Emotion Trumps Logic in Marketing
Lois Kelly’s very interesting August 5th blog post compares politicians and political persuasion to marketing in how it connects with people (or doesn’t) on an emotional level.
Kelly contends that most CEOs and sales executives, like unsuccessful political candidates, rely on dispassionate logic, overlooking the power of emotions. Yet, she states,
“neuroscientists and psychologists have proven that the more ‘rational’ a message, the less likely it is to trigger the emotional circuits in our brains that activate behavior and decisions.”
I agree wholeheartedly with most of what Kelly writes, as she discusses The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of a Nation by psychologist and political scientist Dr. Drew Western. The one place where we part company is when she says that Republicans and many consumer products marketers are masters at working with the idea that people decide how to act by how they feel about you. Democrats (with the exception of Bill Clinton), business-to-business, and professional services, she asserts, are not.
I wish Republicans were masters at this, and I do think most Republicans have points of view that they’ll stick to and are less swayed by polls and public opinion, but many of them are no better at connecting emotionally with the public than the very stiff Al Gore she so mercilessly skewers for market testing every word of his 2000 presidential campaign:
“Virtually every word that came out of his mouth had been market-tested, using focus groups and hand-dials indicating when listeners liked and didn’t like what he was saying in practice debates. Unfortunately, the more his words seemed market-tested, the less genuine they seemed. And the less genuine he seemed, the less likable.”
Be sure to check out her post. Some of the most interesting points related to emotional marketing include:
“Emotion is one of the most potent sources of motivation that drives human behavior. It is no accident that the words motivation and emotion share the same Latin root, movere, which means to move.”
“The data from political science is crystal clear: people vote for the candidate who elicits the right feelings, not the candidate who presents the best argument.”
The implications for marketing are very clear as well — emotion trumps logic. Or at the very least, it should come first. You can always use the logic later, to justify the emotion. See my May 25th post, Talk to the Brain with Your Marketing.
[tags]emotional marketing, Lois Kelly, political persuasion, Dr. Drew Western, Al Gore, emotional connection[/tags]
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