The Eternal Struggle of Making People Move

Let’s start big:

How do you make a happy young man sacrifice his life?

Imagine you’re twenty-two years old in 1944, like my uncle was. On your shoulders rests a heavy burden. Your mother and father left their village in Calabria, Italy and, like so many other wide-eyed wanderers, made their way to New York through Ellis Island. These parents found an apartment in Greenwich Village and set up a vegetable stand on Bleecker Street. Selling vegetables wasn’t their goal, however; family-making was. Two sons and four daughters carrying the burden of the quintessential American Dream: build a life, have a family, do better.1

And perhaps you, their eldest son, find yourself where your parents never hoped you would be: on the verge of sacrificing your life. You’re in Slapton, a coastal town in Devon, England, a village that had its few hundred residents evacuated so that the Third United States Army could practice maneuvers for an invasion, an invasion whose details were unknown to all but a few of the 150,000 soldiers who would storm a beach and scale some perilous cliffs. When? Where? How? All a mystery.

But here’s what you do know: you don’t want to be here. You don’t want to die. You want to be back home selling vegetables with your sisters on Bleecker Street.

And then you’re summoned, you and your fellow soldiers are summoned to the hillside by the beach on June 5, 1944, because a general wants to speak to you.

Now imagine you’re that general.

Imagine you’re about to ask thousands of young men who would rather be anywhere else to wake up the next morning and set sail for a certain fight and a likely death. You need to move an army. You need to ask thousands of young men with all the promise of the world before them to fight—likely, to die—in an almost-suicidal mission for some sort of “greater good.”

How do you do that? Do you remind them of the importance of the mission, of the nobility of the cause? If you could, would you take them through a PowerPoint presentation outlining the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of the situation, and then send them off with a catchy, rousing slogan?

Of course not.

But what do you do?

Do you get dressed up in a funny old outfit and curse and bully and, in an ego-fueled rant, appeal to the basest instincts of your troops?

Yes, perhaps you do.

Now imagine a far less lethal scene. Your ad agency is pitching a new client, but it’s not a particularly thrilling new client. It’s not Nike or Apple or some technology company disrupting a broken old industry with ingenuity and cutting-edge design. But it’s a pitch that matters, nonetheless. Millions of dollars can be gained for your firm, securing your job, maybe even offering the promise of a year-end bonus for your few hundred coworkers. For sure, winning this business means no layoffs.

But it’s a conservative client with an insipid marketing leader, a blow-hard CMO with a track record of treating partners poorly. This isn’t what you imagined or wanted your life to become. You studied English at a top-tier liberal arts school and hoped that a job in advertising could offer you a career cocktail of “creativity” and “commerce” that would both satisfy your soul and pay off your mortgage on your Montclair Tudor. You wanted to throw your talent to the entrepreneurs and the visionaries who would appreciate it, use it to build a better mousetrap and make a better world.

Yet here you are, Friday, 4:30 p.m., with no hope of catching the train to get you to your daughter’s lacrosse game; no hope, in fact, of a weekend at all. Again. You need to muster the wherewithal to prepare this pitch to share with your boss on Sunday night for a meeting with the client on Monday morning. Harder still, you need to rally your team to do the same. Somehow, you need to motivate a substantial crew of men and women who would rather be at bars and barbecues and bar mitzvahs, anywhere except here in the office making work for a client who won’t even appreciate their best effort. You need to get your team focused and stoked to do the mediocre work that needs to be done to win a prize that none of them really want.

How do you do that?

And while we’re imagining…

Imagine you’re a parent of a teenager who lost his focus and is second-guessing the value of college. His grades have slipped, and he quit the soccer team he used to love. Maybe he’s losing himself in a swirl of drinking too much and sleeping all day. How do you save him?

Imagine you’re the CEO of a start-up pitching the board of Silicon Valley’s hottest venture capital fund. You know you’ve got an industry-busting idea on your hands, but you also know this board of investors will hear that same promise from dozens of other companies that very week. How do you unlock the critical second-round funding you need?

