Sorry Spock, Emotions Drive Business

Proving the Value of Creative Ideas With Science

Adam W. Morgan

• Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781642790726
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Marketing

Sorry Spock, Emotions Drive Business presents scientific proof that creative advertising is better for the bottom line.

Adam Morgan, a Senior Creative Director at Adobe, gives both creatives and marketers the ammo to prove the value of creativity to stakeholders. For decades, marketers have battled over the value of creative ideas. Some believe creativity adds more impact, others believe it's just window dressing. With data-driven marketing, the divide is only increasing. Today, more than ever, creative professionals need a concrete answer to the question, "Do creative ideas work better?"

Fortunately, science has finally caught up. There is an answer that isn't based on subjective case studies. More than that, Adam shows how emotional ideas create experiences that are more effective and reveals why creativity is actually less risky for business. Sorry Spock, Emotions Drive Business shows readers how they can create the ideal experiences to improve their bottom line.

ACT III—

PUTTING IT ALL INTO PRACTICE

Chapter 10

INSIGHT INTO THE STANDARD MARKETING PITCH

As we explore whole-brain marketing and how we make decisions, it helps to have a sense of what marketing experts have been pitching over the past decade. At least how they have connected creative ideas with improving the bottom line.

These are the same thoughts I shared with Russell when he asked if our billboard ideas would work. As marketers, we experience enough campaigns over the years and we start to understand how messages and audiences are connected. We get a sense for certain messages that will resonate, and we recognize those that won’t. This is the marketing gut.

After we go through the basic pitch, we’ll look at it again with a neuroscience perspective. That way, we aren’t just basing it on experience, but showing how science explains it all.

Here’s the basic pitch that I’ve experienced from a number of agencies, marketing departments, and creative boutiques.

We’ll go through this quickly so you get the backstory on how this has been presented. It starts by describing all the millions of messages that bombard consumers every day. The sheer number of media choices given to consumers is enormous, with endless photos, ads, videos, texts, emails, billboards, and apps. People’s brains should be overloaded before they finish breakfast. Except they’ve learned to block most of them.

And the only way to break through all that clutter and get noticed is with an emotional idea. It can be expressed in a few words, in an image, in a story—as long as it is told in a way that pulls on an emotion with the audience. That emotion can be comedy, inspiration, sorrow, or appreciation. The level of stand-out power depends on the amount of emotion. Something that is really emotionally charged will have more impact than something with a flutter of emotion.

The reason you need an emotional idea is because it causes more participation from the audience. Emotions draw people into the conversation. They react to the image or story. When they feel an emotion, they feel more connected. When we create ideas that require a little bit of participation from the audience, this creates an experience. Noticing an ad is one thing. Experiencing it is so much better.

We call this experience with your brand being “sticky.” Which means the idea lasts longer in their mind. When your audience participates in the experience, their engagement level goes up. The more they are engaged, the stickier the experience becomes. Creative ideas create these moments of deeper engagement.

This sticky factor is important to the success of a piece of communication because it gives it a greater chance of being liked. When consumers have a positive experience and feel engaged, they create positive memories of the experience. These positive experiences over time create brand preference, which is another way of saying your customers like your brand.

Finally, people who have positive experiences with a brand become more loyal and are willing to pay more for that experience again. Brands are built on positive feelings over many experiences. And if you can consistently keep the positive experiences coming, your customers will remain loyal to your brand.

In short, a creative idea creates a chain reaction that eventually turns into brand loyalty. Here’s a quick summary:

A creative idea stands out with an emotional charge that leads to audience participation that leads to greater stickiness that creates a positive experience that leads to greater likability that leads to repeat purchase and finally brand loyalty.

That’s the basic pitch behind the value of a creative idea. At least, these are the reasons marketing experts have used over the years to explain why creative ideas work better.

If you break it down, these steps in the process are basically the secret sauce behind a large part of advertising agency proprietary approaches. Check several agency websites and you’ll find a short narrative that explains their unique approach. They just all focus their narrative on a different part of this basic pitch.

Perhaps it’s, “We create engagement.” Or, “We are storytellers.” Another may claim, “We create culture.” Many others simply state that they put your customer at the center, or they’re influencers, or builders of loyalty. Really what all these companies are claiming is that they understand this basic process. They know how to connect with people through emotional experiences and create a lasting connection.

Now, let’s go through each step of that same pitch, not based on gut experience, but based on the neuroscience I’ve presented in this book. We’ll look at it from a logical perspective on how the brain works and explain all these marketing buzzwords with science.

Getting noticed, with neuroscience.

As consumers, we’re bombarded with millions of messages every day. Just scanning one page of search results or a long list of news stories can overwhelm the conscious mind. To avoid decision paralysis, our brains use a trick that’s been hardwired into our system for ages. We use our subconscious skills of anomaly detection.

