Articles - Research insight: hearts, minds and experiential marketing - 360 - Jack Morton Worldwide's Experiential Marketing Blog

March 08, 2007
Research insight: hearts, minds and experiential marketing
By Liz Bigham

It’s a truism of marketing that communications should balance the intellectual and the emotional – that brands should seek to engage people’s hearts as well as their minds. But like many truths too obvious to need restating, it’s amazing how easy it is to forget this one.

In case you’re ripe for a reminder of the need to balance emotional branding with more rational information, we offer insights from research commissioned by Jack Morton as part of our annual Experiential Marketing Survey earlier this year. The study (reported in two white papers available for download) comprised a broad examination of how people want to be engaged and what leads to insight, action and word of mouth advocacy.

As part of the much broader study–an online survey of 1,625 participants in the US, UK, Australia and China–we asked the question, “What is important for brands to communicate to you?” and gave survey participants choices such as:

Give me information
Relate to me through my interests/concerns
Explain to me what the product/brand stands
Show me how to spend my money wisely
Engage me on a personal level
Entertain me
Show me what’s cool/trendy

Participants’ responses to this question spoke to a set of priorities incredibly balanced by their minds and hearts:

The #1 most important factor was definitely in the realm of the rational: “give me information” was selected by 88% of all participants as extremely or very important to them. This more intellectual urge was consistently the most important factor across geographies, gender and age.
Coming in at a close #2 and #3 were decidedly emotional factors: the next most important qualities were “relating to me” and “explaining what the product/brand stands for.” Again, there was strong consistency: these qualities were rated second and third most important among groups.

Interestingly, when we asked respondents to answer the same question about their employer brand–e.g., “What is important for your employer brand to communicate to you?”–they revealed a parallel balancing of intellectual and emotional needs:

The #1 factor, selected by 92% of participants, was “give me insights I can apply to be more effective”
The #2 factor, selected by 88% of participants, was “show me how I fit into the company’s vision”

Again, the conclusion is a simple but powerful reminder that brands should balance the intellectual and the emotional, engaging people’s hearts as well as their minds.

Simple, yes–but marketers will still face a two-fold set of challenges:

How to orchestrate brand touchpoints to balance hearts and minds?
In addition to asking what factors were most important for brands to communicate, we also asked participants to identify marketing media most aligned with these qualities. Respondents rated the Internet most capable of “giving information,” closely followed by live event marketing. For “relating to me” and “explaining what the product/brand stands for,” respondents were almost evenly split on what media are most effective: the top three included live event marketing, word of mouth and the Internet. Again, in the parallel questions for employer branding, respondents were evenly balanced on the influence of hearing from a manager and participating in live event marketing.
How to adjust communications to the nuances of the audience?
For example, gaining information from products and brands is significantly more likely to be important to older respondents than to younger ones, and by American and Australian versus Chinese respondents. In our survey it was cited by 93% of 50-65 year-olds as compared to 83% of 24-37 year-olds; and by 94% of respondents in both the US and Australia versus 74% in China.

Additional information about the study, as well as prior studies looking at specific demographics such as Hispanics in the US, can be found in white papers available for download as well as by contacting the author.