Imagine you’re running for town council because you’re fed up with a broken government and sincerely believe you can do better than the jackasses ruining everything. How do you cut through the toxic petty politics and actually enlist your neighbors not only to vote for you, but to join you in fixing the whole damn system?

Imagine you want somebody to spend the rest of their life with you, through good times and bad ones. Imagine you’re in love with a beautiful, reasonable girl. How do you conjure a completely irrational life-long commitment when you don’t even own a car?

And finally, consider the many times you’ve felt to urge to do better, to be better—to play more with the kids, eat healthier, drink less, exercise more, watch less TV. Your old habits are so strong. How do you turn your sincere but weak desire into real action? How do you move yourself to be a better version of yourself?

Behind all these scenarios is the very same question: How do we move people—including ourselves—to do what they might not want to do? How do we lead a family, a class, a team, a company, a congregation, or even a country?

The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre famously wrote, “Hell is other people,” a quip which has come to represent a truth universally acknowledged: other people can be a pain in the ass.2 They have their own ideas and ambitions and plans, often at odds with our own designs. Other people might not always be “hell,” but they can certainly be a headache, especially when they’re not inclined to do as we wish. And yes, yes, certainly the world is good because it is filled with these strong, stubborn human beings, but it leaves us with a persistent challenge: how do we move them?

In Neanderthal times, the strategy for moving other people was pretty straightforward: bone-breaking sticks and stones. With most matters, say hunting and gathering, a well-applied threat of force could do the trick of bringing others along: See this club, Stan? Now go find me dinner, or I’ll bash your skull!

But from the beginning of words, people have tried using their mouth-sounds to make each other do things. Talking instead of hitting is a mark of being civilized, after all, and so we say: Come here. Stop that. Touch this. Eat. Move. Don’t move…. And occasionally we even add in a please. And in those simple prehistoric days, when a command was in the best interest of the commanded, obedience would generally follow: Yes, I guess I’ll help you gather some berries, Stan. I’m hungry too.

So it went. Shared needs, self-interest, and, occasionally, sharp sticks were the coin that made the people of the realm work.

But today, we and our commands and our mouth-sounds have gotten infinitely stranger and more demanding: Sacrifice yourself for your country. Work on this project over the weekend. Learn calculus. Marry me. Vote for me. Don’t eat gluten, Stan. Buy these sneakers with the swoosh, not those with the stripes. Repent to receive eternal life. These are strange requests, the kind that don’t find a clean logic in the short-term arithmetic of pleasure and pain.

So how do we get each other to do things today? How, without resorting to sticks and stones, do we move one another when our hopes run into the wall of other people’s wants?

Well, self-interest and brute consequences certainly have staying power. They’re motivations that still work well. It’s deep human nature, after all, to do what brings pleasure and repels pain, and so, if we couch our commands to others with promises of pleasure or threats of pain, we might find success. Arguably, the modern science of behavioral economics is an attempt to understand just how to apply these age-old motivators in a new-age world. Where once we smacked, now we “nudge.” We exploit the biases that have been built into the human psyche over the centuries.

And “nudging” certainly works, especially on those issues that are matters of process and habit, like signing up for a retirement savings account or keeping your hands sterile in a hospital. But many of the decisions we face today require intellectual acrobatics that demand a much more engaged and thoughtful approach. We “think”—and think hard—about such matters: Is my nation really worth my life? It sure feels good to love you today, Stan, but will I feel this same way after decades of marriage? I don’t see why calculus matters. How much more are those sneakers with the swoosh really worth? Sure, I want eternal life, but I also want to stay home and watch the football game.

This is the curse of our blessed non-Neanderthal lives: our brains have gotten our bodies all tangled up; doing anything important involves an awful lot of mind working on our muscles, weighing pros and cons, often at a very abstract level. It’s a thicket of difficult decision-making, and cutting through it needs more than a nudge.

For centuries, philosophers and scientists have wondered what to do about this conundrum: how do we get free-thinking human beings to do anything? How do we lead? How do we command a team or an army or a nation or, heck, just our kids?