Our fast system is the first to kick in. It can quickly process more data than our slow logical system. It’s the first to know if the idea is novel such as an anomaly or just another repeated view of our surroundings.

As our eyes or other senses flood our brains with an endless stream of inputs and stimulus, our fast brain efficiently processes and anticipates all that data, and only retains the most interesting data points. The rest are passed over in order to retain storage space. This isn’t hard. Our brains do this every second of life, whether we’re looking at media or not.

When we hear the stories of how we are being inundated with thousands of marketing messages, this is old news to our brains. This is the part of the pitch that we’ve had wrong over the years. The ever-increasing number of messages isn’t the problem. Bring it. Our subconscious can handle millions of data points flooding in.

We’ve heard of studies where we only have five seconds to get a consumer’s attention, or ten seconds on a web page, or that we give an average of seven eye flicks to each message. Whether that real number is a second or two-tenths of a second, it doesn’t matter. A blink is plenty of time for our subconscious minds to decide if there is an anomaly and let us know if it’s worth our time to take notice.

I want to pause on this point for emphasis. In the digital economy, we are constantly being told that our content needs to be bite-sized. Short. Fast. But marketers are getting this all wrong. The length or size doesn’t matter. All that matters is if there is an anomaly. Something new or different. Something expressed with an unexpected emotion. I could create a small chunk of content that just gets ignored because it isn’t an anomaly.

When you send a message out to consumers in hopes that they will see it, three possible actions will happen.

First, and this is the worst-case scenario, your message goes completely under their radar. It’s ignored. Your customers see the message, and in a split second, their brains reject the idea. It’s not an anomaly. It’s not worth giving any attention. It becomes wallpaper and they pass it by.

The second option is that the message registers, but only a small part of their brain lights up. This would be a classic straightforward message. Just the facts. In this example, your conscious brain slows down and absorbs the information. Remember, with straight-up logic, our memory can only handle a few variables. And it takes a lot of energy to analyze the data when our slow system is in charge. Which means the chances of our brains spending the minimal amount of energy on the idea is real. In this slow state, we try to hurry up and move along, focusing on other things.

Or perhaps your message remains in the subconscious only. It isn’t a big anomaly, so it dabbles around for a bit and then is logged away. It thinks about the information for a short time, but then moves on. Perhaps it isn’t a big enough deal to notify your executive function. Or if it does, there’s no emotion, so your brain isn’t flooded with neurochemicals. Perhaps the prefrontal cortex gives it a little attention, processes that data point, and then it’s over. Your message got through, but it didn’t make a grand entrance.

This is often the fate of a straightforward, logical idea. It has no emotion, so it only lights up a small part of the brain. Engagement is limited. And it probably doesn’t move on to the next phase of locking in a memory. It’s a flash in the slow-system pan. This is not a response you want from a prospective customer.

The third option is more dramatic. Your idea is noticed because it’s a full-fledged anomaly. It’s an emotional idea, and the brain instantly triggers a burst of neurochemicals. The emotion pulls from a variety of experiences as your subconscious quickly relates the new emotion to the past. Think of our exercise when you read the list of brand names and images and you were instantly filled with past thoughts and emotions. The experience was instantaneous. Much faster than seven eye flicks or even a second.

All of this happens lightning fast as your subconscious raises the flag and alerts your CEO. Your brain is flooded with emotion, causing multiple areas to light up. And when you make a decision to get engaged, your brain continues to be flooded with emotion and electricity. In short, your whole brain is alive and alert.

The difference between these last two options is striking. It’s like standing in the shadows or being on center stage under the flood lights. When a burst of emotion is present in the brain, your message is on fire.

So really, the story of this first step isn’t so much that we are flooded with too many messages and we need to stand out from the crowd. It’s that your message needs to be emotional so that your message lights up your customer’s entire brain. The key to making an idea get noticed is emotion. Not just information.

When we look at getting noticed from a neuroscience perspective, the key ingredient is emotional juice. When you present an idea to your audience, you want their brain to fire up like crazy. You need that emotional catalyst. You don’t want to play it safe and just send a logical fact or you risk an efficient brain that will file away your idea too quickly. Sure, it may get through, but it won’t get any fanfare.

Rather, you want that customer to wake up and instantly pay attention. This requires an anomaly and a flood of emotion. Which is another way of describing a standout creative idea.

A creative and emotional idea will break through, not because your brain does a SWAT analysis to break through all the other competing messages. But because the emotional idea immediately shoves out the competition and gets the brain to spend its energy on your message.

Engaging ideas that stick.

Let’s assume your message lit up the whole brain and caught your target’s attention. The next phas...