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    Emoti-coms: A marketing guide to communicating through emotions
    Emoti-coms: A marketing guide to communicating through emotions
    Emoti-coms: A marketing guide to communicating through emotions
    Ebook185 pages3 hours

    Emoti-coms: A marketing guide to communicating through emotions

    By Xavier Quattrocchi-Oubradous and Charles Bal

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    About this ebook

    Marketing is broken. Everyday, consumers are bombarded with thousands of commercial messages, and they have become increasingly adept at screening out or instantly forgetting them. The advertising quest for eyeballs is floundering and research and developments in technology suggest that reaching people will only get increasingly difficult with time.
    Meanwhile, exciting breakthroughs in neuroscience and psychology have given us greater insights into human emotions than ever before. And important findings suggest that marketing communication - and consumers - can benefit from this.
    Companies that change their promotional efforts to focus on emotional engagement with their would-be customers can convey values and benefits more accurately, be more persuasive, gain better memorisation, have their marketing go viral with greater speed, and ensure they get the best possible returns from product placement and celebrity endorsement.
    A share of heart, not a split-second of attention, must now be the goal of all marketers.
    Emoti-coms is the revolutionary guide to this new approach. Lucidly covering the theoretical groundwork and introducing actionable ideas, hints and tips for your own emotion-based campaigns, it also addresses the ethical dimension of thisa new and powerful way of getting your message out to the world.
    A fascinating and provocative read for all marketing and communications professionals.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarriman House
    Release dateApr 1, 2011
    ISBN9780857191274
    Emoti-coms: A marketing guide to communicating through emotions
    Author

    Xavier Quattrocchi-Oubradous

    Xavier Quattrocchi-Oubradous is an artist-turned-investment-banker-turned-media-entrepreneur. After many years of cello practice, trying unsuccessfully to emulate his family roots, he graduated in management at Dauphine University, Paris and in political sciences at Sciences Po, Paris. His business career started with financing industrial projects at investment banks Calyon and GE Capital. He then launched a series of businesses in the marketing and communications industry - including QobliQ, a multinational group offering digital, sponsorship, corporate social responsibility (CSR), social media and experiential marketing services. He has published several articles in Admap. Dr Charles Bal was research manager and is now head of brandRapport France, a sponsorship and associative marketing consultancy owned by QobliQ Group. He has developed a new family of sponsorship measurements that take into account the highly emotional nature of sponsorship. As part of a cotutelle agreement between the University of Paris-1 Pantheon Sorbonne (France) and the University of Adelaide (Australia), in 2010 Charles completed a PhD examining the role played by emotions in the sponsorship persuasion process. He has already presented his results at marketing conferences in Europe and Asia-Pacific, and has published his work in several international reviews (Journal of Sponsorship, Asia-Pacific Journal of Marketing & Logistics, Admap).

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      Book preview

      Emoti-coms - Xavier Quattrocchi-Oubradous

      Publishing Details

      HARRIMAN HOUSE LTD

      3A Penns Road

      Petersfield

      Hampshire

      GU32 2EW

      GREAT BRITAIN

      Tel: +44 (0)1730 233870

      Fax: +44 (0)1730 233880

      Email: enquiries@harriman-house.com

      Website: www.harriman-house.com

      First published in Great Britain in 2011

      Copyright © Harriman House Ltd

      The right of Xavier Quattrocchi-Oubradous and Charles Bal to be identified as the Authors has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

      ISBN: 978-0-85719-127-4

      British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

      A CIP catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library.

      All rights reserved; no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior written permission of the Publisher. This book may not be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise disposed of by way of trade in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, without the prior written consent of the Publisher.

      No responsibility for loss occasioned to any person or corporate body acting or refraining to act as a result of reading material in this book can be accepted by the Publisher, by the Authors, or by the employer(s) of the Authors.

      About the Authors

      Xavier Quattrocchi-Oubradous is an artist-turned-investment-banker-turned-media-entrepreneur. After many years of cello practice, trying unsuccessfully to emulate his family roots, he graduated in management at Dauphine University, Paris and in political sciences at Sciences Po, Paris. His business career started with financing industrial projects at investment banks Calyon and GE Capital. He then launched a series of businesses in the marketing and communications industry – including QobliQ, a multinational group offering digital, sponsorship, corporate social responsibility (CSR), social media and experiential marketing services. He has published several articles in Admap.