The great Greek thinker Aristotle offered a reasonable answer in the heady days of Athenian Democracy: persuasion. Persuasion, he claimed, is the art of getting people—”rational animals” in his formulation—to do as we ask. Persuasion is the use of words, often “elevated” words, to command action. In a series of lectures eventually published as Rhetoric, Aristotle laid out the rules for using words to move crowds.3 There are three “modes of persuasion” he concluded:

1. Ethos. This is an appeal to authority, either the bona fides of a person or the shared values of a community. Essentially, it’s a polite, eloquent way of saying, “Do this because I said so.” Very caveman.

2. Pathos. This is the fun one, the appeal to emotions. Make ’em laugh or cry, give ’em hope or incite fear. The rationalists amongst us worry about these appeals to our feelings, dismissing them as the tweaking of mere flimsy emotions, but Aristotle understood that underneath each rational animal is an animal still.

3. Logos. This is the place for logic, for facts and figures and proof and evidence. This is courtroom rhetoric, the kind practiced by the high school debating team. Logos is actually the mode of persuasion with which we’re most comfortable, because it seems so clear-cut and objective; and yet, interestingly, Aristotle was very skeptical of logos-based appeals, as he thought they were ripe for manipulation. Even in Ancient Greece, beware the propagandist bearing facts.

 

So there you have it: a variety of ways to use words to make people do things. And for the last two centuries, scholars have quibbled with some of Aristotle’s work, debating the primacy of one mode over another, but, for the most part, we’ve all accepted that a strong cocktail of logic—delivered with authority and occasionally feeling—gets the job done. The debating team has triumphed. We’ve all agreed to reason with one another, to make our cases for action based on facts and logic with an occasional shake of emotional verve. Think about it, we say. Facts don’t lie. Let me give you a few good reasons.

And, over these centuries, we’ve built a deep appreciation for soaring “rhetoric” and an admiration for those people who can give those speeches that move the masses. We’ve studied the greats, like Lincoln and Churchill and Kennedy, the forgotten like Thucydides and Cicero and Macaulay, and even the fictional like Shylock and Atticus Finch and Coach Taylor from Dillon, Texas. These are great-speaking men, and women as well—though too often, they’ve been less chronicled in the dusty tomes—like Sojourner Truth and Virginia Woolf and Eleanor Roosevelt and Barbara Jordan and Malala Yousafzai who have spoken words that have changed the way the world would be.

While there’s so much beauty and wisdom to be found in this study of rhetoric, it hasn’t really resulted in very practical advice for our day-to-day needs. There are hundreds of books and thousands of essays teaching us how to “give a great speech,” and the advice in them usually boils down to a trifecta of platitudes: prepare, practice, personalize.

Well, sure. Perhaps preparing, practicing, and personalizing your speech is the recipe to persuading your audience.

But what if you’re not giving a speech? What if you’re talking to a colleague in the parking garage or your kid on the telephone? How do you move people, day in and day out, in quiet conversations and family dinners and office meetings and team huddles?

And on those occasions when you do have to give something that resembles a speech, how do you do so in a way that works for a modern audience, one with ears un-attuned to the clank of classical rhetoric?

But mostly, what if persuasion is no longer the point? What if logic, be it delivered in a conference room or from a stage, has lost its power to move people? What if reasoning with each other no longer gets us very far? What if it never really did?

The Man Who Murdered Aristotle

We are living in a golden age of neuroscience, and if this brain-deciphering field is yielding one unifying lesson, it’s the insight that we humans are odd, irrational ducks. You’ve probably read the books: we blink. We’re nudged. We’re pre-suaded. Our actions are the result of so many factors, from our environment to our cultural biases, most of which work on us unconsciously, short-cutting the rigor of deliberation. Very rarely are our decisions the result of pure, calculated logic. Even when we think we’re being oh-so-rational, we’re often not even coming close. That’s our brain giving us the false comfort that we’re both aware and in control of our biases and impulses. Silly, hopeful us clinging to the myth that we’re more rational than animal.4

You’re likely familiar with Dr. Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist who won The Nobel Prize for illuminating how our minds really make decisions. In Thinking, Fast & Slow, he describes two types of thinking: System 1 and System 2.

