To win you must use emotion first

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Political campaigns have historically been constructed using two kinds of models: call-to-action model or rational appeal model. Both are fairly straightforward. The former urges consumers to “try today”, “call now” or “vote”. The latter highlights the unique selling point of the candidate. But before I dive into substantiating the role of emotions in winning, I need to acknowledge my work made easy by two digital journals. The Conversation that carried an article on June 20, 2019, titled Persuasive politics: why emotional beats rational for connecting with voters and Tears and Laughter – How to beat Modi? by Shivam Vij in The Print.

A recent example of the rational appeal model can be seen in UK Conservative Party’s 2017 general election campaign, “Forward Together”. "The proposition was based on the unique selling point that Theresa May was a stronger leader, matched with the insight that voters perceived strong leadership to be a positive quality. But people just didn’t buy it, and the election left her significantly weaker."

This kind of rational messaging requires audiences to use, what psychologist Daniel Kahneman propounded, “System 2” thinking. It is an effortful, slow and considered way of thinking that becomes more difficult as we get older. As a result communication tactics typically involve drumming messages through a process of repetition. But this “rhetorical carpet bombing” quickly becomes boring and worse, a blind spot.

Campaign managers in politics could learn from the commercial world a different method of brand communication.

Rather than explicitly promoting a product's quality and benefits arising from that quality, brands employ emotions to appeal to the consumer. The strength of this kind of communication lies in the fact that it is focused on the consumer rather than the product. It considers the wants and needs of the target audience – how the consumer thinks and behaves. This insight enables the brand to create a message that is relevant and relatable. The consumer is more likely to buy-in to the brand’s story, since stories are more memorable and retrievable than rational based messaging.

Take for example, the beer company Carlsberg, recently ditched its famous “Probably the best lager in the world” slogan in favor of the rather unclear “Danish Pilsner”. “The beer company is not making any claims to promote quality or benefits of the product. Instead the aim is to make an emotional connection with the consumers. “Danish” implies qualities of provenance or heritage that, perhaps, are popular with consumers, leading them to think positively about the beer.”

Emotional communication manages to catch the attention of the audience as well as encourage associations that in turn guide judgments and simplify decision-making. It manages to do this because it requires only “System 1” thinking: an automatic and often unconscious way of thinking that is effortless and demands little or no attention.

If you ask people the meaning of Nike’s “Just do it”, you’ll get answers that reflect hope, desire and belief of the individual. It invites people to project their own meaning to the brand message. And that is the key to effective messaging through emotions because the aim of the message should be to influence how people feel, not just what they think.

It could not be more relevant in today’s India where, “irrational emotional commitment to rationality” seems to be driving the voting pattern, says Shivam Vij.

Drew Westen, a professor of psychology in Atlanta, US found that the human brain responds to politics more through emotion than reason. But emotions alone would yield little result in converting emotion to action. You can say that buying a 35 lac BMW is an emotional purchase. Yes, it is about status. But one still needs to supply a rationale for that purchase. BMW is a driving machine and no one would admit to themselves that this purchase is all about status. The human mind uses both emotion and reason together. But to sell reason, one must use emotion first.

Think of every successful public figure. You will see that they evoke emotions in people, and they do so partly because they use emotions in their messaging. This is true of Martin Luther King Jr., Narendra Modi, Barack Obama, John F. Kennedy, Steve Jobs and many more. But one politician who just doesn’t appeal to emotion at all is Rahul Gandhi. “The hesitation in using emotions is a major reason why Congress, and liberal politics in India at large have lost the ability to influence the masses. The Congress is the party of the Mahatma, the father of the nation; of Chacha Nehru, the maker of modern India; of Indira and Rajiv Gandhi, who gave up their lives for India. Yet, the BJP manages to own nationalism partly because the Congress doesn’t use emotions while reaching out to the people with its ideas and icons” says Shivam Vij.

“In politics, when reason and emotion collide, emotion invariably wins”, writes Westen. A good comparison that Shivam Vij gives is about how Modi sells the Ujjwala scheme to give free gas cylinders to households and how the Congress has not sold the Right to Food or indeed any of the UPA’s rights based schemes. Modi will remind you of the suffering of mothers, the Congress will give you a statistic.

The day an opposition leader talks about what it feels like to be unemployed. Or makes you empathize with an automobile factory worker who has returned to his/her village with little hope of earning a living again. That day the Modi story will begin to lose its hold.

The successful use of emotions to succeed is so eloquently described by Westen, “You know you have a good candidate when he or she can make you laugh, move you to tears, enunciate your shared values in a way that puts a shiver down your spine, deliver a eulogy or address a national tragedy in a way that puts a lump in your throat, criticizes the other side with a sharp joke that is so disarming that you barely realize its more than a scratch until you see the bandage, and elicit moral outrage so powerful you want to go to the polls tomorrow.”