One of the applications I use the most on my laptop is the built-in calculator. It’s a basic app that comes standard on the latest smartphones and computers.
And most of the time, the calculator app is quite simple. It has a standard nine-key setup and handles basic calculations like addition and multiplication. Few of us ever download a more complex calculator to figure out the tangent of a plane curve or the square root of a large number. Most of us just need the calculator to figure out pretty simple problems.
The calculator comes standard because it’s super useful for everyday decisions. Like adding up a list of expenses for a budget. Or figuring out how much tax I’ll have to pay if I buy a new microwave.
The calculator app hardly uses the maximum computing power of our devices. In fact, it takes very little power from the CPU. You can buy a simple calculator at a corner store with the most basic transistors and a mini battery that will last for years. Because the calculator doesn’t require much power or circuitry.
Yet I use the calculator all the time. Because it can hold more variables and often arrives at an answer faster than me trying to calculate it in my head.
Of course, the calculator app isn’t the only reason I have a laptop or smartphone. I use the latest tech to solve other problems and needs. I may push the limits of my laptop when editing video in Premier Pro, where the files are large and I need to maximize the output of the CPU. Or I may have dozens of open applications when I design or write, and I’m constantly switching from one app to the next.
The reality is that I have a variety of needs. And the best way to solve each need is with the right application for the job. A quick math problem is best solved with the simple calculator. But a complex adjustment to a photo is best solved with Photoshop.
The same is true when we are making decisions or creating new memories. Our brains may be a complex machine with massive computational power. But there are certain decisions that are better handled by our slow, conscious system, and some that need to rely on our fast, subconscious system.
When we compare the two systems of computation power in our brains—our conscious and our subconscious—one isn’t superior for all choices. The answer isn’t that we should try to be rational and logical with every choice. Or that we should rely only on our emotions to survive. We need both. And we should use the strengths of both systems in everyday life.
Remember, our conscious can roughly hold Miller’s seven (plus or minus two) variables at a time, while our subconscious is practically limitless. This is important to keep in mind when we consider the many decisions we need to make in a marketing context.
In basic terms, if we’re asking a customer to think about a relatively simple thing, like a math problem, or we are asking them to compare a few simple features of a straightforward product, then appealing to their conscious brain is ideal. Like a spatula, the variables may be simple and only include the handle or color or the material it’s made from. In these situations, our logical brain can calculate value rather quickly. It’s like a calculator, and it can handle it.
But if our marketing decision must break through the clutter of messages and it’s a more complex choice like buying a house, or it has hundreds of variables and product options like a new car, then an emotional appeal may be the better option. These decisions require a supercomputer, like a modern laptop.
In reality, most of the choices consumers have to make are pretty difficult and include a mix of simple and complex choices. That’s when our little CEO requires the help of the entire company and taps into the super computer under the iceberg.
Which means the real answer of whether to use logic or emotion in your marketing is to use both. Consumers use both systems in making decisions, so we need to plan for both in our marketing campaigns.
Right now, I’m sure your logical half is nodding and thinking, “See, I knew it. All this talk about embracing emotions is situational.” That’s not what I’m saying. The point is that too often with business and marketing decisions, we are only using logic. And now that we know how emotions work in the brain, we need to start swinging the pendulum back to the middle and embracing more emotion in marketing decisions.
The advice is simple. Don’t go all in with just one half. Too often as marketers we live in the extremes.
For decades agencies and marketers have battled over the role of logic and emotion in marketing. It’s been creative versus strategy. Brand versus direct marketing. And art versus science.
What we need is an equal seat at the table for both sides. However, just like my opening story with Russell, many business leaders have learned in their MBA degrees to only focus on the numbers, the logical patterns, and the risks.
But when business leaders think that emotional marketing is fluffy and unnecessary, then they don’t understand how humans think.
If you want to avoid risk, look at our biology. If you want a sure bet on your marketing dollars, then you need to embrace a balance of both logic and emotion.
We are biased from history, from our schooling, from culture, and from best practices in business to discount the emotional side of advertising. But when you look deep into the science, the type of marketing that will better connect with customers, that will help them create positive memories with your brand, and that will turn your messages into money is marketing that has a foundation of emotion.
Many companies are realizing the need for this balance, and we are seeing new positions at the highest levels where creativity and design have a seat at the table. Like chief experience officer or chief design officer. But those progressive companies are the exception. We need business leaders who understand the value of emotion and put a premium on business decisions that give creativity a voice.
More often than not, this means understanding the value of creative ideas in a sea of data and logic.