System 1 Thinking is automatic. It’s intuitive, emotional, and quick. This is “thinking” that swells and spurts from the mysterious seas of our unconscious mind. Let’s think of it as the “Fuck It!” force behind those moments that feel so instinctual: Fuck it, I’ll buy the fast car. Fuck it, I’ll tell him I love him. Fuck it, I’ll quit my day job and open a bicycle shop.

System 2 Thinking is its exact opposite: measured, careful, and well-reasoned. System 2 Thinking involves effort and an awful lot of classic Aristotelian logic—weighing pros and cons, analyzing advantages and disadvantages. Let’s call this “Hmmm…” thinking: Hmm, which car will be the most practical one for our family? Hmm, is he really the right husband for me? Hmm, I better shut up and get on with my work if I want to pay for my kids’ college.

This model of competing brain energies makes sense to most of us who, all the time feel, the need to “correct” our instincts (System 1) with our reason (System 2). We want the cake, but we know we shouldn’t have it. We feel our desire to tell off our stupid boss and quit our stupid job, but we consider the consequences of doing so. Most of us rest assured that our System 2 superhero will swoop in and save the day before our System 1 rascal unleashes hell. We trust that our “Hmmm…” will rescue us from the disaster of impulse.

But we’d be so wrong to trust the power of that mild-mannered “Hmmm…”

What’s really shocking about Kahneman’s work is the conclusion that System 2 Thinking has very little chance of saving any day. As Kahneman explained, “System 1 is really the one that is the more influential; it is guiding System 2, it is steering System 2 to a very large extent” (emphasis added).5 In other words, we’ve got it the wrong way around: our rational brain does not “correct” our emotional brain; no, our emotions drive our thinking. “Fuck It!” is in charge.

 

“Fuck It!” thumps “Hmmm.”

 

Dan and Chip Heath, brothers, academics, and authors of many best-selling books explaining what actually moves people, borrow an old metaphor to explain this phenomenon: Imagine a rider on an elephant, they tell us. The rider knows the elephant is gargantuan and powerful, but the rider also knows he is a man—a smart man who has mastered the skills of directing a dumb, lumbering elephant with an expertly-applied mix of whips and treats. The man believes he can steer the beast…. But come on, people, it’s a friggin’ elephant! If that elephant really wants to go left or lay down or buck or roll-over, our rider is simply hosed. The man is a pipsqueak of System 2 Thinking, hopeless against the beast of System 1.6

Without going too much farther down this rabbit-hole of science, it’s also worth noting that Kahneman’s work builds upon the findings of another giant of modern neuroscience, Dr. Antonio Damasio, who runs the Brain and Creativity Institute at The University of Southern California. Damasio’s first book, called Descartes’ Error, takes that Enlightenment philosopher to task for his very influential belief that we human beings harbor separate systems for feeling and thinking. In Descartes’ theory of dualism, our body and our mind are discrete organs, one base and emotional, the other noble and rational. This (flawed) thinking has found its way into modern beliefs about the distinction between our “right brain” (the creative side) and “left brain” (the logical one). But as Damasio proves, it’s all nonsense, an error. While different regions of our brain exert motor control over specific parts of our body, thinking is a far messier process. In matters of decision-making, there is no “right brain” or “left brain”—there is only a brain, an integrated and complex organ in which feeling informs thinking; in fact, as Damasio demonstrates, good thinking is impossible without feeling. He uses some heavy-duty laboratory work to prove that what we consider “thinking” is really our brain’s mostly-unconscious reaction to our emotions. Feeling is, in fact, how we “think” our way to decisions—and, without feeling, we’re as likely to make bad decisions as we are without logic. Our best “decisions,” in other words, are built upon sands of emotions.7

So the next time you hear somebody talk about “right brain” and “left brain”—or the tug-of-war between our “emotional” and “rational” selves, laugh. Whatever you do, don’t try to reason with them. It’s futile.

