Tune into your audience’s emotions
As much as we all like to think we’re mostly rational beings, communication experts know that we’re emotional beings first and logical beings second.
Evoking emotion is key to communicating for change. There’s no doubting the importance of logic, but it’s emotion that creates a lasting impact, fosters loyalty, and prompts action; in short, it’s what resonates with people and gets them to care.
But if logic is more your cup of tea, the Harvard Business Review points out that ads that elicit above-average emotional responses can lead to a 23% increase in sales, and emotionally connected customers are 52% more valuable to brands.
Emotion, however, is often used to further the agendas of populists and those spreading misinformation or disinformation. There are studies, for example, that show that tapping into emotions before presenting misinformation reduces the ability of audiences to discern what’s real from what’s fake.
And thousands of years ago, Aristotle listed emotion (ethos) as one of the three central elements of persuasion, observing in The Art of Rhetoric that “listeners always sympathise with someone who speaks emotionally even if he is talking nonsense.” Anyone relying on logic alone to counter such “nonsense” is therefore doomed to failure.
At ICF Next, we help our clients leverage emotion as a force for good and positive change. We do this by not only developing integrated communication campaigns, events, and other communication projects with emotion at their heart. We also seek to strike a balance between emotion and logic and measuring emotional resonance before, during, and after campaigns—and appreciating the differences between using emotion in commercial and institutional contexts.
A balancing act
If emotion is what first gets people to care, it’s the combination of emotion and logic that keeps them caring; in other words, we use information to rationalise and justify our feelings. Evoking emotion in audiences plus providing them with researched-backed information and factual content is what gives institutions and others seeking to do good the upper hand against those who can use emotion but have no hard facts to back up their claims.
There are myriad ways to evoke emotion. This can be anything from telling stories and using audiovisual elements effectively, to leveraging authentic user-generated content and engaging in media partnerships. The ratio of emotion to logic to employ throughout a campaign or project depends on the touchpoint in question. Certain touchpoints (e.g., a short video on social media) will call for more emotion in relation to logic, while others (e.g., a factsheet) will necessitate a greater focus on logic.
Our ICF Next team ran the Eyes Open campaign in support of the 2020-2025 EU Strategy on Victims’ Rights, which is a prime example of how to successfully employ emotion and logic. To achieve the campaign’s objectives, we created a host of assets that highlighted the victims of crimes—such as xenophobia, and violence against children—in a jarring and evocative way. The assets also provided telling facts and informed the campaign’s audiences of specific actions to take to support these victims.
Measuring emotion
Despite the importance of emotion (especially in the context of strategic communication), seldom do agencies advise on how to leverage and measure it. Far too often, discussions about the impact of campaigns revolve around metrics like reach and impressions, which say little, if anything, about how people feel.
We go beyond traditional research methods like surveys and focus groups, using artificial intelligence (AI) tools to provide our clients with more accurate measurements. We test creative ideas with well-established methods of conducting social sentiment analyses. Together we’re employing data and our decades of experience in communication consulting to better define key performance indicators and fine-tune our efforts.
Evoke emotion and find your resonance
It’s only by effectively leveraging emotion that institutions—and anyone, for that matter—can communicate in ways that truly resonate with their audiences. Get in touch with us to learn how we can help you use emotion to further drive positive change, increase engagement, and find your resonance.