Emotion must lead, reason must follow
- Fri, May 27 2011
- Filed under: Marketing essentials
Are you about to start a conversation with a statistic?
Stop.
Emotion must lead, reason must follow. Because that’s how you commune with the human brain. Emotion first, reason second. Heart, then facts.
Please, REMEMBER THIS. Whatever your cause, whoever your audience, you must start every conversation with the emotional heart of your cause, not the facts of its scope or scale in the world. If you don’t create emotional space in the mind for your cause, there will be no place for your information to find a home. And if you do not create a social landscape for a relationship, there is no place for human connection.
If I had a dollar for every person who asked if this applied to them, I’d have a lot of money for my nonprofit. My answer is always this: There are no exceptions to the rule that you must awaken the heart to arouse the mind.
David Brooks says this so very eloquently in his new book, The Social Animal:
“Reason is nestled upon emotion and dependent upon it. Emotion assigns value to things, and reason can only make choices on the basis of those valuations. The human mind can be pragmatic because deep down it is romantic.”
Decision making is not a point in time, says Brooks: “We are primarily wanderers, not decision makers… We are pilgrims in a social landscape.”
So true. So well said.
Comments
Absolutely right on! Thanks for that post. We are right in the middle of fundraising after starting our nonprofit through http://Simplenonprofit.com in 4 weeks. The fundraising is going great but must be preceeded with the emotion. Great post.
I agree with your point,nice article,thanks.I will continue to read your articles.
Most what i read online is trash and copy paste but i think you offer something different. Keep it like this.
Every time I see/hear something that’s leading with an emotional appeal, I’m pretty sure that I’m about to get scammed somehow. Leading with emotion is a way to short-circuit logic, and the only reason one would be looking to short-circuit logic would be to scam your audience ... to buy something they don’t need, to do something they wouldn’t otherwise do, to give money that they don’t have room in their budget to give, etc. I quit listening to radio because every damn commercial was trying to make me feel greed, envy, fear, lust, whatever, in the hope that said emotion would over-power my rational mind and make me want to get whatever it was they were pitching. SURE, if your GOAL is to get people to do things that they would not, following their rational self-interest, DO ... leading with emotion is the #1 way to attain compliance ... but how do you look at yourself in the mirror afterwards?
In fact your creative writing abilities has inspired me to start my own Blog.