Insight, Analytics and the New Marketing
TV’s emotional impact
Posted 2010.03.12
In my previous post I listed some empirical evidence that shows that TV advertising is becoming increasingly effective. One of the reasons is that TV is a superior medium for driving emotional engagement. The role of emotional engagement in driving purchasing behavior has been hotly debated in the last couple of years. This is as a result of advances in neuroscience that have demonstrated that the decisions people make are often a result of what happens in their sub-consciousness. As a result the traditional linear AIDA model, where the role of communications and advertising is to move customers down a linear path from awareness to interest to desire to action by grabbing their attention, has been severely challenged.
Robert Heath has published extensively on this topic and has shown that the role of emotions in the decision making process are very important. In a 2009 Admap article about how TV builds brands he said :”Early advertising models that addressed the role of emotion in advertising reflected the thinking of the time, which was that ‘conscious thinking’ leads to ‘feeling’, which leads to ‘attitude change’, which, in due course, leads to a purchase decision. They were not to know at the time, but they got it seriously wrong. Feelings and emotions are processed much more quickly than thoughts.” Heath has used brain scanning technology to show that we usually make decisions up to 1/5th of a second before we are aware of them. He says that “we always form an attitude about a decision through emotional and subconscious rational processing before we start to consciously and actively ‘think’ about it. So our conscious thinking tends either to support the decision or counter argue it. There is empirical evidence […] showing that the presence of brands inhibits processing of product attributes and encourages consumers to use shortcut to validate their brand choices.” This is illustrated in the diagram below.
If people use brands as subconscious short cuts, then brands need to be built through communicating at the subconscious level.
This is where TV is especially powerful. Contrary to other media such as print that require conscious processing of information (ie reading), TV more than any other medium can work at the subconscious level by evoking feelings through the uses of visuals and sound. This is why TV is such a powerful medium for creating brands. It does this through emotional communication. And Binet and Field have demonstrated, in the study of the IPA databank I mentioned in my previous post, that emotional campaigns consistently outperform rational campaigns in terms of driving sales, share, price elasticity, loyalty and penetration.
Would a rational / thinking personality type, say an INTJ, still respond better to emotional advertising? I would be interested to see a breakdown by Myers-Briggs types. Traditional brand-oriented consumers do tend to be more feeling oriented by nature it seems…
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by dimitrimaex: TV’s impact on the subconscious – thedoublethink : http://thedoublethink.com/2010/03/tvs-emotional-impact/...
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