Emotional advertising tends to produce much bigger effects in the long term

Les Binet posted a YouTube video titled Winning Hearts, Winning Business.

Summary: Sales activation works, but the effect is short-lived. To grow, you need both activation and long-term brand building. Key to building brand is memorability. Key to memorability is emotion.

“Emotions and feelings turn out to be the real keys to long-term success and I’m going to show you why.”

“In our book The Long and the Short of It. We distinguish between two very different kinds of advertising. The first we call sales activation. That’s any kind of marketing communications which were intended to produce an immediate response or a response very soon. I’m talking about promotional advertising. I’m talking about direct response. I’m talking about performance marketing.”

“This stuff is highly efficient, produces great short-term ROIs and produces big sales uplifts. But there’s a problem. The effects don’t last very long. They decay away very quickly. And because they decay away very quickly, they don’t have a chance to build and accumulate and cause growth. So sales activation on its own is not enough to make a brand grow. For that you need something else. “

“And that something else is brand building. Brand advertising isn’t just intended to sell something now, it’s intended to produce a long-term change in how we think and feel about the brand and so produce a long-term change in behavior. That’s a harder job, so the short-term effects of brand advertising are often slightly smaller. But the last longer. And that means that they can accumulate over time and so drive growth. So it turns out that brand building is the main driver of growth and profit in all categories. But in fact you need both. You need brand advertising and you need sales activation working in synergy. But those two require very different ingredients.”

“When you’re doing sales activation, you just want a short-term response, so the ingredients are pretty straight-forward. You need to be tightly targeted on the people most likely to respond, you need to give them relevant information to persuade them to buy now, and you need to make the response easy by providing a direct response mechanism.”

“But for brand building it’s different. You need to think more long term. That requires broader reach because you need to talk to anyone who might buy your product in the next couple of years. You also need to make sure that what you do is memorable so that the ads are still working in people’s minds in a couple of years’ time when they come to buy. And the key to that is to do something that creates an emotional response.”

“Emotional advertising works better for several reasons. First, it gets more attention, even if we’re not currently interested in the product itself. Secondly, it’s easier to process. No need to think, just feel. Thirdly, it’s more memorable. We tend to remember how we felt long after we’ve forgotten why we felt that way. And fourthly, emotions, feelings, and associations play an enormous role in our choices, including our choices of products and services.”

“Emotional advertising tends to produce much bigger effects in the long term, much bigger effects on volume, but crucially, emotional advertising is much better at reducing price sensitivity and so supporting higher margins. And that’s very profitable. In fact, emotional advertising seems to be about twice as profitable as more rational message-based advertising in the long term.”

“And that’s why creativity is so important in the advertising business. Any competent marketer can give people reasons to buy their brand, but moving people, making people feel something about a brand, is far harder. It requires supreme artistry and rare craft skills. But when you get it right the paybacks can be huge. Because emotion is not a luxury or an artistic indulgence. It’s the single most powerful weapon in the marketer’s armory.”

Les Binet and Peter field wrote several books including The Long and The Short of It and Effectiveness in Context: A Manual for Brand Building. Les Binet and Sarah Carter wrote How Not to Plan: 66 Ways to Screw Up