The Science of Keeping It Real

We crave the purity of an emotional connection with things that are real.

In sport we laud and love the art and grit of the battle and the warriors that participate in it. In the arts, those that move our emotions in some way like Picasso, Russell Crowe and Jonathan Franzen are heaped with acclaim and riches often disproportionate to their efforts. And as far as marketers are conce
ed, the cash register is the ultimate measure of success.

Creating an emotional connection, no matter what the field is good business.

Obviously, it takes a lot of time, effort and skill to create these connections. In fact, creating something real, pure and commercial (the key element here) is the result of intricate planning and process implementation. Doesn’t sound too real or pure, huh? But as we are such emotion seeking beings, we don’t care about how hard the duck is paddling under the water, as long as we can enjoy it serenely gliding across the pond. ‘Reality TV’ is the ultimate example of gimlet eyed executives creating disposable shows that are calculated to target our often base emotions. And given their proliferation, they usually succeed.

However, we humans have a range of emotions and we often enjoy it just as much when things go wrong as when they go right; you only have to see people slowing down to visually feast on any car crash to understand that. So it’s often those unplanned moments that are truly memorable. Last week’s balls up on Australia’s Next Top Model – http://bit.ly/dcj3cf - where the host Sarah Murdoch announced the wrong winner on live television only to correct herself after the non-winner had made a tear soaked speeched was a perfect example. The ‘production error’ made headlines globally. Had things gone according to plan, the couple of hundred thousand viewers would almost certainly have forgotten about the show by the next morning.

So in this sanitised world of artifice and cunning, reality can hit us in many different ways and guises. The trick is to at least attempt to get to the heart of what your market craves.