Emotions are easily the most powerful force of action or change people can experience. People react passionately to things or ideas that evoke a feeling deep within them. Sometimes this feeling can be explained in simple terms and other times it can be unexplainable. As communicators, it is important to recognize the value of emotion and learn how to control your audience’s reaction without manipulating it.
In the Heath brother’s novel “Made to Stick”, they explain that the key to making a message stick is to align it with an emotion that is widely shared and recognized. You want to tell people what to feel without actually telling them. They express the notion that, “if we want to make people care, we’ve got to tap into the things they care about” (Heath, 176). Companies find success with commercials and ad campaigns when they associate their product with an emotion that people can relate to.
One of the commercials that always stuck with me was one of Apple’s first FaceTime commercials. The commercial portrays a series of conversations between people FaceTiming one another. Each conversation exudes a different emotion, such as: giddiness, happiness, excitement, sadness, and loneliness. Although each conversation evokes a different simple emotion, they all cause a feeling of nostalgia or a feeling of want.
There is a way for every person who sees this commercial to relate themselves to at least one of the situations. This relation can come from a past memory being sparked or seeing a hope for the future come alive. Even the sad and lonely scenarios have a tinge of understanding and positivity.
I found that I related to a large majority of the scenes in some way. The two main scenes that stuck out to me were the one with the woman laughing hysterically in bed and the young couple after they got engaged. The woman laughing reminds me of talking to a close friend and evoked that feeling of giddiness and nostalgia inside of me. The proposal scene evoked that sense of future want and made me feel happy knowing that when that time comes for me I will be able to show my family and friends my reaction and ring right after it happens.
This commercial is successful because Apple is able to make their audience feel these emotions and relate them to their own lives. Once they make a connection with their audience they are able to express that because of their advanced technology these intimate conversations are made possible. FaceTime connects people and allows them to share these emotions with their loved ones the closest way to a face-to-face conversation that there is without being physically together. By appealing to emotions, Apple was able to successfully get the point of FaceTime across without ever really explaining its purpose in words.
Effortlessly Elegant 