Creating Conscious Messages Part 2: Balance Emotional and Functional Messages
This is the second article in a 4-part series on how to craft conscious marketing messages. Each article explores a specific communication practice to avoid in order to better respect customers, create value, and grow your business. Additional articles in this series include:
PART 2: Balance Emotional and Functional Messaging
In the book The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, John Mark Comer rails on advertising, calling it “a multibillion-dollar industry that is intentionally designed to lie to you – to get you to believe that if you will only buy this or that product then you will be happy. Or at least happier.”
As a marketer, I am disappointed that some individuals perceive all ads as communicating lies, but there’s a thread of truth at the core of this idea. Comer’s criticism is not that advertising explicitly lies about what products and services do, rather he critiques the promises brands make about how using their products and services will make you feel.
While effective communication should make you feel something – otherwise it risks being ignored and ineffective – we need to be careful that we are not setting up promises that a company cannot deliver.
Consider a few examples:
“Be proud of how you ship”
“Travel Confidently”
“Feel Sexy Again!”
With no context, each of these promises an emotional benefit without a functional solution, leading one to wonder: How? In the actual executions, these brands had varying degrees of specificity as to how they help you achieve the emotional benefit, but in all three, the functional solution was significantly deprioritized.
These examples highlight a central reason why so many people distrust the messages that brands communicate: Companies promise or exaggerate an emotional benefit without anchoring it in the product or service that creates the feeling. In essence, they divorce the emotion from the functional solution.
Why Balancing Emotion and Function Matters
Functional benefits are time-bound, physical, concrete, and/or task-oriented solutions to a problem, need, or desire customers experience. Emotional benefits are the feelings customers experience during or after they have used your product or service. Both messages have value, but when emotional messaging drastically overshadows functional messaging, we risk overpromising, misleading, disappointing, confusing or creating distrust with our customers.
Customers have problems or needs that require solving, and the only solutions companies can offer, consistently and reliably, are functional. Tony Ulwick, a pioneer of the innovation tool “jobs theory,” describes customer needs as “jobs to be done.” “Jobs are functional with emotional and social components,” he explains. Emotional and social benefits only result from solving a customer’s primary functional need.
All humans experience deep emotional needs such as happiness, security, confidence, to be loved, and to feel worthy. However, a brand cannot consistently and reliably solve an emotional need outside of the specific functional solution it offers. While a growing number of “lifestyle brands” promise a social and emotional identity to customers (a topic for a future article!), selling emotion without a solution is short-lived and, in many cases, an illusion.
To create and accurately communicate value, we can only promise what we can actually deliver: functional solutions and the emotional benefits tied to those solutions. When we do this transparently and humbly, we create more effective communication and build trust.
Why Do We Prioritize Emotional Benefits over Functional Benefits?
Standard message development processes often lead us to overpromise and exaggerate, even if that’s not our intent. We ask: “How does our product make our customers feel?” Perhaps the response is: “Happy. Joyful. Content. Safe. Confident.” When that insight is turned into a message, we appeal to the overarching emotional need, sometimes forgetting or significantly minimizing the way in which the product actually delivers those emotions.
One of the reasons we tend to see emotion play such a large role in messaging is that many marketers and advertisers believe that emotional benefits are more effective than functional ones. This thinking argues that functional messages engage the rational brain, whereas emotional messages engage the subconscious brain where most of our decision-making takes place.
Illustrating this point, a 2022 Gallup study found that “70% of decisions are based on emotional factors and only 30% are based on rational factors.” The Gallup article cites a study on luxury hotel brand, concluding that emotional attributes, such as feeling welcomed, were more important than physical attributes, such as furnishings, to influence customer engagement. This study ignores the fact that there are physical elements - a receptionist’s smile, the excellent service of a server or concierge, a clean lobby – that create the feeling of being welcomed. A customer must understand what a product or service’s functional benefit is in order to understand and believe the emotional benefit that comes from the solution.
The opinion that emotional benefits are more effective assumes that functional and emotional benefits work independently to influence behavior and can therefore be compared. But in truth, they are mutually dependent elements. For advertising to be effective, according to Ph.D. neuroscientist Elise Temple, it must first be easy for your brain to process, and then it needs to tap into existing memory structures that create context. In order to motivate action, such as filling out a contact form, purchasing a product, or engaging in content, the message must be simple, clearly communicate how it creates value, and provide context for how the brand fits into the customer’s life. Temple explains that functional messages can easily and effectively deliver on these elements of strong advertising, and are no less likely to be effective than what we consider “emotional” messages.
We often forget that functional solutions have intrinsic emotional benefits, and a brand need not always explicitly state them. For example, “Keep the weight off for good” is a functional benefit that a weight loss seeker automatically associates with confidence, discipline, and freedom. The emotional benefits are implied without being directly mentioned. Compare that to the claim, “Body Confidence Guaranteed,” where the messaging has shifted its focus away from the weight loss service it provides and (unless it provides a much more detailed explanation) begins to overstep the promise it makes to customers.
