Rational vs. Emotional Advertising

Rational or emotional advertising! Give me a break. I am a little concerned that people still feel that this is a worthy distinction to make. The argument (normally put forwards via the advertising agency) is that rational messages can’t make a connection with the consumer as deep as emotional messaging. It goes like this ‘we are the advertising agency and we believe the best way to build brand loyalty is through an ‘emotional connection’. This is normally accompanied by a powerpoint slide that has a lovely picture of a bridge on it with the voice over ‘we want to build a stronger connection between your brand and the consumer’. It’s crap.
Rational advertising is seen as limiting creativity, and has much less chance at winning awards (as creatives vote for the very same awards they compete for it means convention wins).

Emotional advertising on the other hand is completely unexplained in the above argument. What are emotions? Which ones are we attempting to resonate with – and why? The industry (clients and creatives) normally go for funny ads, I’m not sure why? People are not trained to know which emotions are going to be motivating in various situations.

However, perhaps my biggest gripe with the rational vs. emotional thing is that it is an artificial dichotomy – it is very weird to pull the two apart at all. Behavioural change is achieved via the following; What you think, controls how you feel – which in turn dictates how you behave (and in turns drives what you think and so on). For example you think ‘My CEO is a goose’, you therefore feel ‘Frustrated”, you therefore ‘Ignore what she has to say’. Change how you think – you’ll change how you feel and therefore your behavior.

Therefore the rational vs. emotional debate is redundant as a) ‘rational’ thought is the precursor to emotions anyway, b) emotions rarely exist in the absence of thought, and c) we can alternatively – forget rational or emotional messaging and just jump to behaviours - encouraging people to act via a promotion (I can feel the creative department groaning already). Once people act – through cognitive dissonance they post-rationalise their thoughts and feelings to make sense of their behaviours anyway.

The goal of advertising is to create behavioral change. This can be achieved via resonating with people, rewarding people, or giving them information to appraise your brand. Studies on the soon to launch in Australia TIVO demonstrate that it’s the rational information based ads that avoid the fast forward button. In this case therefore it’s rational ads that generate sales and build an ‘emotional connection’.

In 50 years of practice I hope we have enough collective wisdom to say more than ‘we want to create an emotional connection’, and enough common sense to realize that both rational and emotional and any combination inbetween can be emotional, creative, and effective.