Emotional Appeal : Emotional and Rational Measures

Our media landscape has been transformed with the rise of the ‘machines’, and the growth of digital within the mix. The end result is that the ordinary person has never had so much choice of content available.

With a plethora of data analytics existing to record consumer response to marketing initiatives one would think that we would now have an enhanced understanding of people’s responses to our brands and campaigns.

However, in this ‘wild west’ of digital growth, we must be cognisant that we are marketing to human beings. Despite the growth in technology access, the human brain has not changed, we can only register and process so much at the same speed. If anything the growth of ‘always being online’ has led to less information being digested or more bite-sized nuggets of communications being absorbed, rather than the detail of yore.

So what does the above mean for measuring human reaction to brand and advertising communications? The answer is that we need to delve deeper. Humans are emotional beings, we do not behave rationally, and hence purely rational measures are flawed. As Giep Franzen noted in the book The Mental World of Brands, “whenever the rational and emotional collide, emotions win.”

Delve Deeper into the article as it appeared in the Irish Marketing Journal.