Aristotle said it first; neuroscience confirms it. To be persuasive, communications (and what is marketing but a sophisticated set of communications based on powerful ideas) must function on both the emotional and rational level. In fact, unless a message affects your customer emotionally, there is no way he or she can make a purchase decision. This is true no matter what you are selling: tractors, mutual funds, auto parts, medical devices, soda or cosmetics.
Marketers and advertisers know this in their bones. Yet, clients tell us all the time that it is difficult to build emotional connections with customers and potential customers.
- It’s difficult because people have a hard time talking about feelings, sometimes because they haven’t stopped long enough to feel them.
- It’s difficult because it’s hard to find tools to help us uncover how people feel about brands vs. how they want to feel.
- It’s difficult because executives tend to – well – feel that emotions are an anathema to effective decision-making. One of our clients, a financial services organization, hired us on the basis of our ability to obtain emotional insights, and then told us that we couldn’t use the word “emotion” at meetings because the organization fundamentally believed that financial decision-making should be a totally rational process. A CPG client told us that they knew they needed emotional insights, but didn’t know how to do that systematically in their organization. A health care organization said, “if a recommendation can’t be presented in a spreadsheet, backed by numbers, our executives ignore it.”
Our mission at Drumcircle is to address these needs. We are a collection of researchers, marketing strategists and creative people who come together to support marketers who are seeking whole-brain insights and ideas. We are not walking away from the hard-core, numbers-driven aspects of marketing; it’s that we build on and enhance that side of the marketing equation.
So we invite you to take a look at this website and the set of tools and techniques that you can use to leverage more emotional/intuitive/right-brain insights that will grow your business. And give us a call, so we can discuss your challenges and see if we can help.
