How Emotional Tugs Trump Rational Pushes: The Time Has Come to Abandon a 100-Year-Old Advertising Model

This paper proposes a new model for how advertising works and how it should be measured. It seeks to demonstrate the importance of measuring emotional response to advertising and illustrates the flaws in conventional pre-testing measures of persuasion, cut-through, and message receipt.

How Emotional Tugs Trump Rational Pushes: The Time Has Come to Abandon a 100-Year-Old Advertising Model

Orlando Wood

BrainJuicer Labs

Management slant

  • New evidence from psychology suggests that most of the decisions we make are made quickly and intuitively, by what is known as System 1 (fast) decision-making.
  • An important component of System 1 decision-making is emotion, which guides many decisions. Instead of answering the more difficult question "what do I think about this choice?," we instead tend to ask ourselves "how do I feel about this choice?"
  • A brand that adopts emotional communications draws people closer to it, promotes...

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