So reader, how are you feeling? Over the past few weeks, we’ve talked about how emotions affect decision making. We have talked about the neuroscience of what the loss of emotions can do to your brain, and how emotions affect your decisions, even economically. Today, we want to dip into something a little bit more practical. We want to explain how we use these ideas when we make videos for a clients in order to draw viewers in with emotions and then present them with the data they need in order to make a decision. And we genuinely hope that all this talk about emotions is giving you the feels. It is for sure giving us the feels.
1) Columbus School for Girls and Appealing to Parents:
In our aforementioned blog post about emotional decision making, we talked about Charlotte Falk and her decision to attend the Columbus School for Girls. (If you want to read more about that story, click here.) The reason why we focused on Charlotte’s story in that particular blog post is that it is a very good example of how the emotional argument can often outweigh the statistical argument.
Sure, CSG has all of the numbers to support the success of their graduates (SAT scores, college enrollment statistics, etc.). But when we began thinking about what a mother and father would want to see in terms of their daughter’s future, we realized that they would want to see how happy, thriving, and engaged their child could be if she were enrolled at Columbus School for Girls. We realized that appealing to the emotions of the prospective students and parents was the most important thing, because most parents just want to be sure that their child is happy.
2) Melinda’s Story and What it Means to Help
A few months ago we talked about Melinda’s story when we broke down the science behind storytelling and focused on emotions. When Mercy Health approached us to do a series of videos for them, they asked us to help them with internal employee engagement. The Purpose of Melinda’s story was to highlight how much of a difference Mercy Health employees make when they do their jobs. From a practical standpoint, it would have been easy to make a video outlining the statistical advantages of working for Mercy Health. To show the benefits provided by the company, the number of people that the hospital helps on a yearly basis, etc. Instead, we made a video outlining Melinda’s experience of working in hospice care and standing by people’s bedsides as they pass on from this world. Why did we do this? Because it is one thing to give a presentation about why an employee’s job matters. It’s a completely different thing to show that job mattering in real time. With Melinda’s story, that’s what we tried to do.
3) Ethiopia and the Dreamy Candle Company
If you only knew the most basic information about Eleventh Candle Company- that they are a company that sells candles to help support women in Ethiopia- what kind of video would you like to see explaining their mission? Amber Runyon, the founder of the company, has all of the statistics relating to how the sale of candles benefits the people of Ethiopia and how they are reaching out to make a difference.. Instead of showing all of that, we decide to make a video in the streets of Ethiopia, following Amber through a normal day. By allowing the viewer to actually see the people they are helping, it plays to the emotional argument that the story Amber is important and worth supporting.
Every video we make, whether it’s following a man with his large format camera into the woods for a day, or telling the story of a man with Multiple Myeloma, we want to find the emotion in the story first and then show the statistical, rational part second. If you choose to partner with us at Rooted Content on your next video marketing campaign, we can guarantee that we will work with you to find the heart of your story. Because most of the time we act with our hearts, and that’s a beautiful thing.