for cognitive processing. In advertising, this would mean that we may pay less attention to the branding, messages or persuasive elements of the ad if we are focused on the story.

So, if we are busy watching a cute performing dog in an ad, we may not bother to notice the name of the brand being advertised. This has implications for designing executions that are trying to both engage and persuade. It also has implications for the media context in which ads appear and the degree of receptivity of the target audience.

Finally, there is also emerging evidence that these responses vary according to individual pre-disposition. Some individuals are more or less sensitive to emotional content, depending on their nature, development or even current mood state.

So emotional content that is attention-grabbing and relevant can help an ad to achieve sustained engagement, but this can be reduced if other tasks are taking place at the same time. The implication for advertisers is to balance the desire to get across as many messages or cues as possible with the risk of being “screened out” regardless of the emotional content.

To be continued

COMMENT NOW