Do you have a favorite commercial that puts a smile on your face or draws a tear to your eye every time you watch it? One of my favorites is the recent T-Mobile commercial with the moms sitting poolside regretting their Spring Break ’99 tattoos. A classical favorite is the Coca-Cola commercial where Mean Joe Green gives the boy a Coke in the stadium tunnel.
These commercials are memorable and effective because they evoke emotion, which leads to a connection to the brand. On average, 50 percent of buying decisions are driven by emotion.
Yesterday, Promotional Consultant Today shared four ways to create emotion through your marketing and creative efforts, as identified by brand experts Sam Swisher and Trevor Shepard, who have worked on well-known brands such as Sonic Drive-In. Today, we share four more elements to drive an emotional connection.
1. Color. Choosing the right colors for your brand and your campaign can be challenging. You need to choose a color that conveys the emotion you want, and then use it effectively so that, figuratively, it leaves a mark on the audience.
The first point to consider is whether the brand owns a color. If it does, that factors into every color decision. UPS’s color is brown. McDonald’s, Netflix and CNN lean on red. BP and Whole Foods are associated with green. In every case, the choice of color is driven in part by the quality the brand or product wishes to convey. Colors evoke their own emotions: yellow is warm, red is exciting and green is associated with calm and healthy. Some brands have deliberately chosen a multi-colored palette to communicate diversity, such as Google and NBC.
2. Look And Lighting. Advertisers love their products, and in many cases when creating video, their initial preference is to shoot a product in a practical application. But in today’s world, the look of a product is a multi-faceted consideration. The evolution of technology and computer graphics allows us to create images of a product that can be optimized for multiple types of viewing and screens. When creating these kinds of graphics, consider if you want your product to be photo-real (realistic), hyper-real (emphasizing certain things) or surreal (abstract). When done correctly, the creative work is really about the emotion it creates, not as much about the product. Often, showing the actual product becomes unnecessary.
3. Location, Environment and Dress. This is important in setting the tone and realistic nature of your product videos. As Malcolm Gladwell discusses in Blink, human beings absorb information in micro-second bursts and deduce enormous insight from fragments of evidence. This makes the choices of location, environment and dress crucial.
Of course, much of this is driven by the demographics of the audience you are trying to reach. It needs to be authentic to that audience. Swisher and Shepard use the example of creating a car commercial. If the commercial shows palm trees, drivers in cold weather climates will worry about the car’s performance in snow and ice. Incorporate a high-rise building, and the rural viewer will immediately begin to disassociate.
Dress is also important, and it’s not necessarily the dress or attire of a user of the product, but the way the product is packaged and represented in the creative work. If the video looks too “stylized,” for example, it may not seem authentic. You need to show the usefulness of the product and how it fits with the user’s lifestyle.
4. Typography. Finally, the last brand element of the emotion equation is the typography represented in your brand. What type says about your product can impact an audience for a long time. Why? Because, type has its own personality. Your type font should reflect the characteristics of the product you want to accentuate, but you should not deviate from your standard font.
When building an emotional tie to your product, be sure to think strategically about these eight elements to drive audience connection and loyalty.
Source: Sam Swisher and Trevor Shepard are founders of Woodshop-The Product Specialists.
