Emoti-coms: A marketing guide to communicating through emotions.

by Xavier Quattrocchi-Oubradous, Charles Bal

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.

196 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 18, 2011

Reviews

[Ergun Coruh · Rating 2 out of 5]

I no longer believe we should keep reading a book we clearly don't enjoy. Obviously one does not need to agree with author's sentiments in order to enjoy their book. But there is a limit on how much bullshit you may effectively swallow.

So I quit reading this one. This book is about "marketing should focus on emotions rather than rationality". Fair enough, common sense in fact. But..

The authors' first gibberish was about nominating music as being the ultimate meaningful media for communicating emotional messages. Don't get me wrong, I love music, but I could not agree with the proposition that visual can not be as effective. The authors devoted an entire chapter to this useless discussion.

My irritation became unbearable when I reached Chapter 2 in which an exhaustive analysis was being made on differences between Moods, Feelings, and Emotions. I was completely lost in that one. So I quit.

I gave two stars as the book talked about some useful campaign examples targeting emotions. But all in all there was no integrity in keeping them inline with the main message. They may still be useful for some though.

[Dane Cobain · Rating 4 out of 5]

The concept behind this book is pretty simple – marketing has undergone a shift from messaging-based campaigns to emotion-based campaigns, and with consumers constantly over-exposed to marketing messages, they’ve learned to tune out the rubbish. If you want to reach your target audience, you need to pull at their heartstrings, by involving them emotionally, physically, creatively or otherwise.

There’s some great evidence to support this shift and the two authors really know what they’re talking about – they bring their argument to life with a whole host of case studies and real-life examples so that you can apply their lessons to your own business, and you can measure the success of it all, too. My only criticism here is that Emoti-coms simply wasn’t long enough – I’m sure the authors could have written at great length and I, for one, would have liked to have read even more.