Hint: you already have it, you just aren’t using it to your advantage.
While everyone else remembers Super Bowl LI for New England’s 25-point run to tie and 75-yard drive in overtime to win the game, us hardcore marketers will remember it as the year a lumber company produced a commercial so emotionally impactful, it got millions of Americans right in the feels. A lumber company…
Emotional storytelling is expected in the B2C vertical but rarely is it seen in B2B, especially to this degree. Arguably, never has such an un-relatable product/service provider tied so many people together.
The full-length video is almost six minutes long, which meant 84 Lumber had to pull taught the heartstrings of America using only a fraction of the whole story (a 30-second ad spot during the Super Bowl costs roughly $4.5 million). Their tear-jerker of a plot was so powerful; people flocked online to watch the rest of the story and crashed 84 Lumber’s website.
Here's the full version, deemed too controversial for the original ad and banned from broadcast.
Most marketers see B2C as an easier vertical for emotional storytelling because it targets individual people. On the flip side, B2B targets businesses; it’s less personal. But behind every B2B deal, it’s still people that are seeking solutions and making decisions. And emotion is the one thing that every person on the planet has in common.
It’s a scientific fact, our amygdala (the part of our brain that deals with emotion) sends sound and sight triggered by emotion directly into our memory bank. In other words, emotionally-driven moments become permanent fixtures in our minds. The stronger the emotion, the more we remember it.
How B2B Brands Can Harness the Power of Emotion
True, most B2B brands are missing an opportunity to use emotion as a business driver. Let their shortcoming be your gain! Here’s how to give your audiences all the feels:
1. Feature Real People
We mirror the emotions of others. It’s why we smile during happy scenes in a movie or cry during sad moments. If you want your audiences to feel emotion, you need real people to play out the emotions on screen. MetLife crushed this concept in their commercial, My Dad’s Story.
2. Tell a Story of Triumph
The best stories get readers emotionally involved in the main character’s plight and frame the character as a hero of sorts. In this case, your B2B brand plays the lead. Does your organization have a “rags to riches” story? Tell it! Has your product or service made a profound difference in another organization’s success? Share it!
3. Use Powerful Music
Music triggers attention and memory and stimulates the release of dopamine and endorphins. What’s more impressive, research found that music influences the way we see and interpret visual images. Sad music makes us feel sad about what we see. Energetic music gets us excited about what we see. Take Peak Completions, for example. Most people have no idea what down-hole tooling is. But this video builds anticipation and makes viewers feel the gravity of the work Peak Completions does. Strip the music. Would this video have the same impact?
4. Add Shock Value
Tell a story your viewer hasn’t heard. Take the story for an unexpected turn. Surprising your audience is a surefire way to elicit emotions they weren't expecting to feel. Impromptu emotion is highly memorable.
Risual does a great job evoking impromptu ‘happy’ emotions with this video. It features a punchy narrator with just the right level of sarcasm to make the video entertaining and (dare I say) even fun.
5. Exercise Your Viewer’s Empathy
GE is one of the best examples of a B2B company getting emotional with their audiences. Their video, “Ideas Are Scary” targets empathy in such a brilliant way; it makes audiences see GE as a liberator. When we practice empathy, we’re making a deliberate decision to feel someone else’s emotions. This often results in taking some form of action (a.k.a. a marketer’s hoop-dream).
Happiness, sadness, fear, joy, surprise…each emotion you share with your audiences is an opportunity for your brand to build trust and loyalty. However, emotional storytelling walks a fine line. It’s easy for these types of videos to miss the mark on ‘funny’ or ‘heartfelt’ and teeter into ‘corny’ or ‘over-the-line’ territory. To ensure the right emotional chords get struck, bring in a professional scriptwriter and video marketer and producer. They offer years of experience helping companies embrace the best parts of their brand characters and stories.
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