Every brand which aims to create loyalty is in the emotion business
It is often advised that you shouldn’t go grocery shopping while hungry – science proves that hunger may influence you into purchasing items you wouldn’t add to your shopping cart otherwise. This also signals a larger truth of the human condition: The fact that we may be tricked by our own subconscious to make decisions.
These don’t have to be bad decisions necessarily, but they could be biased. For example we could choose a specific wine over another based on the visual appeal of its packaging, which may have nothing to do with the quality of the product itself. Kids make quick decisions about what toy they want from Santa Claus solely based on how much fun it looks on a TV ad. In fact, that very imagery and the surrounding emotional context is responsible for influencing brand loyalty.
Marketing experts say children can express brand awareness as early as age 2, an awareness encouraged by a world that offers more choices than ever before.
– AdWeek
This plays an important role in the way advertisers communicate with their entire audience, not just children. Brand loyalty mostly develops over time, but in a world of fast moving imagery, 30-second viral wonders and companies blurring the lines of e-commerce and brick-and-mortar, emotional appeal should be a focus for advertisers. As our attention span becomes shorter and shorter, brands have to work harder to build lasting connections and swaying potential customers their way.
Emotions matter because if we did not have them, nothing else would matter.
– Jon Elster
We’ve experienced a rise in videos as the ideal format of choice to generate emotional connections between brands and consumers. While legendary examples like Apple’s 1984 Super Bowl commercial (based on George Orwell’s masterpiece “1984”) showcase the power behind emotional advertising better than most, the choice of video comes naturally as an evolution of the technology that delivers it.
It is undeniable that a video can carry a message like no other format, but even its formula has been challenged by the meteoric rise of social media since its invention. Just like Twitter defined micro-blogging as we know it, no other app pushed video to its shortest form into the mainstream like the now deceased Vine. Suddenly, 30 seconds was enough to make people burst in laughter, generate curiosity, or even make you extremely hungry. Thank you Tasty.
Video is moving so fast, in fact, that many brands and advertising agencies struggle to keep up with demand and often don’t perform market research prior to releasing an ad into the wild. This is hardly their fault, as market research is intricate, costly and more often than not takes a long time to show results.
Even businesses with enough track record can sometimes miss their targets, just because they have no simple way of iterating on their ideas, or continuously test their productions with real people.
Some businesses believe the research to be crucial and consider continual market research a necessity, while others conduct market research only when they start a new business, expand a product, have a product issue or need to introduce a new product to their line.
– Jennifer Moore
My partners and I experienced this closely while working in the media industry for the past decade, most recently at HBO. Our thought is that if video format and its method of delivery is changing, so should the ways in which market research is performed.
We want to empower brand managers and advertisers to test their videos during production. This creates a change in convention where videos are made in iterations and with predictive success.
With this in mind we created RefineAI.
RefineAI is a real-time market research tool for video creators.
Measure the emotional appeal of any video without the need for a lab.
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