      Dr Charles Bal was research manager and is now head of brandRapport France, a sponsorship and associative marketing consultancy owned by QobliQ Group. He has developed a new family of sponsorship measurements that take into account the highly emotional nature of sponsorship. As part of a cotutelle agreement between the University of Paris-1 Panthéon Sorbonne (France) and the University of Adelaide (Australia), in 2010 Charles completed a PhD examining the role played by emotions in the sponsorship persuasion process. He has already presented his results at marketing conferences in Europe and Asia-Pacific, and has published his work in several international reviews (Journal of Sponsorship, Asia-Pacific Journal of Marketing & Logistics, Admap).

      Preface

      Music is the shorthand of emotion.

      – Leo N. Tolstoy

      A Note on Emotional Communication

      This book makes a number of cross-references to music, which may seem strange as we are dealing with business, marketing and communication.

      The first reason for these references is that it is somewhat difficult to talk about emotions in the abstract. Our vocabulary is inadequate for explaining what happens when emotional messages reach our brains, and how we react to these stimuli, as the emotional phenomenon is extremely complex and sometimes counterintuitive. When words are missing, it is often useful to use benchmarks, and the authors’ choice has been music.

      Why did we choose music?

      Like emotions, music has the feeling of a wordless language, almost as complex as spoken or written languages, but communicating with us directly, without filter or barrier, and without the necessary treatment of words and syntax. Music does have a grammar, but you do not need to know it in order to listen to it or be deeply affected by it. As Victor Hugo said, music expresses that which cannot be put into words and cannot remain silent.

      That is the reason why the effect of Bach’s toccata in D minor is almost immediate on most of us – provoking a flow of thoughts, questions, images; changing our mood, displacing our thoughts, bringing forth a range of new feelings. The first three notes of the toccata, coming out of the organ’s pipes, are designed to grab our attention in an instant, divert all of our brain functions towards our ears (or rather towards the vibrations coming through our ears), focus and be ready for the later developments. They are comparable to the first three notes of Beethoven’s fifth symphony in the energy, power and excitement they convey. The muezzin’s adhan (call to prayer) is equally striking. It is difficult to imagine faster ways to generate emotions, apart from fight-or-flight situations.

      This is typically what our business readers need to do every day, all day long: grab the attention of their audience to convey a message. This is what music does. And it is what emotionally focused marketing will help us to do more effectively than ever before.

      Why music is more relevant than vision in our argument

      Visual creations were of course also designed for the purpose of promoting faith or other messages. The Mayan or Egyptian pyramids, Greek or Khmer temples, the Taj Mahal, the Blue Mosque, or even the sorcerer’s body paintings and other outlandish attributes are designed to help people apprehend some sense of the divine – by showing them something at the limits of what their brain can believe, something almost unfathomable.

      Why do we love to be deceived?

      What is the common factor between a bestselling novel, a great movie, a hilarious joke, a jaw-dropping presentation and an illusion? For American cognitive neuroscientist Al Seckel, the common denominator is simple.

      They all violate our expectations in some sort of pleasing way.

      Human beings have a natural tendency to anticipate what is going to happen, and to form expectations about their near future. In some cases, a violation of their expectations is perceived negatively because of disruptions it brings to their life. But on the other hand, when the situation is not critical and the trick is clever, an unexpected twist can be a joyful experience.

      This is precisely what happens when we are exposed to an illusion. Irrespective of our age, social background or experiences, there is always something fascinating in being confronted with a visual representation that literally tricks our brains; an image, for instance, that fools the most primal of our senses, making us see a circle when it is actually a square, or a moving 3D shape when the reality is a fixed 2D drawing.

      What Al Seckel’s work teaches us is that not only are we easily fooled, but we somehow like it. Our brains usually ‘produce’ positive emotions when we partake of these illusions. We enjoy being willingly deceived. However, the main difference between visual messages and music, and the reason why music is a more helpful analogy for discussing emotions, is that it too deals with less direct, objective, measurable experiences. We have difficulty in explaining why we are touched by sonorous harmonies – but we can easily describe how impressed we are by the height of a cathedral in comparison to our human body size, or the pleasing colourful effect of sunlight through stained glass. Our brains can deconstruct, rationalise and explain the complexity of the visual message – especially as the brain capacity in processing visual messages is highly developed.