Data-driven marketing is misunderstood. On a recent LinkedIn thread in a discussion about the need for creative ideas, one business leader said that we don’t need creative ideas anymore because we have this. Then he pasted a link to a small digital analytics company.
His point was that we have more ways to measure customer choices than ever before. We know what customers like and what they click on, so therefore we don’t need creativity to lure them into a purchase. We can simply present the data and the customer will make the right choice.
I’ve also read many other articles on this topic where some claim that the marketing gut is dead. We no longer have to guess anymore. We have data.
Whenever I come across these types of arguments, it makes me smile. Because I work for one of the most sophisticated analytics companies in the world. (According to independent analysts like Gartner.)67
At Adobe, we understand the relationship between data and creativity. Our company is built on the platform that art and science should live in harmony. Data doesn’t remove the need for creativity. Rather, data helps you understand the customer, so you can deliver creative experiences.
With the most advanced analytics, the best you can hope for is to surface an anomaly or insight that you can instantly act on. But you still need the creative idea to create a relevant and emotional experience.
Algorithms can offer you suggestions from holistic customer data. It can bring anomalies to the forefront with fantastic data visualization. It can make statistical suggestions based on similar customers and we can use artificial intelligence to serve up the right data at the most opportune moment to make an informed marketing decision.
But it won’t replace your intuition. It won’t make the leap to a new innovation on its own. It’s the base. The catalyst. The yin to your intuition yang.
Why does it always have to be an either/or equation? Why take a scarcity approach?
The truth is that it doesn’t have to be. Both data and our gut are critical to business success. There’s plenty of room at the business table to comfortably seat both creativity and science. It’s not about one versus the other. In order to survive in today’s economy, you need both.
Because the best way to know your customer is to bring together all your data sources. This includes your company’s first-party database. And any secondary or third-party data that you can buy. And you should add in all your personal experience data, or marketing gut, so you have all sources of data to make the best decision possible.
When you think of your marketing gut as another source of data, should you toss this out just because you have a digital method for collecting more data? No chance.
If you want your business to succeed, you need to invest in both digital data and human experience. You need both logic and emotion to create the most amazing brand experiences.
And this isn’t just my personal opinion. Recently, a team of scientists from several universities conducted research to better understand what situations are better for logical deliberation or trusting your emotions.
In a report titled, Should I go with my gut? Investigating the benefits of emotion-focused decision making, Joseph A. Mikels, Andrew E. Reed, Sam J. Maglio, and Lee J. Kaplowitz began with the premise that logical or deliberative thinking has historically been considered the best way to make a sound decision. People usually hold all the factors in memory and deliberate over them to reach the best decision.
They mentioned that past studies had introduced the idea that for complex decisions, we should rely on our emotions or gut. And for simple choices with only a few variables, our logical brain is more ideal. So they wanted to prove it out and see if this is true.
They concluded that for complex decisions, listening to your emotions is actually a very effective strategy for making good decisions. Here’s an excerpt of their final summary:
“While many open questions remain, the current results support the notion that when the going gets tough, go with your gut—but with the qualification that one should not overthink their decision.”68
This study helps us understand that listening to your gut while making a difficult decision is critical. If you simply try to rationalize it, you’ll end up making a poor decision.
But it takes a balanced approach. When getting all the details about the decision, using logic is important to study the problem. But when you move to making a decision, you need to think about your emotions and use your intuition. After all, it can more quickly reference all your past decisions and emotions to find a solid answer. Don’t rely only on logic or you will overthink it.
Your marketing gut isn’t just another source of data, it’s one of the most powerful data tools on the market.
In the world of data-driven marketing, one of the better ways to optimize is through A/B testing. That’s exactly what our gut does. It’s the poster child for A/B testing. Our gut is how we learn and grow as humans. It’s how we instantly optimize and choose the best option. And it probably has better data integrity than many business databases.
If we rely solely on data and reason, we undermine our greatest resource. Our guts are massive databases of experience. Remember, emotions are really just an instant transfer of a massive amount of data and logic. True, they aren’t omniscient. They can get it wrong sometimes, and they have plenty of biases. That’s why we have to train them day after day—it takes time to build up that database.
And that’s why someone new to marketing won’t have the same gut as an experienced marketer. We trust those with experience because they’ve already made hundreds of similar decisions and can access those experiences in a split-second of emotion.
But there’s more to trusting our guts than simply past experiences. By understanding how we interpret emotions to make decisions, we can change the way we process decisions. We can tap into both emotional and logical ideas. We can become more intuitive thinkers.
