Brand Building: Why Emotion is Key to Creating Buddies for Life
It’s simple. Be a good friend.
Are you old enough to remember the rumors that Led Zeppelin’s iconic song Stairway to Heaven included missives from the Devil? Supposedly, if you played the record backward, it would say evil things to your subconscious, like, “He gives you 666”.
Whatever that means. Does explain a few things about the guy who sat behind me in Algebra, though.
Whether or not rock and roll’s bad boys were dancing with the Devil is uncertain, but we do know that the advertising world certainly was. And does.
It’s not news that advertisers have used images to kick our subconscious in the gut for decades, especially with sex and fear.
Hello, 2021.
COVID-19 emptied offices, some for good. Work and school from home are skyrocketing online media consumption.
Social media is in the midst of a painful transition with blurred lines between news, fake news, ads, facts, fiction, and marketing content.
Brands and influencers can now get the attention of more people, more often than at any previous time in history.
How all this stimulation is changing our brains remains to be seen in future generations, the kids who spend a lot of time on phones and iPads before they can even walk.
To riff on a saying from gun and pitbull advocates, screens don’t hurt people. People who produce harmful content hurt people emotionally.
As I wrote about in this post, it turns out that false and fear-based content presents risks to the health of society, not to mention your business.
The content we create now is shaping our future. Choose wisely.
The case for win-win
Empathy is a buzzword right now, and for a good reason which I talk about below. The happy news is that prioritizing positive emotions to build empathy is not only the nice thing to do, it’s good for business.
A May 2019 Deloitte Digital study✎ EditSign presents some interesting insights into fans’ expectations of their favorite brands. A quick caveat — the sample surveyed was overwhelmingly caucasian and skewed to lower to middle income, middle age and above.
That being said, the report offers this helpful analogy — people expect the same emotional connection from their favorite brands as they do from their friends.
This can simplify understanding our end game with our followers. Nurturing a friendship is a clearer goal to most people than “building empathy”.
Like a close friend, customers will even forgive brands for messing up if there is transparency and an honest apology.
Another interesting finding for your customer journey map concerns the timing of shared values vs. emotional content.
It turns out that shared values are a powerful attractor for new followers — the awareness phase. I’ve addressed this exact opportunity with my Superfan Magnet Video packages a couple of years ago.
Values are specific trigger points that are more useful than broad cultural cohorts or a birth year “gen-somebody” clump.
But here is some interesting nuance — the Deloitte study found that shared values are not as effective as emotional content for engagement — ie building the friendship.
Deloitte uses the word satiety to describe this — after an initial reassurance of shared values, people are satisfied that they have that in common with you as long as your future behavior doesn’t contradict it.
You can and should move on to content that deepens trust and attachment to the brand. And you can and should consider video for that, and you can see specifically WHY, in a fascinating interactive example, below.
Bottom line: churn is expensive, an engaged loyal following is the long game, and the way we do that is by consistently building trust to develop positive emotional ties to brands.
No surprise, companies like Apple are looking at ways to track emotions at scale.
Let’s back up and look at the content question.
Image and Video
A common internet meme says that people process meaning from images 60,000 faster than words. It turns out there is no proof of that, beyond just Instagram’s success.
How meta is it that a false meme would come up as I was researching for a post about the high road for content marketing?
This source ran an experiment and estimated that our brain derives meaning from images 600x faster than text.
Add motion and sound to that, and now you have your brain sizzling on video.
Video is the most triggering kind of content, for better or worse, kind of like the word “squirrel” is for your dog.
As a video strategist, this caught my eye, and it should yours, too: a 2017 Berkeley study by Alan S. Cowen and Dacher Keltner measuring emotional responses to over 2000 video clips.
How long does the video need to be to register an emotion? 60 seconds? 30? 15? Nope.
Let’s say 5 seconds because that is what the researchers at Berkeley used.
In this fascinating interactive display, we see a universe of related information about emotion. You can hover over an emotional label, watch the video clip used to elicit a reaction, and see a radar chart showing the relative expansiveness of the participants’ feeling, based on how the video engages 14 common dimensions of emotion.
Huh? If all that text just made your eyes glaze over, here is a quick demo video in the original blog post
This is my broad interpretation of this part of the study. The authors have a much lengthier technical explanation. Not being a grad student, I ran out of time trying to decipher the jargon. Please refer to the paper for the official version.
The radar charts for positive emotions are often larger and more symmetrical. The one below pictures a blend of responses dominated by aesthetic appreciation.
This one below reflects a blended response dominated by horror and disgust.
The radar charts for negative emotional responses look sickly, in my unscientific opinion.
Unscientific, perhaps, but intuitive as well.
You see, when the ancient brain senses fear, it impairs the area of the brain we use for reasoning and decision. It is difficult for scared humans to think clearly about the overall context.
This is helpful if we are cornered by a tiger, for example. It narrows our focus to increase our odds of escaping the tiger.
I don’t know if that mental constriction is what the negative emotion radar charts are depicting, but my guess is that they are related.
The challenge is that modern humans rarely face tigers. Our everyday “fears” do not require us to shut down our reasoning capacity, but try telling Old Grandpa Dinosaur brain about that. He’s kept us alive for a millenia or two.
The problem with fear-based content is that it creates audiences of people who aren’t using their whole brain. From mob mentality to personal neurosis, maybe this is why we see otherwise intelligent people acting in ways that don’t make sense to someone looking at a situation with their entire brain.
Do you remember the water crystal studies done by Masaru Emoto, who took photos that purport to reflect the effect of emotions on frozen water? Professional scientists have since discredited his work, but many people believe it contains more than a kernel of truth (aka intuition).
Another example of repetitive exposure to negative feelings is the Ikea school experiment, with two plants placed in identical conditions in a school hallway. For thirty days, the students praised one plant and bullied the other. The bullied plant was visibly worse off by the end of the month.
Like Emoto’s work, some people have criticized this experiment as rigged, too. Perhaps it lacks scientific rigor, but the idea of talking nicely to plants nurture their growth is not a new one. And that poor bullied plant did look terrible. Again, intuition, right?
Many other scientists are studying the effects of social media on mental health. That is too broad a topic to go into here, but it’s easy to see how people spending too much time with questionable content may begin to feel like the bullied Ikea plant on the inside and act like the bullying sixth grader on the outside.
As marketers, we have no control over people’s social media consumption habits.
We do have some control over how they feel after interacting with our content, especially if we are chasing them with retargeting.
Attracting attention and cultivating a trusting relationship with your followers in ways that consistently make people feel healthier and happier is the key to long-term brand health.
This is no small task.
And that’s fine because small tasks are not the work of leaders and change makers.
Speaking of no small tasks and change makers, my favorite example of all of the above is not from a company, it’s from NASA.
They are doing a fantastic job engaging Mars fans with the current Perseverance Rover and Ingenuity Helicopter mission. They are looking at the long game with a creative, engaging campaign that invites you to register to send your name to Mars in 2026, complete with boarding pass and frequent flier miles. #brilliant.
The research shows us that when brands attract people based on positive values, and engage with them by triggering positive emotions, they begin to trust you. Your churn goes down, you attract higher quality follower friends, and lifetime customer value goes up.
Many brands are experimenting with NFTs and tokens to reward loyal fans and attract new followers. They are able to establish a direct relationship with customers, rather than relying on social media.
Done correctly, you’ve now got a thriving following of buddies for life.
Thanks for reading! If you got value from this, please follow me and join us over at Impactoverse.com. Thank you!
