Using emotion in content marketing
With great power comes great responsibility, and any marketer worth their salt knows how to use emotional and behavioural levers to inspire an action. Doesn't mean they should.
In 2018 I traipsed around Japan and somehow came back with a great example of genius marketing that should never, ever be used.
I spied a Purikura machine, which is like a photo booth on steroids, during one of my trips to the arcade.
It's where (typically) teenage girls will go in and take photos with their pals, and digitally alter them to give themselves kawaii eyes and otherwise make themselves look pretty.
It's basically a real-life photoshop.
So, curious, I decided to go in and get a new cultural perspective. Also, make myself look pretty.
But it's what happened next which really made me respect the marketing insight behind these machines, and also recoil in horror about how the insight was being used.
To get a digital copy of the photos, I needed to give the company behind the booth my email.
That's when it got weird.
Creating and cultivating an audience with emotional levers
The first email was innocuous enough.
It was basically just a jumble of Japanese with social links and a copy of my photos.
But then a couple of days later I got an email, while still in Japanese, was pretty clearly intended for a Japanese schoolgirl -- selling them all kinds of cosmetics.
One has to admire the marketing insight here, but wither at its intent.
The company behind the machine has created the ripest of audiences for cosmetic sales -- teenage girls who go into Purikura machines in order to digitally alter their appearance.
Think of the Purikura machine as a piece of owned media content.
The company behind the machine knows that by creating and presenting this content where the audience hangs out (in this case the Joypolis arcade), they can help cultivate an audience with a particular emotional frequency.
Here is an audience which is inherently insecure and nervous about their looks and open to messaging about products which promise to "improve" their appearance.
The brand then follows up with a solution to the user's state of emotional distress (which they play a part in creating in the first instance).
It's deeply, deeply problematic -- but it's a great example of the role of content in creating an audience receptive to a potential solution to their problems.
Going beyond the dataset
The Purikura machine is a great example of the psychology at play during a great content marketing campaign.
Traditionally, marketers have relied on the audiences that other sources of media have cultivated to spread their message.
Nowadays, marketers have access to data insights from social platforms about what a user has engaged with.
But increasingly, marketers are realising that having raw datasets on demographics and interests isn't enough -- the ability to map a potential customer's emotional resonance is what they're after.
Facebook has been onto this for a long time, for example, creating a log of user emotional states according to the posts they put up.
Again, this is marketing insight which has been applied in a pretty messed up way -- but it's the why which is interesting to a content marketer.
It turns out that hitting an emotional resonance is a great way to not only build brand affinity, but break down consumer defences to messaging.
But knowing which emotional levers to pull and when to pull them is the work of skilled content marketers and should only be used sparingly.
Because doing it poorly can lead to a tremendous amount of backlash.
We break into this football game to present you CHILDREN DYING
In 2015 US insurer Nationwide allegedly wanted to start a conversation about preventable deaths of children in the home.
It teamed up with an advertising agency to create a piece of emotionally charged creative, which was super-effective in getting people to think about the problem. It's a great piece.
The only issue was that they chose to run it at half-time during the Superbowl.
Turns out that people weren't exactly pleased to have their annual celebration of football interrupted by an ad about children dying.
According to data from Amobee Brand Intelligence, 64% of the more than 238,000 public social media mentions about Nationwide on Sunday were negative.
Nationwide said the point of the ad wasn't to sell insurance, and that may be true, but it did run with Nationwide branding attached and the following voiceover.
"At Nationwide, we believe in protecting what matters most. Your kids."
If the point was to merely 'start a conversation' and not realise a brand benefit, there would be no mention of Nationwide at all.
The point is that marketers have realised the enormous power of pulling an emotional lever to connect with an audience beyond demographics and interest profile.
Whether it's cosmetics or insurance companies, brands have realised the enormous potential of creating owned content with emotional cut-through.
But it requires skilled communicators to not only create the content but assess the emotional context to make sure it's not the worst of marketing.