An advertising executive recently asked me if I saw his company’s new TV ad on a recent episode of The Office on NBC. I said, “yes, but unfortunately I watched it at 200 miles per hour.”
Nobody at the table laughed.
Real marketing opportunities, where you have someone’s attention, are getting harder and harder to come by. You’d better off a high “return on attention” or you’ll get TIVO’d out of the mix (even if you are just selling or trying to market a project in-house). Attention is at an all time low.
Marketing has changed and now the trick is to jump out of the noise and its filter to elicit an emotional response. The key to any marketing today is the “emotional content” in the campaign, ad or device.
Everyone has to market (you market yourself, your products, your business) and so everyone should begin to check off one thing on ALL their offerings: Is this marketing charged with emotions?
If you don’t connect at the emotional level, you will be an also ran. Too many people obsess with connecting at a practical or logical level — and wonder why they still lose business. There is still a place for practical value, its part of the equation, but it is not enough to sell through and create demand.
The next time you are part of ANY persuasion situation (working on a ad, a sales letter or even an event), inject emotions through storytelling. Ask yourself, who would gain or lose from having or not having this? What is their story? What conflict do I help resolve? (Conflict is an essential ingredient to any story.) Nominate someone on your project team to be in charge of “emotional content”. You may capture the story in words, through a picture or even with a video. If your marketing doesn’t make someone laugh, cry, wonder, be afraid, be inspired or feel mild discomfort — you are not doing it rigiht.
So charge your next pitch with one of the seven basic emotions: Sadness, Anger, Disgust, Fear, Interest, Surprise or Fear.
Recommended Read: Emotional Branding: The new paradigm for connecting brands with people by Mark Gobe, Mark Gob and Sergio Zyman.