All of this is very difficult to swallow for an intelligent, educated reader like you. We resist the notion that the hard work of our brains so easily surrenders to the whispers of our hearts. We insist we weigh the pros and the cons of a given decision and mentally muscle our way to a correct answer. We pride ourselves on our human ability to be bigger and better than our base emotions. We scoff at the accusation that we’re remotely controlled by the impulses hidden in the deepest recesses of our psyches.

But that’s the weak, pesky whisper of System 2 Thinking. You really can’t argue with science. It’s factual.

And, of course, for our purposes, all of this science has one clear implication: reason doesn’t move people; feeling does. Aristotle’s faith in logos—the lawyerly logic of argument and evidence—is misplaced. It’s pathos—the feelings—that really move our modern (and yet still Neanderthal) selves. As my friend Dan’s grandmother used to tell him, “Arguments convince nobody.” In other words—like it or not, resist it or not—if you want to move anybody to do anything, you’ll have to figure out how to arouse their emotions. You’ll have to figure out the language spoken by the heart in their head. You’ll have to inspire them.

And when you do, oh boy, that’s when the good stuff starts.

Campaigning in Poetry

Yes, feelings most always trump logic, and perhaps there’s no better illustration of that like-it-or-not truth today than Donald Trump. Much has been written about his surprising victory in 2016 being borne of the steady refusal of politicians from either party to address the fractured state of working-class America. Steel workers and coal miners and the army of minimum-wage-earning laborers felt threatened and ignored by a world that was galloping on the back of technology to an automated, highly educated future, a future where the value of their skills was uncertain. These hidden Americans lost their footing, and when they looked to Washington, DC, they saw nobody with a helping, steadying hand to offer them.

Into that trauma roared Donald Trump with a fusillade of pronouncements that were shocking, if not scandalous: his pronouncements on immigrants and trade; his threats to rupture America’s traditional role on the global stage; his fawning over international strongmen like Vladimir Putin. All of that was unorthodox enough, but on top of those policy—um—positions was a confounding instinct to dissemble, to contradict himself, to contradict the facts, to slide over reality into the realm of “alternative facts” (as his counselor would later call some of these falsehoods). And then came filmed footage of Donald Trump boasting about his assault of women. It was vulgar, vile, and confoundingly irrelevant to the outcome of the election.

So how did this middling mess best the “most qualified” presidential candidate in the history of our Republic? How did he even get close? Now, certainly, there are myriad explanations, ranging from the reasonable (Change!) to the nefarious (Russia!) to the structural (Damn, Electoral College!), but I would suggest that Trump beat Hilary Clinton, in large part, because he campaigned in poetry, as Governor Mario Cuomo once recommended all politicians should do. That’s right: poetry. With Trump, it was angry poetry; he was emotion incarnate, campaigning in the bold feelings of nationalist resentment and bravado to a tune with a very catchy hook: Make America Great Again. Discussions and dissections about how he would actually accomplish that—the prose of policy—were not just meaningless, but ineffective. Any rational indictment of Trump (or his policies) was impotent against the raging bull of his belting feelings. In fact, in his wake has been borne such anti-rational notions as alternate facts and “fake news”—literally and vividly, reasonable evidence has lost its power. Ultimately, this “poetry” revved up a meaningful segment of the population, swinging some critical states toward Trump, even while Clinton won the popular vote.8

As Dan Balz, the respected veteran journalist and chief national correspondent at The Washington Post put it, “Trump understood something that others did not appreciate…. Trump has traded approval for intensity…. It was that intensity that helped him win. And it was the lack of intensity for Clinton that helped doom her candidacy, allowing Trump to win the electoral college while losing the popular vote.”9

And, lest we dismiss this election as a fluke, let’s review the general trend of most modern presidential elections: Barack Obama beats Mitt Romney; George W. Bush beats John Kerry and Al Gore; Bill Clinton beats George Bush; George Bush beats Michael Dukakis; Ronald Reagan beats Walter Mondale and Jimmy Carter.

He who has campaigned in poetry has won. He who has summoned intense emotions—feeling pain, dreaming big, stirring anger—has won. He who has argued with the reasonable natures of our disposition has lost.

