Sweet Emotion
Effectiveness experts Les Binet and Peter Field are very British and very smart. They analyze decades of data from the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) databank, then they write their conclusions in books.
Their most famous effort, The Long and the Short of It, was the result of analyzing data from nearly 1,000 advertising campaigns. In it, the authors concluded that companies must balance long-term brand building with short term sales activation.
They recommend a 60/40 split in ads: 60 percent geared towards brand building, 40 percent aimed at sales activation. Occasionally, a business should run ads to make immediate sales, but the majority of any company's ads should focus on building the company's brand.
This is revolutionary, because most businesses run 100 percent of their ads in order to make sales today. Les Binet and Peter Field say that advertising only to make immediate sales hurts a company's long-term growth and profitability.
So what approach builds a brand and makes for the most profitable advertising? Binet and Field say the data surprised them.
“Peter and I were both at BMP… and we’d both been trained to think that great advertising took a rational message and put it in an emotional envelope. So the key to powerful advertising was to find a motivating message and then tell that story in an engaging and emotive way,” Binet said.
“So when we examined the data, what we expected to find was that the killer combination was emotional and rational together. But when we looked at [it], that is not what we found. What we found was actually quite different. We found that the more you moved away from rational messages to pure emotion, the more effective advertising was.” 1Revolutionary!
We like to think we are rational creatures, and sometimes we are, but most buying decisions are emotional. We buy the items we buy, from the companies we buy from, based on emotion.
The product makes us feel happy or important or powerful or successful or secure. We buy from companies because we feel an attachment to the owner and the staff and what the company stands for and how they do business.
We do not buy based on facts. Or logic. Or rationality.
We buy based on emotion. And the more a company uses emotion in advertising, the stronger the attachment becomes to the company, and the more effective the advertising becomes at making sales.
Binet and Field say 60 percent of a company's messages should be aimed at building the brand, and they say that's done best through emotion. Not emotion plus reason. Just pure emotion.
They're quick to point out this does not mean that ads have to make people cry, though that's okay, too. It could mean charming people.
There's a whole range of emotions we humans feel, all of which are powerful. A business that taps into these emotions in creating and spreading its brand can powerfully draw people to that brand. That leads to sales.
Then, amid this brand-building, a business should occasionally drop in an ad aimed at making immediate sales. But this works most effectively after people have been drawn to the company's image.
Ads that are full of nothing but facts and unsubstantiated claims fall on deaf ears. People are not looking for an education, and they don't like to be sold to. When a company's ads are perpetually facts, figures and assertions, those ads don’t create sales.
But ads aimed at the heart—ads that are pure emotion—reach people's hearts and stay there, making it far more likely that they move people to spend money.
“We found that the more you moved away from rational messages to pure emotion, the more effective advertising was.”
To move people to buy, aim for the heart, not the head.
1. The Long and the Short of It, Les Binet & Peter Field
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