Business Week interview with Dan Hill, author of Emotionomics

'Loyalty is an emotion. Trust is an emotion. If you really want to make headway, you can't just do the rational part. That's really like fighting with one arm behind your back. You need the rational and the emotional, but of the two you really need the emotional more.'

So says Dan Hill, author of Emotionomics, to emphasise the value of using emotion strategically in the marketplace. And how do you achieve emotional impact in marketing and advertising? Not from lists of features and benefits - that's your left brain talking. To hit them where the wallets are, you've got to get creative. 'Less explaining, more entertaining', we might say.

Or as Dan Hill sums up:  'We make our decisions emotionally, we justify them rationally.' Features and benefits can appeal to a buyer's rational side, producing satisfaction of a kind, but that's after-the-fact impact.

In 2010, I'm hoping we can help more clients recognise the influence an emotional response (and therefore creative execution) has on buyer behaviour. Emotionomics gives us some food for thought to offer, such as the fact that an emotional response typically triggers five times more brain activity than a rational one. By the way, we also offer monitoring, analytics, and other tools like eye tracking to satisfy your rational side.

What would you like to believe for your business in 2010 and beyond? Let us know at www.iwouldliketobelieve.co.uk.

Everything old is new again - an early casting comparison for the new Star Trek 

**Film spoilers alert**

B2B folk and Trekkers have a few things in common:

We both attend conferences.
We have serious debates about how our respective fields should progress.
And we both tend to resist change.

That last one is particularly sensitive for...um, both of us. And we've both recently had big, whopping changes handed to us, then been told: 'Deal with it, or you don't play here anymore.'

The B2B challenges that have commanded more attention over the last year - getting onboard with Twitter and social media, to blog or not to blog, diving into the Buyersphere, finally addressing your techie, scary, and hugely relevant Search marketing needs, the worth of it all - these and more have been thoroughly investigated by my fellow Beyond bloggers.

I just want to make you feel better.

So if you want some recent facts and advice, check out Which Half of Your Advertising is Working by my Beyond buddy John Stanton. 

If you want to know how a JJ Abrams blockbuster can give you strength in these turbulent B2B times, read on.

'You can't write a poem about B2B marketing'.

Not just one, anyway. More like seven.

It all started just over a year ago with an invitation: our original pink poem in B2B Marketing magazine. Following up in the Beyond blog, we asked all of you involved in B2B to 'debate how and why (if?) marketing is changing...share influences...move it along' - in other words, to help shape the B2B mindshift.

But what good is a poem about B2B marketing?

Poems don't give us conventionally useful answers. They take us deeper into the questions and passions that fuel our collective imagination. Ideally, they help us understand ways of thinking and being and doing that will help us to go...further. Deeper. And in this case, beyond business as usual.

To order your free limited edition of 'Beyond: The Poems' just email us at b2beat@baseonegroup.co.uk.

When you receive your poems, read them aloud. Really. It's the only way to feel the full impact.

PS: For my opening line to this post and the collection, I'm indebted to Ronald Wallace and his great proof that you can indeed write a poem about McDonald's.

Global recession - that's what it takes to make people say what they mean, clearly and concisely. At least, that's what prompted UK Council leaders to ban a long list of expressions deemed jargon from their offices.

"During the recession, it is vital that we explain to people in plain English how to get access to the 800 different services that local government provides with taxpayers' money', says Local Government Association chair Margaret Eaton. So after the recession they can go back to utterly confusing everyone with coterminosity and potentialities?

I checked out the full list of banned words and saw some familiar arch-enemies:

• blue-sky thinking
• thinking outside the box
• synergies
• utilise
• step change
• going forward
• best practice
• transparency

...and so on. Some of the entries were truly puzzling - what's so obscure about words like 'client', 'wellbeing' or 'robust'? But mostly I wished some higher authority would publish (and enforce) a similar list of no-no's for B2B marketing.

1. Put your ipod, mp3 player, or digital music library on shuffle or random mode.

2. Resist hitting the fast-forward button for a whole hour's worth of play.

Easy? Or not so much?

Whatever music you have in your library, it's something you once wanted. Something you were open to. But how many of us skip anything that didn't settle into our top picks the first time?

