Indulging in Brand Emotion Can Lead to Missing a Creative Trick When Advertising the Feel of a Brand

The great, sacred topic in brand communications is the power of emotion. The good, the great and the intern who’s read about it in Binet & Field & more are all in agreement.

To do truly effective advertising beware rational sales messaging. It can lead to the dullard that fails to connect. It’s no way to build brand for the long term etc. etc.

It’s of course all valid stuff, and what often follows is debate on what kind of emotional advertising is king. Creative agency offerings get built around it; advertising trends and zeitgeists defined by it...

Are we famous for irreverence? Funny stuff? Sexy? Stylish stuff? Melancholic? Meaningful purposeful stuff? Terrifyingly simple stuff? Bonkers character stuff? This alone then defines the personalities of the brands we work with.

It’s an emotional debate about the genre of creative work that’s ‘hot’ and can be a distraction when there’s a job to do, and a cool creative opportunity, to get audiences to feel the specific value of a customer experience.

Some brands have an epic experience that is defined by an emotion that loyal customers rave about.

When they see it and feel it in famous advertising they talk about the brand more, then new audiences listen to the growing buzz more and so the brand grows more and more. Therefore the art of emotional advertising is to develop the ideas that recreate this experience through the feel of the advertising.

When working on Mercedes-Benz many moons ago this is what it was all about...

The brand believed they had the best engineering - the best or nothing - but not enough young people back then felt this would deliver a dynamic, sporty, exhilarating experience. Mercedes felt old and sedate. And so an epic four year journey of emotively driven advertising campaign was unleashed to get people to feel it. The campaign culminated in the advertising experience ‘sound with power’: a sub-focus music track built using the notes of an AMG engine.

When 2050 worked with IONOS we saw that no one was talking about customer service in their advertising. When we looked closer at the lived strength of the brand experience and how small enterprises felt the experience of getting domains, websites and hosting would be daunting and complex. We realised that the promises of business growth wasn’t the emotional lever to pull on in a sexy, stylish aspirational way or other. It was the promise of getting this sorted with Germanic efficiency, and so we set out to get people to feel this through the experience of the advertising in ‘Aunt Helga’: A germanic tech whizz ready to sort your problems.

The power of emotion is well known, and well understood, but what’s sometimes missed is empathy for the customer experience and the positively bonkers opportunity to re-create the feel of this in the advertising. So don’t get emotional about what you creatively prefer...

...the trick is channelling the one the customer loves.