More emotion=more attention=better encoding
Messages that elicit emotion hold attention and build stronger associations that last longer.
Messages that elicit emotion build stronger associations.
Orlando Wood from System1 combined System1’s emotional response measurement with TVision’s attention tracking to analyze 195 US TV ads.
He found that when ads use right-brain features (characters, dialog, melody, movement, expressive people) they’re associated with high emotional affect and sustained attention.
When ads use left-brain features (product shots, voiceover, on-screen text, freeze frames) they’re associated with low emotional affect and low attention, even from people who might be interested in the category.
And Daniel Kahneman, Peter Field and Les Binet’s research tells us that emotional associations (right brain) are more durable than rational arguments (left brain).
This is the B2B marketing mismatch I wrote about in my last post.
Direct-response marketing measurement trained a lot of marketers (me too) to over-invest in rational, product-focused advertising and activations. And, just to be clear, those are an important piece of the marketing equation.
The issue is that these types of associations have a sharp memory decay; they fade quickly. They can be more relevant when your audience is already in an active evaluation mode, i.e. evaluating product capabilities, case study outcomes, etc. But that’s only 5% of your audience.
The other 95% of your market isn’t in an active evaluation state.
For this group, we need to build brand + category associations strong enough to last until they’re brought back into the market.
Because, like 6sense (and Forrester and WARC and others) have shown, 94% of buyers build a shortlist of vendors before they even contact sellers, and 77% end up purchasing from their original top choice.
So you *need* to influence your spot on that shortlist. And to do that, you need to be top of mind.
And while we can’t completely control (like most things in marketing) memorability, we can make creative decisions about our marketing activations to increase the likelihood of being remembered.
And emotional affect is a big lever we can pull to do that.
Here are a couple of fun examples (in my opinion—but I’m biased) of emotion-heavy marketing that *also* incorporates elements of category and product associations:
https://www.qsys.com/grudge
A seasonal horror movie narrative where product capabilities are core to the story.
Q-SYS Labs Escape Room
Using product capabilities to create an unexpected & unique in-person experience...like controlling a full escape room at your trade show booth (I’m lucky to work with some very talented people 🥲)