      Conversely, harmonic sounds and rhythm resonate directly with the brain, since the equivalent of the treatment of eye-sourced information by the visual cortex is almost nonexistent in hearing. [¹] Music has a more direct and straightforward impact on our brains. This means the musical effect is much closer to the influence of emotions in the brain than vision.

      Why music is more relevant than odours

      Deeply nested in our evolutionary roots, thus wired even more deeply and more directly than hearing and sight into our brain, smell is probably the only other sense that is a reasonably close parallel for the operation of emotions. Like emotions, smells are instantly and effortlessly provocative. A famous example is given by French novelist Marcel Proust, who described how the simple act of smelling his mother’s cake brought back a veritable flood of memories.

      However, there is no form of smell-based emotional creation, apart from food and drink, that can strictly be considered a form of art, a method of communication. Smell is more related to pure survival – detecting enemies and inedible food in the infancy of mankind as a species – and this is why there is no art related to that sense. In the context of marketing and communication, smell is almost impossible to use as a channel or raw material, despite some unsuccessful past attempts, and the classic of the artificial – and so delicious – croissant smell pumped out from some bakeries. This is why it would have been difficult to use the smell sense to explain how important emotions convey messages to audiences.

      Music-related brain circuitry is of business interest

      Music at Mass or other religious gatherings can be compared to background music in shops, aimed at creating a sense of wellbeing for the public and enabling higher buy-out levels. Environmental psychologists Mehrabian and Russell’s (1974) research shows that individuals respond emotionally to background music, which creates an approach-avoidance behaviour favourable to mental or financial buy-out; a technique used in bars, restaurants and retail shops to increase consumption.

      A series of studies run by North, Hargreaves and McKendrick (1997, 1998 and 1999) have shown how important music can be for business. For instance, they demonstrated that music could influence customers’ perception of a store or a bar; that in-store music could prolong customers’ visits and increase staff productivity. In a very interesting experiment (see the boxout ‘Listening is drinking’), they even showed that music could directly influence customer choice.

      Listening is drinking

      In 1999 research was undertaken to investigate whether stereotypical French and German music could influence the selection of French and German wines. Over a two-week period, French and German music was played on alternate days at an in-store display of evenly priced wines.

      Results show that French music led to French wines outselling German wines 3:1 and the German music led to the German wines outselling the French wines 2:1. And when customers were questioned leaving the store, they were unaware of any effects and denied having been influenced by any music!

      Source: North A.C., Hargreaves D.J., and McKendrick J. (1999). ‘The influence of in-store music on wine selections’, Journal of Applied Psychology, 84, 271-276.

      All this, we feel, justifies our choice of music as a benchmark for the difficult exercise of explaining how emotions reach our brains.

      The techniques used by any marketing communicator will try to emulate how powerful music is in penetrating something deep into the audience’s brain – not to say ‘heart’, being a deeper part of the brain – which is ultimately where a message should reach.

      Endnote

      1 See: www.miqel.com/jazz_music_heart/vibrational-truth.html. [return to text]

      Introduction

      Here is my secret. It is very simple: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

      – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

      Reversing the Eyeball-to-Eyewall Trend

      A famous if controversial study from American psychologist Albert Mehrabian, published in 1967, concluded on the supremacy of non-verbal communication cues over verbal and vocal ones. [²]

      According to him, spoken words, voice tone and facial expressions respectively contribute 7%, 38% and 55% to the understanding of someone’s communication. Put differently, words alone often lack the substance and the subtlety that enable the understanding of a spoken message.

      This is why most of us needing to seriously engage another person, for business or personal purposes, would do so (in decreasing preference) by:

      meeting in person

      video conference

      phone call

      email, SMS, instant chat, fax or mail

      and more and more rarely, telegraph or smoke signals.

      In this time of mass communications and increasingly powerful communication tools, there is something highly ironic in the fact that most

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