Entry 5: A battle between right brain and left brain.

When we first landing on this world, we are irrational, emotional creature. Start from baby, we feel everything without any verbal communication. We start give the response based on our emotion. We feel comfort, when daddy mummy smile toward us; we cry, when daddy mummy scold at us. That’s simple. Life is simple. We only train to become a rational thinking human being by incubating 10 or more years of education. Thus, we know that emotion is instinctive-oriented, personal and it might derived different based on individual whereas rational is incubated to make us more logic and rational thinking is trained to become as our habit.

In advertising, advertisers also start up their execution and strategics based on this. Mostly, advertisement is emotional-oriented as emotional appeal has better and effective communication which connects at a visceral level compared to rational or persuasion-based advertisement.

From consumer insight

What I mention before, we born as an emotional creature and the response is instinctive. We will easier dominated by emotion especially purchasing something. From a research, it showed that 90% of any decision is emotional. The rational part of us supplies the reasons for supporting our predilections. It make us feels right when purchase.

So, from this fact, it is clear to show the emotion and rational affect our decision making.

The table below is showing the different between emotional appeal and rational appeal:

Emotional Appeal	Rational Appeal
Right hemisphere of brain.	Left hemisphere of brain.
Soft sell	Hard sell
Feeling, pleasure, mood	Information, Fact
Heart (feeling-oriented)	Head (think-oriented)
Visually	Verbally
Appeal to fear, empathy, sympathy, happiness and other human emotions.	Prove the product’s quality and usefulness to the consumer. State the product’s benefits, performing a product demonstration or citing facts or statistics.
Conduct the consumer love the brands, not just buy them. (Fame)	Persuade the consumer to choose the result it desires. (Persuasion- based communication)
Emphasize a personal story that relates to the product.	Show the product being used, rather than discussed.
Emphasize the benefit of a product, service to the consumer.	Emphasize the benefits of the product, service itself.
Primal Tongue (through design, color, motion stagecraft, music and tonality)	Logical relationship, the primal mind seeks symbolic relationship.
Hard to execute.	Easy to execute.

Next, I would like to show two videos which selling same product (toothpaste) but they are using different appeals (Emotional and Rational).

Rational Appeal

Emotional Appeal

After viewing these two videos, we know that although we getting an abundance of information of the benefit the products and get surprised and persuaded on the specialty functions, we might forget the contents easier if compared to the emotion-based advertising. From the emotion-based advertising, it might make us to feel empathy and think and rehear what the problems and remembers the product due to the "eye-catchy" story.

However, from my opinion, the overuse or misuse of emotional appeal advertising will lead the audiences feel confused between the storyline and products. It is because some of storyline is totally unrelated to the products and the consumers will feel like what the helX. This will be annoying. At last, consumers will only remember and overly focus on the story instead of the products.

References

Dooley, R (2009) Emotional ads work best. [Online] Available at: http://www.neurosciencemarketing.com/blog/articles/emotional-ads-work-best.htm [Accessed at: 23rd January, 2014]

E.M. Rawes (N.D.) Difference in rational and emotional marketing. [Online] Available at: http://smallbusiness.chron.com/difference-rational-emotional-marketing-23661.html [Accessed at: 19th January, 2014]

Orwing, K (N.D.) Rational appeal vs. emotional appeals in advertising and marketing communication. [Online] Available at: http://www.orwig.net/articles/rational_emotl/rational_emotl.html [Accessed at: 19th January, 2014]