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.
We may think emotions are soft, but we’re thinking of them all wrong. Our senses pull in about 11m bits of information every second, but only 40 bits per second can be processed by our conscious brain. Emotions are how we make sense of this. They’re the Post-It notes in our mind that ‘tag’ certain stimulus that is important. It makes evolutionary sense so that next time we encounter a snake, a mate or a meal-deal-upsell we won’t make a mistake.
Some research that beautifully demonstrates this emotional override was the 1994 Denes-Raj and Epstein Jelly Bean experiment. Candidates were offered to swap red jelly beans for cash. To get the jelly beans they were given two options for a lucky dip. One, a large bowl with hundreds of red beans mixed in with hundreds of others. This bowl had a big sign clearly stating, ‘Seven per cent chance of winning’. The second option was a small bowl with only 50 beans in it, but a higher ratio of red beans. The sign on it stated ‘10 per cent chance of winning’.
The results? More people went for the big bowl because they thought it had a better chance of winning. And who said gambling is just a tax for people who don’t understand maths.
Emotions are inescapable in the context of decision-making, and if you lost them, you’d really miss them. In 1982 a patient called Elliot developed a brain tumor that had the effect of making him completely rational and logical. The net result was he became unable to choose anything. When faced with a menu, he became obsessed with the information and unable to decide.
So if we can’t get rid of emotions, then how can we as marketers embrace them? We can get back to stories. Listen to your creative director when they tell you ‘This story is powerful’ because they’re probably right. If it conjures up fear, empathy or pride, it will beat the confusion of a cacophony of stats and numbers every time.
Realise that emotions once tagged to a stimulus create a feedback loop that’s hard to break. Brand managers should make sure there’s a clear and strong positive emotional tag on the first and every contact a prospect has with your brand. Whether it’s your website, TVC or signage, you want to make sure that you’re leading with your trump card.
Ashton Bishop (left) is the head of strategy at Step Change Marketing and Gary Wilkinson (right) is a behavioural psychologist and founder of Blisspoint Research.
This feature first appeared in Encore. Download it now on iPad, iPhone and Android tablet devices.
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?
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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