Pause for a second—but only a second—to be sad about this, if you must. You can certainly bemoan these “emotional appeals” as cynical and dastardly manipulations. And you can do so while the Muses continue to thump the Robots. But I hope we’ll soon come to understand that, while moving people through their emotions can be a manipulation, it can also be the best and most beautiful way of communicating with each other, a way that honors the messy fullness of our humanity. If we want to be moved, as Lincoln said, by “the better angels of our nature,” we’d be wise to remember that angels and devils are the very same species: they speak the same language; they just have different agendas.

You’d think marketing experts would have learned the power of appealing to our emotions instead of tinkering with our reason. After all, we think of them as the Don-Draper-like Svengalis who build big business on snowflakes of fairy dust but, oddly, beneath the occasional pop of a heart-tugging commercial, most of these experts cling stubbornly to the belief that logic moves markets—despite all the evidence to the contrary. That evidence came to light in 1957 when Vance Packard, a journalist who was worried the world was being duped by the wizards of Madison Avenue, published an exposé of their tactics called, appropriately, The Hidden Persuaders. The book makes the case that the best brands appeal to timeless human desires like security, power, and ego. And while some of his accusations, like the preponderance of “subliminal” advertising, are hare-brained, the gist of his argument was right: marketing moves people through their emotions.10

But bizarrely, even though The Hidden Persuaders was supposed to be a revelation of how the ad industry actually worked, the ad industry never really bought it. Oh, for sure, agency executives pay lip service to the power of “emotions” in their marketing, but at the heart of their craft lurks the persistent belief that people need “reasons” to buy what they buy. They call them “reasons to believe” (Now with 3x the cavity-fighting power!) or they divide them into “functional reasons” (like whiter teeth) and “emotional reasons” (like the self-confidence that comes from whiter teeth)—but reasons they remain. They celebrate a brand’s “unique selling proposition”—the attribute that makes it a better alternative to the competitive product. This cereal that has more whole grains. This car with better fuel efficiency and comfortable seats. This bank that will make you richer in retirement. Even today’s fad for brands to have “purposes” comes gauze-wrapped in the safety of logic: You will like our winter jacket company more than the others because we really do care about the environment. And to prove how much we love the environment, we will donate more money to saving it than our competitors will.

It’s a world of “-er” marketing—better, stronger, faster, sexier, good-er. It’s downright Aristotelian.

And this is not to say that marketers don’t use emotions in their work. Of course they do. See, there’s a mother holding an adorable baby. But generally, those emotional appeals are sprinkled on top of the arithmetic of argument. Oh wait, where did that baby go? Why are they pouring blue liquid into Diaper A and Diaper B? I think I’ll go watch some cute cat videos now.

So what’s the problem with this model of marketing—coherent “reasons to believe” delivered with an emotional punch? What’s the problem with a brand—or a political candidate or a corporate leader—juicing up their logical arguments with some feeling flimflam? What’s the problem when they pump up their “unique selling propositions” with some sex appeal or sentimentality or humor?

Well, simply put, that model, rational at its core, is a weak model. It just doesn’t work as powerfully as the alternative can.

The Mad Men of the twenty-first century have begun to enlist the expertise of academics and neuroscientists to help figure out which bits of their work really move markets, and it turns out they had an awful lot to learn from Dr. Kahneman. Consumers—whom we’d be wise to remember are actually people—are moved by the unstoppable tides of System 1 Thinking.

A few British academics have landed a one-two punch to the face of reason-to-believe marketing. First, Professor Robert Heath, who teaches at the University of Bath, has demonstrated that advertising is processed by the brain with “low involvement”—in other words, people don’t “think” about a commercial; they just let it wash over them.11 Perhaps, every now and then, some act of marketing does create some salient and valuable associations for a brand. Maybe something catches our attention and maybe even share something a company does—but even those episodes are processed at very low levels of consciousness.

Robert Heath has demonstrated what most non-marketers have always known: most marketing, like politics and news, is literally background noise. And if it’s background noise, it can’t really persuade anybody of anything.