Why is it so hard to make the most of what you've got, as my copywriting comrade JB urged us to do with brand assets recently?

What does it take to make us revisit the mental playlist of ideas and methods?

How do you make sure you're getting the full value of what you accumulate from so many sources: email, RSS feeds, Favourites, webcasts, roundtables, internal sessions, colleagues, trade press...

Why revisit anything that once caught your imagination, but failed your greatest hits filter the first time?

Because everything changes.
 
Because what you filed away back then may be useful to you now.

Because maybe some of those filter-failers scared you - or at least unsettled you a bit. That's always worth exploring.

Go random with a little thing or link (already) in your life.

Tell us if you find a hidden gem. Me, I didn't even know I had any KT Tunstall. Now she's top of my workout playlist.

No, that's not our Tom and Dave having artistic differences (they're quite chummy, thankyou), it's a scene from the new TNT series Trust Me, set in a fictional modern-day ad agency. Given the success of Mad Men (agency drama set in the early '60s), we had to know a contemporary glamourisation of the advertising life wasn't far behind.

TNT is the network that brought us ER and X-Files - make of that what you will. More encouraging, perhaps, is that the show was created by two former ad agency inmates. So why does the show rate a mention on Beyond?

'One of the things we wanted to hit on with the show is how the business is changing and how some people are more successful at changing with those times than others.' - Hunt Baldwin, Trust Me creator, in this rather entertaining interview

Would be interesting to see how the show wrestles with that...this video sneak peek only highlights some of the typical frustrations that have been present in agencies for time out of mind:

"But to talk to people and secretly be trying to sell them something--isn't that, I don't know, unethical? Surely you agree that it's completely out of order."

"He didn't ask us to buy anything. He gave us free drinks."

"I know, but the point was to get us to buy something later on. That particular brand. We generate buzz. We recommend it to our friends, it becomes hip, blah-blah-blah."

"He should have given me image approval. Look at my chin! I'm going to have words next time I see him."

From the short story 'Raj, Bohemian', by Hari Kunzru. It's not often you get social commentary, marketing issues, and literary value blending quite so well in one piece.

Kunzru puts us right into the head of someone who suddenly realises all his social interactions, even the most intimate, have been infiltrated by WOM. And before long, he just can't take it anymore.

I can't help but sympathise with the narrator, whose name we never learn (let me know if you find a reference to it). All that 'power' I have to customise and choose and sell products and services can sometimes just make me feel like a tool.
 

'But there must come a time when you're allowed to stop being a consumer. There has to be some respite from all that choosing, a time, well, just to be.'

What implications these musings have for B2B is unclear. If we B2B folk participate in or draw others into a WOM campaign, everyone's well aware of the business implications/context.

Or are they? Is it possible for us to overstep a personal boundary in the midst of all the networking and social media interfacing, or is everyone fair game as a potential WOM conscript?

Anyway, Hari Kunzru is a major British writer you may quite enjoy, and you can read the whole story for free on The New Yorker website. I think the ending is...realistic.

PS: Big Phony is a singer-songwriter who can be found here.

'It's entirely familiar, but it's never been heard before.'

I think that neatly sums up one main reason good branding and advertising are able to influence people. It's also how music producer DJ Earworm described the wonderfully weird mash-up listening experience at the IDEA conference hosted by Ad Age and Creativity .

Note: the video may not be available to nonsubscribers by next Friday, so get in the groove now.

Give in to your Friday fidgets with something useful, entirely relevant to your work, and fun. The Brand Tags project is it - and now there's a version just for UK brands. People, what more do you want?

Okay, here's a bit more: a short while back, our Creative Director, Dave Thomas, found the  newish Brand Tags site just as we were starting work on a Very Big Campaign. Typing in the name of the Very Big Client returned a tag cloud of one-word associations that loads of people have when they see the brand name/logo. How useful is that? Well, it made for a nice little piece of backup to our proposal, anyway.

So that's how it works - either you type in a name, or you let the site flash up a random logo, and you type in the first word that pops into your head. Then you can see all the word associations other people have input to the site, too. Neat, eh?

The US version has the most major brand names indexed at the moment, so if you don't find one you're looking for on the UK site, go on over to the Dark Side.

Didn't I tell you to go play?

PS: Big Client is PayPal. It's no secret, really.