Functional messages also tend to be deprioritized because they are seen as boring and lack memorability. An article in Forbes states, “Emotions tend to trump facts when it comes to influencing buyers,” which illustrates the confusion that exists between understanding features and benefits. A feature is a specific attribute of your product, such as its specifications, dimensions, or how it’s used, and they often are factual in nature. A functional benefit is the value created for your customer by solving a problem or meeting a functional need; benefits are not necessarily factual. For example: “wireless” is a feature; “get access anywhere,” a benefit.
Without a clear explanation, features often don’t communicate how a product solves a customer’s problem and can risk being irrelevant, whereas functional benefits – when relevant to the customer and communicated well – can be extremely effective in creating purchase interest.
What Happens When We Separate the Emotional Benefit from the Functional Benefit
Let’s take a closer look at what happens when we prioritize the emotional benefit over the functional solution. Coke’s former advertising campaign, “Open Happiness,” which ran from 2008-2015, spoke to the concept of a lofty generic promise. At the core of this campaign idea was “Coke will make you happy,” which was a tall glass to fill (get it?!). The company’s reason for abandoning the campaign reflects the need for a specific and realistic benefit that the product can deliver. Marcus de Quinto, the CMO, explained, “…it failed to hammer home more simple pleasures, like enjoying an ice-cold Coke on a hot day.” He elaborated on the importance of focusing on the product and not inflating what the brand could realistically achieve. “We are a simple pleasure, a product that refreshes. Not one that's going to save the world. If by refreshing, you save the world, fine. We are going back to this truth."
One of Coke’s “Open Happiness” ads; © CocaCola Company
De Quinto cautioned, “Emotional marketing goes to the extreme; talking about message without product, and values without benefits. Over the last few years, we have been talking about happiness, and sometimes we forget we are a drink that tastes very good.”
While de Quinto did not cite business results, the industry attributed the campaign change to category declines and sluggish brand growth. “Open Happiness,” a campaign focused nearly exclusively on promising happiness - in a category under fire for obesity and tooth decay - did not deliver the sales growth the company desired.
How to Tie the Emotional Benefit to the Functional Solution
Let’s contrast the Coke example with a Pillsbury commercial I saw a few years ago where the brand realistically tied emotion to the solution. In the ad, parents and children baked crescent and cinnamon rolls together on a weekend morning. The kids anticipated the “pop” of the pressurized cardboard container when it opened, a father taught his daughter how to roll the crescent, and all peered into the oven, watching the dough rise while inhaling the aroma of fresh-baked goods.
The sights, sounds, and behaviors visualized in this ad accurately depicted my personal experience making crescent rolls with my kids. While the emotion communicated was joy and love, the sounds, smells, and feelings portrayed were all generated by the product itself in the specific context of baking as a family.
The key to accurately communicating emotional benefits is to focus on how the product itself can realistically achieve the emotional experience depicted. If your product cannot directly create that emotion, then it is ingenuine to associate your brand with that promise. If your service only delivers that emotion in a specific context, then you must convey that specificity in your message.
Once you’ve created your message, you can check the balance of emotional and functional benefits by asking yourself these questions:
Does my product or service directly and frequently create the emotions I convey in my message?
Am I showing or explaining how my solution creates the emotions I portray, and the specific circumstances in which that happens?
Am I exaggerating how much emotional impact my product will have on my customers life?
How to Restructure Your Message
If you find yourself prioritizing emotional benefits over functional benefits, either by deprioritizing or excluding the functional benefit entirely, the first step is to identify the functional and emotional benefits that your product or service offers. As a reminder, functional benefits are time-bound, physical, and/or task-oriented solutions to a meaningful need your customer has (which are not the same as product features!). Emotional benefits are the feelings customers experience during or after they have used your product or service.
When developing communication, ensure your message makes clear how your product or service addresses the functional need, either visually or through explicit statements. Incorporate emotional needs as they relate specifically to the functional need you solve for and in the context in which you address the emotional needs. If marketing messages or images portray only emotion, work to shine a brighter light on the functional solution.
Check to ensure the emotional promise considers the relative importance of the solution in your customers’ lives so that the emotion conveyed is not exaggerated. A lifesaving cancer drug would indeed have a far more significant emotional impact than a kitchen gadget that saves time chopping garlic. If you’re not sure, just ask your customer and they will tell you.😊
We owe it to our customers to deliver on what we promise: a solution to a functional need. And we can deliver the solution, assuming it’s a high-quality product. What we can’t promise is that they will feel a certain way by using our service. If we can reduce instances of exaggerated emotional marketing and focus our messaging on the simple ways we can improve lives, we not only make our messaging more believable, but our brands become more trustworthy. People can’t claim that we are selling them a lie if we don’t promise that our product will make them happy. Our products and services just simply need to do what we say they will do.
Check out the next article in this series on Creating Conscious Messages in November!
