How to exploit emotions, the ‘Post-It notes of the mind’
While emotions may be inescapable when it comes to decision making, marketers have the power to harness them say Ashton Bishop and Gary Wilkinson.
No matter how tough, detached and rational we believe we are, we still make emotional decisions and then make rational justifications. It’s not just buyology (the way we buy), it stems from biology (the way we’re built).
Super simplistically there are three layers to the brain; one, the automatic, brain stem (reptilian brain) which controls breathing, balance and blood flow type activities. Two, the emotional, limbic brain (mammalian brain) dealing with emotions, memory and decisions – feeding, fighting, fleeing and fu… (you know, the reproducing function). Thirdly, the rational, neocortex and frontal lobes – the executive office responsible for strategy, high-thinking and logic.
The limbic brain is 80 to 200 times faster than the neocortex. So when you’re faced with a decision of ‘would you like fries with that?’ your emotions (the limbic system) already have an answer while your conscious brain (the neocortex) is weighing up the last time you ate, whether you are on a diet, if it is good value, and asking if the kid serving you is actually 15.
Here we go once again with the idea that good decision making, logic and rationality (whatever that is) only emanate from one source in the body. Guys when your heart tells you something (intuition) does that come from the emotions or frontal lobes or both?
Well made points, though the call for emotional branding has been around awhile. Creatives have for a long time intuitively defaulted to emotional options.
Interestingly for marketers the whole issue of rational versus emotional is at the centre of how digital and social media should be used as outlined in this post: http://brandtruth.com.au/2013/.....-marketing
Hi Mike,
Our point is that that ‘feeling in your gut’ (that orginiates in the brain’s limbic system) generally trumps logic and rationailty.
It’s too easy to get caught up and forget we’re emotional creatures first.
Oh and as for the jelly bean example. Experiment fail. It’s perfectly rational to go for a bigger bowl with less chance of getting red beans as you’ll still be able to get more as there are more beans to be got. Depends on time line and uncapped upside or not.
Hi Hmmm… it was actually a less complex experiment than that. Pick one bean blind. It was designed so the rational percentages were directly pitted agaist the ‘gut’s’ desire to ‘pick from the big one’. Time line, multi-grab etc all didn’t matter. Simple emotinal override.
Good article. it provides an excellent explanation as to why stories are so powerful in marketing. Gosh, who would want to completely remove emotion in decision making? We’d all become Vulcans!
Stories are powerful, emotions are powerful, it is true for marketing, only as a secondary consideration.
There must be a kind of logic, an intent, to drive the story and create emotion; if not, we will be left with false and unsupportable game playing and artifice.
An example of this is the thing people refer to as “Ham” or “Lousy Acting” or “Unbelievable Scripting.” It is often none of those things, but simply good creative work performed and/or shot without the benefit of logic and intent, it follows that the emotion will not result and the work will always fail.