Our gut instincts can be just as much about how we make decisions as it is about the past experiences that influence our decisions. Think of the way that many intuitive leaders, both past and present, have made decisions. They listened to all the options and then made a bold decision that often doesn’t seem rational.
They aren’t making a decision based on their conscious executive function. Rather, they tap into their feelings. They intuitively sense how they feel about a decision. They train their hard drive to respond quickly to the process of decisions rather than just the data of stored experiences.
They’re looking for anomalies in the process and allowing their subconscious to find new solutions. It’s the same creative process as coming up with a new emotional advertising idea.
On the flip side, data is just as important. You can’t ignore it. Sure, it’s emotionless. But it can be the catalyst to big ideas and disruption. You can’t bully your gut into chasing an idea that isn’t based on solid data. You’ll end up with a creative idea that has no backbone.
Data-driven marketing leads to brilliant ideas. Data isn’t the end of the journey. On its own, data isn’t going to solve your business problems or change the world. But it will inspire big ideas.
As long as we have brains and emotions, our gut is the perfect way to make a decision. In fact, it’s the only way to make a decision. It’s the way we are wired.
What we’ve learned from neuroscience and behavioral economists is that both logic and emotions have strengths and weaknesses. And that a balanced approach is essential. We have to think about every choice and action, with both systems. Only then will we be able to overcome the shortcomings of logic and emotion.
The era of the gut isn’t dead. But we shouldn’t rely solely on our instinct. We need a balance of both. Gut and data. Emotion and logic.
This may seem opposite of what feels natural. Normally if you have a hard problem, you want to slow down and consciously work it out. But when you consider how the mind works, it’s easier to see what’s going on.
When we’re slowing down and thinking hard, it’s because we’re trying to force our neurons and dopamine to act. But they don’t know what to do, and we’re stuck. If it’s a new experience, where there isn’t a past memory and our gut isn’t telling us how to act, those neurons and chemicals don’t know what to do. This is hard. There’s no emotional grease. Without enough emotional juices to make a memory easy, we have to work a little harder for it.
Most of us have experienced this, but that doesn’t mean it’s a better way. It’s actually quite inefficient. It uses up a lot of energy as our body is tense, pupils dilate, and we focus on the task. Slowing down and thinking logically about a problem doesn’t always result in an answer. Often, we walk away because of the strain and our subconscious works on it overnight. This is how the brain tries to be more efficient, by allowing the subconscious to do the heavy lifting.
Another way we try to force a logical decision is by brute force. Perhaps the emotion is there and our brains are completely lit up, but our CEO or executive function wants to add some checks and balance to the decision. So we embrace a little micromanagement over our emotions to ensure that the decision feels logical. Even though we’re really just ignoring all the data in the emotion. Then we make a forced decision and later end up regretting it.
We have to remember that emotions aren’t unrestrained animals. Emotions are actually an enormous amount of past logic and rational thought. And we also need to remember that emotions are a positive feedback loop. Once we make a decision, if we get a good emotional response afterwards, we feel good about it, and then we act. We usually won’t act if the decision “feels” wrong. This means that you can overthink and force a “bad” decision because you’re trying to ignore your gut emotions.
One insight that stuck with me from early in my career was a bit of advice from one of my first bosses named Darrell Smith. He was a founder and partner of the tech agency Dallin Smith White. When I first interviewed with him in 1995, he told me an interesting philosophy on strategy.
Smith was a classic account guy and strategist, but he believed in both results and creativity. To him, finding the strategic insight behind any product that would drive sales was really a creative act. In essence, creativity and strategy are really the same thing.
For example, when writing a creative brief and discovering the singular message that you should focus on, you were using your creative muscles. Or when you build a company vision statement or come up with a challenger brand strategy, it’s really just another form of creativity.
His philosophy helped form my opinion that both creative agencies and results agencies were right. Both sides were really using the same process. We just called them different terms, but the type of thinking was the same.
By knowing how the brain works, we understand better how these two elements of marketing come together.
In terms of neuroscience, your marketing instinct is a series of past experiences, decisions, failures, and successes all rolled up into a nice emotional package. Instantly accessible and adaptable. Your gut experience is really a massive amount of past logic. Just like any memory.
So, here’s a fascinating thought—emotion is logic.
Emotion represents a ton of rational thought. It’s just expressed in a different way, through your fast system, rather than your slow system. But the data and experiences are the same things.