The next blow to the nose of the old hidden persuaders came from Les Binet, an ad man himself, who along with Peter Field, was commissioned in 2007 by the august Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) to review hundreds of “effective” marketing campaigns and divine their secrets.12 They divided the campaigns into three categories, those with: 1. A Rational Approach; 2. An Emotional Approach; and 3. A Balanced Rational and Emotional Approach. And then they looked at marketplace data and sales results to judge which approach was most effective.

Now, if you, like almost every marketing professional, bet that the Balanced Rational and Emotional Approach was the most effective model, you’d be, like almost every marketing professional, wildly wrong. In fact, Binet and Field demonstrated that purely emotional advertising is twice as effective as any other kind. And, in case you need an example of purely emotional advertising, they provide one of the best: a completely nonsensical film of a gorilla playing the drums to a song by Phil Collins. Is this an ad for drums? Or gorillas? Not at all. This is a commercial for Cadbury’s candy bars. Go watch the ad. It’s preposterous. It’s confusing. It’s also utterly captivating. Best of all, it was a runaway success, driving a sales increase of almost 10 percent. Commercials don’t usually do that for such big and well-known brands.

I’d add most fashion advertising to the category of purely emotional marketing as well. Just flip through the pages of any slick fashion magazine and you’ll see some bizarre images, impressions really of strange worlds with glamourous people. In fact, I remember a high-profile ad for Dolce & Gabbana that had the most gorgeous Italian models standing around a forest, holding goats. Why were they holding goats? Who knows? Hardly ever does fashion advertising commit the cardinal sin of trying to explain anything to you. It’s all feeling—and it creates more visceral desire than any breakfast cereal ever has.

As Binet summarized it, “You can see clearly that the more emotional the strategy, the better it worked. People might think that adding emotions in to a rational campaign might be the answer, but pure emotion works better, even in categories that are supposedly rational, like financial services and computers…. People go by their gut feeling first.”13

Alongside this confounding insight about the power of pure, anti-rational emotion, Binet and Field shared a related bit of wisdom: thinking gets in the way of making great advertising. As you’d guess, there’s an awful lot of “strategy” that goes into the making of marketing, and much of that brain-work is fueled by market research. Copytesting, for example, is the market research methodology that involves showing ideas, a commercial or a new product design, usually in unfinished form, to a group of consumers and discussing their responses. What do you think? What do you like or hate? What would you keep or change? It seems like such a good idea: before you spend your marketing money, just ask real flesh-and-blood people what they think. In the industry, these exercises are sometimes called “disaster checks.”

But according to Binet and Field’s work, they ought to be called disaster-makers. Advertising that is copytested has an inverse relationship to real-world success. Think about that: asking people to judge your marketing is a bad idea. It makes the marketing more rational and, hence, less effective.14

The problem with copytesting is that it engages the “rational” side of a consumer’s mind. It’s very, very System 2. Do you like this ad? What is its message? Do you find this message compelling? What would you tell your friends about this product? And then, armed with those answers, marketers go on to create exactly the “rational” marketing we just learned doesn’t work so well.

 

“People go by their gut feeling first.”

 

A focus group is a fraud: people rationalizing their feelings and, in the process, butchering the truth. And it’s not because people are liars; no, the research itself is the problem. It’s predicated on the twin false beliefs that people can both explain their own decisions and that those decisions are reasonable. We now know both of those premises are false.

Market research asks drumming gorillas to explain themselves and beautiful goat-cradling Italians to explain themselves, and yes, Donald Trumps to explain themselves—and, as it does, it sucks the very vitality out of the object it’s examining.

And yet why does it persist? Why is market research a multi-billion-dollar industry, a required crutch of so many top-spending marketers? Well, no doubt MBA-armed executives and cable-news political prognosticators find comfort in the (false) confidence this kind of research provides. Look, they tell their boss, I tested this idea. Look, they tell their viewers, suburban women voters hate Trump.

But I believe there’s something at play beyond the instinct to cover one’s own ass, something that affects all of us, even those of us who will never make marketing. Perhaps the world of pure emotion—of “pure imagination,” as Willy Wonka put it—is a scary place to be. Perhaps feelings are terrifying things.