How to generate Emotional Appeal

Emotions are loudspeakers of experiences, thoughts, culture, perceptions, environment and disposition, and they work to amplify all these through a ‘remembered’ association of feelings. An emotion may arise from an action (like a good joke that leads to laughter, giving joy as its consequence), a memory (the feeling of sadness when you think of the recent death of someone dear), cultural orientation (eating dog-meat is repulsive in most cultures, but considered delectable in a few), thoughts (just the thought of meeting your loved ones would bring joy), environment (one may feel sad by listening to melancholic music) and disposition (a person with an unhappy disposition will feel unhappy even without reason).

Emotions generate feelings - deep-rooted physiological and psychological sensations that help relate, adapt or cope with any situation. They could be conscious or sub-conscious but emotions are essential in managing our personal outlook of situations, inducing social behavior. They also help by grading communication into distinct expressions which can be understood easily (like a smile, frown, aggression, amusement, or the common ‘meeting-room’ expression, boredom).

To explain how to use Emotion in the context of a brand we use a generalization that will attempt to combine emotional responses into three basics which arouse positive appeal. Though it is commonly (and simplistically) assumed that the use of Emotional Appeal implies communicating using emotions like fear, joy, happiness, sadness, shame among others. This is the use of emotions in communications, not generating Emotional Appeal. Generating Emotional Appeal requires using three basics, Positivity, Emotional Maturity and Hope, that are most likely to lead to positive reactions in the audiences.

(extract from the forthcoming book Decoding Communication)