Like in our experiment of the fast system, the next time you feel an emotion, think of all the data that’s communicated. Emotions are just a concentrated form of logic.
Just like creativity is strategy.
To the brain, both sides represent neurons firing in a pattern. It’s just different flavors of the same action.
Which means it’s not an either/or situation. The conflict is over. A balanced approach is really the only approach. Everyone is on the winning side.
Now that we better understand how the mind uses emotion to function, it gives new insight into why marketing campaigns that use emotional ideas are more successful. For decades, advertising pros have known that emotional messaging pulls better. But they couldn’t explain why. They just felt it in their guts.
However, now that we know how the brain ingests data, how it uses emotion to process it, and how emotion plays a pivotal role in decision making and creating memories, we have a universal answer that explains why emotional marketing is more effective.
This truth isn’t based on a few unrelated case studies. It’s not based on situational data. And it isn’t formed from biased opinion. The role of emotion in how we pay attention and how we remember are physiological. It’s built into the way each of us think and interact. It’s part of us.
And this is a universal truth for all humans. There isn’t a target audience like IT professionals who are different. Their brains work the same way all brains work. Which means we shouldn’t make exceptions for certain audiences and only send them logical messages. Instead, the quest should be finding the right emotion for your specific audience. That’s the whole point of creative ideas—emotional experiences that connect with an audience.
If we remove emotion from the equation, we are decreasing our chance for success. So the question becomes, why wouldn’t you use strong emotions in your advertising and marketing?
Many logical thinkers have responded that emotional marketing is unnecessary. That it gets in the way of business. My guess is that response is simply based on tradition. They are following the prevailing thought that we are rational and that logical, linear thought is always right. Or perhaps we are so used to simply looking at the data that we dismiss emotions as something we can’t measure. Therefore, they are extraneous.
As we’ve learned, that’s just wrong. If marketing were purely a rational act, wouldn’t we have already discovered that perfect marketing tactic? That ideal strategy that logically showed why your product is better. If that’s the case, why don’t customers choose the most logical product? The one with the better product benefits. Instead, they pick the brand they trust or connect with on a subconscious or emotional level.
How many ads do we love that are packed with great information? Do we instantly make a decision because we are presented with logical information?
Absolutely not.
In fact, more often the only decision many of us make is to ignore it completely.
Dismissing creative ideas as unnecessary is ignorant. What we should be asking as marketers isn’t whether we should have an emotional message or a logical message, but instead we should be asking what emotion and data is right for each situation.
We should look deep into our customer data and find insights about our audience. Their triggers. We need to know what they care about, what fulfills their needs or what keeps them up at night. Then we should craft a message that rings true emotionally to those insights.
At the same time, we need to be careful to not over index on the creative side. Like many ads during the dot-com bubble of 2000. I saw many TV campaigns during that time that were just creative ideas without any substance or logic. They weren’t tied back to the brand or the decision in any meaningful way. They were just crazy ideas designed to get attention, but nobody could remember who made them. This extreme of only emotion is also a bad strategy.
Yes, we need emotions to make decisions. So finding the right emotion is key to connecting with our customers when they are making decisions about our products. The more we can understand our customers and tap into their emotions, the better we can create brand experiences that last.
In two decades, I can’t think of a logic-only ad campaign that I’ve worked on that has been so powerful that customers felt compelled to buy the product. But I have seen many emotional and creative campaigns that have compelled customers to action. They’ve become so loyal that they want to share the story with others so that they can feel it, too. We keep acting like being a consumer is a rational decision, when it’s an emotional one.
Some may argue that there are deeper-funnel experiences where the consumer already has a relationship with the brand and these transactional messages can be direct and straightforward.
I’ll discuss this topic in a later chapter on brand tone, but the quick answer is that we should still balance logic and emotion in every communication. Even a transactional email. Sure, the balance may be more logic than emotion. We shouldn’t have a highly emotional headline at every level. But we should still have an approachable tone or keep a bit of humanity in the message.
Part of the art of being a great marketer is knowing the right balance of emotion to logic in every situation. You have to decide how much calculator to use versus tapping into the computing power of the whole laptop.
It’s this balanced approach that’s the best strategy. Not all logic. Not all emotion. But something that engages both systems at every level. Where you light up the whole brain of your customer as much as possible. We need whole-brain marketing.
Which means it’s no longer about creativity versus results. With whole-brain marketing, it’s about creativity and results. Branding and direct marketing. Art and science.
Logic and emotion can live hand in hand. Heart and mind. We are both rational and emotional when the whole brain is working.