To Make it Viral, Make it… Emotional!
Babies, poppies or (half) naked ladies are usually considered as a must have for anyone wanting to see a video going viral. Fair enough… but how to explain this? why do we “need” to share this kind of content, when we have loads of videos, some of them being clearly more interesting or useful than others?
For Marketing academic Jonah Berger, the content is not the point. The secret of virality is what the content triggers in terms of feelings and emotions. Indeed, he explains the virality of videos is rooted in the way they arouse the viewer, increase his or her heart rate, and gather his or her energy to, ultimately, prepare for action (in our case, sharing the video). This was his conclusion after he demonstrated that subjects who jogged in place for 60 seconds (to trigger arousal artificially) were twice more ready to email a news article to their friends than those who did not jog.
This confirms a thorough analysis of the 7,500 most-emailed articles of the New York Times, published in 2008-2009. While we could expect people to share in priority articles with practical implications, it appeared that the most viral articles were those that triggered the most arousing emotions. For Jonah Berger, the explanation is simple: sharing content on the Web helps us to foster our connection with others, enrich our relationships with our peers.
As a conclusion, virality is driven by strong emotions (be it positive or negative), because this is both the kind of emotions we are the more willing to share with others, and the kind of emotions that are difficult to share in a face-to-face situation because of what they reveal about who we really are.
In other words: what we share is (what affect us because of) who we are. And here is who I am today, enjoy!
Take Your Audience’s Pencil Out of Their Mouth
Very interesting article in the New York Times : http://nyti.ms/el46m1 relaying a study by Dr. Niedenthal from the Clermont University.
Basically if you hold a pencil in your mouth, hence cannot mimic someone else’s smile, you become unable to tell if that smile on another face is true or fake! You can try it yourself, it is easy to experiment. Astonishing.
A consequence of this research is that understanding of someone else’s emotions requires a deep access – even a physical access – to our own emotions. This is clearly in line with one of our theories in Emoti-coms: emotions (including those generated by experience) spread consciously and unconsciously from people to people, without the need to discuss them.
From a marketing and communication viewpoint, if you want to make sure your target consumer is willing to receive a message – and not to bounce it as it happens most of the time, you must make sure they don’t have a “pencil in the mouth”. How do you do that? Well, it is really about making sure they are in the right environment, with the right mood. It is about the experience that you can share with them and the little something you can offer them (always avoiding to talk about yourself and yourself all the time, how your brand is nice, sexy, exciting, how beautiful your products are…).
When you think about your next campaign, imagine your audience with that pencil in the mouth, unwilling to listen to you. Before you start throwing millions talking to (or shouting at) them, make sure something happens that makes them put the pencil on the table first…
Thoughts from the Miró Exhibition
Some of you may have seen the Miró exhibition at the Tate Modern in London.
You may wonder what the link between the spanish painter and our topic may be. Advertising campaigns as good as masterpieces? Similar creativity?
No, let’s be serious. It is about the quote you can see on the picture: “a painting must be fertile”. That’s it!
That’s exactly what marketers should be looking for when they try to reach customers. They should be creating fertile messages, fertile channels, fertile conversations.
Back to Emoti-coms, it seems to us the only way to enable such fertility is through emotions. Not through one-way messages. Emotionnally-enabled messages germinate in consumers’ minds. They grow. They mix. They evolve (in the Darwinian sense). They move and transmit.
If you have examples of such fertile campaigns, please share them with us here!
When Sports Fans Cause an Earthquake
Never underestimate the power of fans’ emotions!
The last 20 years gave us several examples of earthquakes literally caused by sport enthusiasts, cheering and jumping enough to trigger small seismic events on nearby seismometers.
And don’t see here something happening once in a lifetime. So far, earthquakes caused by cheering fan have been registered:
- in Cameroon, when a “seismic network picked up a series of short, simultaneous spikes across the country. [...] Each jolt representing a goal scored by the national soccer squad in televised games of the African Cup of Nations“.
- in France, when seismic events were recorded in the area of Clermont-Ferrand at two precise moments: when a referee ended the final of the Top 14 Orange (the French rugby championship) happening in Paris, 350km away, and seeing the victory of Clermont-Ferrand ; and when the team Captain hold the beloved trophy in front of tens of thousands supporters.
- In Louisiana (USA) and Seattle (USA) following touchdowns scored by local teams. See this great chart below to realize how closely related vibrations were to the game drama.
What these examples reveal is the tremendous amount of energy – both really and figuratively – caused by supporters. Top level sport men and women know more than anyone how fans’ emotions can provide them with an extra bit of energy that will boost their performances and achievements. But surprisingly, most sponsors keep ignoring this great opportunity…
War Ads Happened
Back to our previous post about unbelievable ads, we have found even worse.
As shown in this article from the CNN website, some brands actually tried to leverage wars, the sacrifice of soldiers, the devil enemy, just 60 years ago.
What we thought impossible took place…
Brands were trying to reach deep inside us through emotional leverages – without any ethical limit. The good news, as we argue in Emoti-coms, is that our brain is able to filter such messages, especially as there were not conveyed (thank God!) through the actual “war experience” itself. The experience – associated with meaningful emotions – makes all the difference, as it opens up powerful channels to change our consumer behaviours.
If you find other similar examples, please share them with us!
“Paris Syndrome”, Opposite of the “Stendhal Syndrome”?
In this article of the BBC, the “Paris Syndrome” suffered by Japanese tourists is explained as follows:
“Many of the visitors come with a deeply romantic vision of Paris – the cobbled streets, as seen in the film Amelie, the beauty of French women or the high culture and art at the Louvre.
The reality can come as a shock.
An encounter with a rude taxi driver, or a Parisian waiter who shouts at customers who cannot speak fluent French, might be laughed off by those from other Western cultures.
But for the Japanese – used to a more polite and helpful society in which voices are rarely raised in anger – the experience of their dream city turning into a nightmare can simply be too much.”.
In Emoti-coms we refer to the Stendhal syndrome as “a striking example of the power of a multi-sensorial emotional experience [...]. Named after his visit to Florence in 1817, this syndrome is a psychosomatic illness described by famous French novelist Stendhal in the following terms: <As I emerged from the porch of Santa Croce, I was seized with a fierce palpitation of the heart; the wellspring of life was dried up within me, and I walked in constant fear of falling to the ground>. [This] illustrates the sheer power of emotions on ourselves, on our physical and psychological balance – even against our own will or knowledge”.
Well, aren’t these two syndromes the same one in a way?
We can use them both as the proof of multi-sense experiences’ deep impact on our selves. Think a moment how much more powerful than a 30′ TV spot this is.
Have you ever felt a mere palpitation in front of a detergent ad?
Unbelievable Ads
For the not-too-young amongst our readers, do you remember these ads? http://bit.ly/9lgl3o
What are today’s ads that will seem so shocking, unbelievable (in the sense not-too-be-believed-in) 20 years from now?
Those about detergents? Or energy? Or processed food? Or financial services (we’re almost there on these ones)? Or drugs? All of them?
