Logic vs. Emotion

I’m going to make this quite short, because I know you don’t have much time to be reading this, and I don’t have much time to be writing it. But this is a marketing topic that’s been on my mind recently and something that I think is quite key when thinking about your content marketing strategy.

What is a logical strategy? 

I would describe a logical social media strategy as being quite 'textbook', lets look at some key characteristics of a ‘logical’ strategy to expand upon what I mean –

• It is typically a B2B strategy
• The objectives are to build better relationships with your target audience and create helpful and inspiring content that your audience will be interested in
• There may also be an emphasis on data management and thinking about your USP
• A successful example of this type of strategy is to look at the Obama president election campaign
• A logical strategy doesn’t necessarily mean it’s 'boring' and can still be very effective and successful, in fact there is still plenty of room for creativity as you evolve your brand, to really get under the skin of your audience, and become super relevant, helpful and inspiring.

What is an emotional strategy? 

An emotional strategy is one in which the objective isn’t so much about understanding your audience and building relationships, but is simply about emotionally engaging your target audience. Your objective here is simply about making people happy and feel good about themselves.

Lets look at some key characteristics of an ‘emotional’ strategy –

• This is typically a B2C strategy
• One popular tactic of an emotional online campaign is to focus on doing something out of the ordinary, i.e. think Trigger Happy, coming up with some sort of public prank or joke within a serious real life situation. This Volkswagen campaign is a good example of this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SByymar3bds&feature=youtu.be 
• Another popular online emotional strategy is to do something kind, charitable, courageous, moral, something that inspires people’s angelic nature. Deep down we all yearn to be good human beings and want to ‘share’ examples of our good nature with others. An example of this is Innocent’s ethical campaign encouraging people to knit to raise money for Age UK. Another good example of this is to look at Jeremy Corbyn's Labour election campaign. He won that by a landslide. The fact of the matter is that all of the candidates at the beginning were all pretty much on the same level (Corbyn was actually the least favourite at the beginning), but it was because of Corbyn's humanitarianism, which was the key reason for massively tilting the tide in his favour to winning leadership.
• Social media content that focuses on cute animals is of course always a winner too. Animals personify the definition of emotion, unlike human beings they have no capacity for logic, hence the reason why people love them, apart from when they’re pooping of course.
• Staying in touch with fun events that are in the news such as the Superbowl or the release of Star Wars 7 again will capture people’s hearts too. Google’s Twitter account does this pretty well.

So, which strategy do you prefer?

Of course, you could argue that you could fit your emotional strategy as a part of your logical strategy. That would transform your strategy into a... erm .... strategy? But looking at it like that would kind of make this blog post a bit pointless, so let's not go there.