How to move humans as humans

At a glance

• Effective marketing is rooted in empathy and understanding real human emotions.
• Over-reliance on data and rational messaging weakens connection and fails to drive behaviour.
• Emotional insight and vulnerability are essential to creating work that truly resonates.

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Editor’s note: This article was adapted from APG Canada’s Eat Your Beets, a collection of essays on strategic planning by 27 of Canada’s most strategic thinkers in brand, media and digital strategy.

By Kristy Pleckaitis

Eight years ago, I made the move from UX designer to brand strategist. In those early days, I thought the two career paths demanded a very similar skill set: primarily, making sense of hundreds of data points and transforming them into an experience that would satisfy a need and motivate action. And while my understanding of the goal was right, my approach was wrong.

I thought providing rationality was the job of a strategist. Emotion was the job of the creatives. But the more feeling I removed, the more I lost clients in presentations, creatives in the briefing process and the consumer’s love for the brand. I should have recognized the mistake I was making, but years of applying logic to my work was a hard habit to shake.

Then the pandemic happened. And like so many, I spent months in personal reflection. I started working through new emotions and ones that I had silenced over time, searching for the version of me that felt real but that had been hidden for so long. The biggest breakthroughs and changes came in those moments when I allowed myself to be vulnerable, not just in times of solitude but with others as well. I started to wonder what else I could affect in my life with this new power.

I originally fell in love with advertising because it was a creative field in which I could participate and impact others. I still remember when the SickKids VS campaign launched in 2016. It triggered tears of sadness and frustration, but also hope. Fast forward seven years, and there are very few ads that I can recall (or had a hand in creating) in the time between that truly made me feel something.

But why is there such a dry spell in our industry? Isn’t advertising supposed to move us? It should, yes. But it only will if the people doing the work know how to move the people watching it. Having that ability is contingent on two things: an understanding of the human condition and guts. Our ability to understand the human condition requires us to be in touch with our own emotions.

Guts give us the courage to put the most intimate and vulnerable emotions on display for the world to see.

So why is it that strategists have a hard time accomplishing this? There are a few reasons.

First, we want to appear smart (smart is the supposed domain of the strategist, which I will address later). And data gives us that cloak of intelligence. It’s easy to hide behind numbers and statistics if we lack confidence in our ability to set the direction and defend our position. We hedge our bets by bombarding our audience with information, hoping that somewhere in our hundred-page deck lies the answer. We want to appear like we’ve done our homework, but we rely on others to connect the dots for us. Then we avoid opposition to our work – and ultimately, having to be vulnerable – by pointing at the data. (I want to caveat that I am not opposed to research. I think data can be helpful when used to support a strategic thought – not lead it.) The problem with this is that our work becomes predicated on observation, instead of understanding emotional motivators. The result: work that fails to change behaviour.

Second, we assume people are rational actors. Largely because that’s what they tell us. And for good reason: activating your analytical brain during the decision-making process makes you appear to be in control of your behaviour and your ability to navigate complex judgement calls with little error. But the truth is, we’re human. And humans are instructed by their subconscious, driven by emotion. If we want to motivate people to act, we need to consistently build emotional memory structures within the brain that can be triggered later with more rational communications. And let’s be thankful that we as strategists can feel. It’s what gives us the advantage over AI.

Last, strategists desire to have ownership over a domain within agencies. Unlike other teams, our work is an input (albeit an important one) to the creative, versus an end in itself. Strategy is not tangible. We are being paid to provide direction. And that can be a difficult thing to wrap your head around, especially when agencies are set up to bill by the hour. To justify our existence and prove our worth, we default to showing our homework, and lots of it.

As I mature through my career, the importance of buying into a philosophy that matches my own becomes critical. It’s difficult to break through a system with opposing views on how to get to great creative work. I knew that I needed to find an agency that wanted strategists to feel their way through brand challenges, not just think their way through them. That’s why I joined Broken Heart Love Affair, to bring the love back to advertising. To create feelings. After all, we’re humans trying to connect with humans. It’s time to start working like the humans we are.