Capture my interest, capture my business?

Editor’s note: Neil Kalt is director, new methodologies, at Beta Research Corporation, Syosset, N.Y.

The concept of idea engagement is causing quite a stir. The reason: idea engagement holds out the hope that advertising can create brand relationships that will induce loyalty to these brands.

It is well documented that a number of consumers form emotional attachments to some of the brands and products that they use. For example, the Gallup Organization interviewed 3,611 customers in the automobile industry, the airline industry, consumer banking, mass retail, online retail and consumer electronics.¹ With the exception of the airline industry, Gallup found that roughly one-third of the customers in each of these industries had formed emotional attachments to one or more of the brands they use (in the airline industry it was 19 percent). What makes these attachments so valuable is that they increase dramatically the propensity of these customers to patronize the brands that have earned their loyalty.¹

Idea engagement takes the position that emotion-driven advertising can generate a richly articulated relationship between the brand and the consumer, and that the consumer plays an active role in this process, bringing - and here I quote William Cook of the ARF - “her own stories, experiences and associations in her memories to our ads, and may substitute her own elements into the unfurling drama to help it become more relevant or meaningful to her.”² When an ad tells a story, that story is likely to - and again I quote Cook - “engage the consumer’s emotions and trigger stored associations, personal stories, brand experiences and images and generate that first emotional imprint in the brain. Emotion involves the consumer and the ad’s story gets integrated into the mesh of memories and schema in the consumer’s long-term memory.”²

Not in the cards

Although there are brands and products for which idea engagement seems like an excellent fit, logic and a fair amount of data suggest that emotional relationships between brands and consumers are not in the cards for many brands and a great many consumers. Let’s look at why:

1. Most people don’t have the time or, I suspect, the inclination to create and nurture multifaceted emotional relationships with all the brands they’re interested in and all the brands they use. Their lives are increasingly fast-paced, and they cram large amounts of activity into their waking hours. All of which leaves little time for forging relationships with all these brands, certainly not the amount of time that idea engagement seems to require.

2. A recent study by Nielsen of nearly 1,000 consumers³ found that only a third could recall any TV commercials they had seen. If two-thirds of the consumers polled couldn’t remember any of the commercials that they were exposed to, some of which were surely driven by emotion, and if we assume that people recall commercials that engage their emotions, then these commercials either failed to engage the emotions of receptive consumers or these consumers were simply not open to the possibility of an emotion-based brand relationship.

3. The results of the research conducted by the Gallup Organization¹ indicate that the relationships consumers have with brands are much more often transactional than emotional - that is, roughly two-thirds did not appear to form emotional attachments to the brands and products that they used. As their perceptions and attitudes are rooted in brand usage, and as a fair number probably have rational/analytical/ practical personalities, it seems unlikely that they will be susceptible to the blandishments of emotion-driven advertising.

Cast doubt

Recently, we conducted research to evaluate a new commercial testing methodology. Coincidentally, the results of this research also cast doubt on the validity of a cornerstone of the concept of idea engagement.

This methodology uses both conventional and new measures to evaluate commercials, which it does from the following perspectives:

1. Conventional measures, such as the communicability of the commercial, attitudes toward the commercial and how much interest in the product the commercial generates.

2. The cognitive/emotional profile of the commercial, which sheds light on the cognitive/emotional strengths and weaknesses of the commercial, and which acts as a road map for increasing the commercial’s ability to generate interest in the product.

3. The cognitive/emotional profiles of the respondents, which enable us to determine how the commercial performs among two key personality types that together comprise a sizable percentage of the population: respondents who are emotional/intuitive/ expressive and respondents who are rational/analytical/objective.

4. The extent to which sensory overload, and the competition between the auditory and visual components of a commercial for each viewer’s attention, cause respondents to miss important pieces of information after multiple exposures to the commercial.

The results of this research yielded important implications for evaluating a commercial’s performance and increasing its effectiveness. They also cast doubt on the power and preeminence of the emotional content of commercials, which is assumed to drive the process of idea engagement:

  • We used tests of 10 commercials in four product categories to evaluate our methodology. The level of product interest that each of these commercials generated was nearly universal when respondents felt that both the commercial’s informational content and its emotional content were considerable. When they felt this way about a commercial’s emotional content but not its informational content, interest in the product plummeted - on average, from 81 percent to 35 percent (see Table 1, quadrants 1 and 3).
  • When a commercial was felt to have a good deal of informational content, or a good deal of emotional content, but not both, informational content generated considerably more interest in the product than emotional content (on average, 52 percent versus 35 percent - see Table 1, quadrants 2 and 3).
  • On average, commercials that were felt to be more informational generated more interest in the product than commercials that were felt to be more emotional (51 percent versus 39 percent - see Table 2).

  • Idea engagement doesn’t assign any role to personality. Accordingly, people should be more responsive to emotion-driven advertising than they are to information-driven advertising, regardless of their personalities. What we found was quite different, though in light of the preceding findings, not unexpected:

1. Respondents with rational/analytical personalities were much more likely to express interest in the product when the commercial was regarded as more informational as opposed to more emotional (on average, 47 percent versus 29 percent - see Table 3).

2. Even emotional/expressive respondents, who might be expected to prefer commercials that were more emotional, tended to express interest in the product more often when the commercial was regarded as more informational (on average, 60 percent versus 51 percent - see Table 3).

Less than conclusive

While these findings are clearly suggestive, they are less than conclusive. Although we looked at the relationship between the content of commercials and the extent to which those commercials generate interest in their products, we did not look at the variables that presumably mediate this relationship - that is, the extent to which emotion-driven commercials lead to the establishment of emotional relationships between brands and consumers, and the extent to which these relationships induce brand loyalty. Still, the data have considerable face validity - the findings are consistent, they make sense and they appear to shed considerable light on the drivers of idea engagement. They should be treated accordingly.

Does idea engagement have a role to play? We have no doubt that it does, though not quite as currently envisioned:

  • Idea engagement does not appear to be driven solely by the emotional content of advertising - at least not in the product categories in which we conducted research (cars, credit cards, insurance and telecommunications) nor, in all probability, in similar product categories. Indeed, when advertising in these categories forges relationships between brands and consumers, these relationships are likely to be based on both the advertising’s informational and emotional content, with informational content usually the more important of the two.
  • It seems likely that these brands comprise a comparatively small subset of the brands that consumers consider using and actually use.
  • The consumers with whom these relationships are forged appear to be a decided minority of the consumer population. As for the rest of the consumer population, for whom relationships with brands and their products are essentially transactional affairs, idea engagement seems destined to be a quixotic pursuit that seldom, if ever, bears fruit.

The last two considerations notwithstanding, the willingness of consumers to purchase brands that have earned their loyalty makes the creation of advertising that uses informational and emotional content to forge relationships between brands and consumers a goal to be ardently pursued.

Notes

1 Appelbaum, Alec. The constant customer. Gallup Management Journal, June 17, 2001.

2 William Cook. “Idea Engagement: Feelings Stirred, Not Shaken.” ARF paper, 2007.

3 “Nielsen Research Proves Less Than Engaging, Only A Third Of Viewers Recall TV Spots.” Media Daily News, Media Post Publications, August 8, 2007.