Maybe it’s a direct response ad, or a call-to-action on a landing page, or maybe some microcopy in an app - we have little choice but to be directive with our message. We wouldn’t be wrong, after all it’s the rational thing to do in the given circumstances.

And here’s the problem with this - rational, fact-based, communication rarely changes minds. In fact it does the opposite: when people encounter evidence that should cause them to doubt their beliefs, they often reject this evidence, and strengthen their support for their original stance. This occurs due to a cognitive bias known as the backfire effect (belief perseverance).

Our messages therefore will only act as reminders for people who would have done what we prompt them to do anyway, with little chance to change any other minds. This is the reason for low effectiveness for most commercial communication.

Is there a better way? A way to communicate without pointing out the expected behavior (being directive) or reality (informational), and without being rational about our arguments? Madness! Here’s the method for it:

First off, every single human behavior is a response to a specific emotion. Violence is generated by anger, care by love, curiosity by anticipation, etc. This means that the specific behavior we seek to motivate our audience to take has a specific emotion behind it.

Words are magic, try this - think of a happy memory - you will feel happy. Think of a potential danger, you will feel apprehensive.

Let’s put it all together: in order to generate the behavioral response we seek, we need to trigger the specific emotion associated with it.

Take the airplane example - the behavior we seek is for our audience to stay put.

Enjoyment is a pleasant emotion that deactivates us, keeping us in the situation where we get enjoyment. So this is one emotion that once triggered, will deactivate people and they will keep themselves put. No need for us to tell them what to do.

How we generate that emotion? It could be direct, by putting a cat in everyones’ lap, but the logistics would be a nightmare. Instead it is sufficient to deliver a stimulus that carries the memory of an enjoyable experience. What was your reaction when you saw the cartoon with the cats in the airplane first? I bet you were amused, which turns out that is a form of enjoyment.

And this is the reason why the internet is full of cats, because the visual stimulus evokes enjoyment (amusement) and keeps eyeballs stuck on the displays.

To wrap things up, persuasive messages deliver only the necessary stimuli, leaving our brains to do the rest of the job, automatically, by feeling the right emotion and acting as that emotion motivates us to do, which is aligned with the desired behavior you want to motivate your audience to take.

Our experience is in line with the research in this field, where emotional messages are proved time and again to outperform rational messages by far.

The IPA (the UK-based Institute of Practitioners in Advertising) dataBANK contains 1400 case studies of successful advertising campaigns submitted for the IPA Effectiveness Award competition over the last three decades.A particular analysis of the IPA data compared the profitability boost of campaigns which relied primarily on emotional appeal vs. those which used rational persuasion and information.Campaigns with emotional content performed about twice as well (31% vs. 16%) than those with only rational content.

However, a clear recipe for creating emotional messages did not exist until now. If you want to try it for yourself, get in touch and let’s work on your most persuasive messages.