How people choose: Emotion, reason and the power of creative marketing

I wanted an iPod before I knew why

Back in 2005, I wanted an iPod.

Actually, that does not quite cover it. I felt an overwhelming need for one.

This was the era of Apple’s silhouette adverts, with dancers moving against blocks of bright colour, white headphones standing out against the screen. The iPod nano had just been released and, from the moment I saw it, I wanted one. The strange thing was that I could not really justify wanting one.

At the time I had a hectic work schedule, a short 10-minute commute in the car, and a young family. I wasn’t spending hours on trains. I had a stereo at home when we occasionally found the time to listen to music, and the car had a good sound system too. I couldn’t immediately think of any situations where I would use an iPod. There was no obvious silence in my life that urgently needed filling.

But none of that seemed to matter. The desire was palpable, and the explanation just had to catch up.

I could point to the size of the device, the number of tracks it could hold or the simplicity of having everything in one place. As a marketing person, I’ve heard Apple’s famous promise, “1,000 songs in your pocket”, countless times. There is genius buried in that phrase, but I can honestly say that wasn’t it either. Those were perfectly sensible reasons, but they were not what had created the initial pull.

Apple had made the product feel exciting, personal and desirable. The advertising didn’t simply explain how the device worked. It showed what it might feel like to own one. And that distinction has stayed with me because it says something important about how people make decisions.

We like to believe that we’re rational beings. That we weigh up the options, compare the evidence and then choose what makes the most sense. Sometimes we do. But many decisions begin somewhere less orderly.

Something catches our attention. It just feels right. We recognise ourselves in it. We want the outcome it seems to promise. We’re being pulled, not by our heads, but by our hearts.

Only then do we begin gathering the reasons that make the choice feel sensible. Enough ammunition to justify our decision to ourselves.

That does not mean the reasons are false or unimportant. The iPod really was small, beautifully designed and easy to use. But those facts became more powerful because I already wanted the product.

Hats off to the creatives at TBWA\Chiat\Day. Their work had done more than help me understand the product. It had created an emotional pull.

We like to believe we make rational choices

There is something reassuring about the idea that we make decisions rationally. Faced with a choice, we gather the relevant information, weigh up the advantages and disadvantages, and select the option that offers the greatest benefit.

It is an appealing picture of human behaviour. It makes us feel considered, independent and in control. It is also incomplete.

Even relatively ordinary purchases can involve more information than we could reasonably process. Walk into a supermarket to buy washing-up liquid and you’re hit with a barrage of comparable data: price, bottle size, concentration, fragrance, environmental credentials, expected number of washes and your previous experience. You could check the ingredients, read reviews and, if you’re that way inclined — yes, Tom, I’m looking at you — calculate the cost per use. Of course, most of us do nothing of the sort.

We recognise a bottle. We notice that one is on offer. We remember that the last brand worked perfectly well. We like the fragrance, trust the name or simply reach for the one we normally buy. The decision may take a fraction of a second.

That does not make us foolish or careless. We have limited time, attention and energy, and most decisions do not deserve a detailed investigation. We need ways to reduce the complexity and reach an answer that feels ‘good enough’.

Even when the stakes are higher, the decision is rarely a straightforward calculation. We might spend weeks comparing cars, kitchens, holidays or business suppliers, but the amount of research does not remove feeling from the process. I bought a new car last year and I’m desperately trying not to analyse my decision-making process! We still respond to confidence, familiarity, desire, trust, status, fear, excitement and the gut feeling that one choice is more like us than another.

The same applies in business. A retail buyer may analyse margins, sales forecasts, category performance and promotional support, but they are also considering risk. Do they trust the supplier? Does the range feel right for their customers? Will the product be noticed and understood? Can they imagine it selling from the shelf?

The spreadsheet matters, but so does the feeling the proposition creates.

We can see this in the explanations people give for their choices. Ask someone why they bought a particular product and they will usually offer a perfectly sensible reason: it was better value, the specifications were better, it had stronger reviews or it offered a longer guarantee. Those reasons may be entirely genuine. But they are not necessarily the whole story.

The product may simply have looked better to them. The brand may have felt more familiar. The packaging may have appeared more premium. A friend’s recommendation may have made the choice feel safer. The customer might simply have wanted it more and then found the evidence that gave them confidence to go ahead.

Much of this happens without a running commentary in our heads. You may not be surprised to hear that we don’t consciously announce that a familiar logo has reduced our sense of risk or that the design has made the product feel more valuable. We experience the combined result as an impression: this looks good, this feels trustworthy, this is probably the right choice.

That is why describing people’s decision-making process as either rational or irrational does not get us very far. A quick, emotional decision is not automatically a bad one, just as a carefully analysed decision is not guaranteed to be right. A gut reaction can reflect years of experience, just as a detailed spreadsheet can be built on the wrong assumptions.

Our decisions are usually made through a mixture of feeling, experience and conscious thought. The proportions change depending on what we are buying, how much it costs, how familiar the choice is and what we believe is at risk.

Reason plays an important role. It helps us compare and check. But it doesn’t operate in isolation, and it rarely arrives first.

Feeling gives a decision direction

If reason rarely acts alone, what gives a decision its direction in the first place?

The Scottish philosopher David Hume was thinking about this nearly three centuries before anyone wanted an iPod. He argued that reason, on its own, cannot motivate us to act. It can help us understand a situation, compare the options and work out the likely consequences, but it cannot decide what we care about.

Reason can tell me that one train will get me to London faster than another. But it can’t make me want to go to London.

That desire has to come from somewhere else. It might be driven by pleasure, ambition, fear, curiosity, duty, love or the simple wish to avoid spending another evening at home. Whatever the motive, it gives the reasoning process something to work towards.

And this is an important distinction, because we often expect facts to do a job they can’t do alone. A product’s feature list may give you the details, but information does not automatically create interest. A customer can fully understand a product and still feel no desire to own it.

Imagine two cordless drills with similar specifications. One shopper may see little more than battery life, power and price. Another might imagine finally putting up the shelves that have been sitting in the garage for six months. They may picture themselves feeling capable, getting the job done properly and perhaps earning a small amount of domestic approval in the process.

The practical information matters, but the imagined outcome can give it meaning.

Of course, we don’t all approach decisions in the same way. One person might happily choose the first drill that feels right, while another will compare specifications, read reviews and watch several hours of people testing them on YouTube. What excites one person may leave another completely unmoved.

Even then, the distinction between an emotional and a rational buyer is not as clear as it first appears. The person doing all that research may enjoy the process, want the reassurance of making a well-supported choice or simply hate the thought of getting it wrong. Facts and figures can satisfy an emotional need too (apparently).

Nor are we consistent from one decision to the next. We might research a car for months, choose our usual washing-up liquid without blinking and buy a book based on the cover (so much for never judging a book by its cover). How we decide depends on what we are buying, how much we care, how much it costs and the situation we find ourselves in.

The same feature can also appeal to different people for completely different reasons. A lightweight lawnmower might offer convenience to one person, confidence to someone worried about handling a larger machine and independence to someone who no longer wants to ask for help. The physical truth remains the same. What changes is the value attached to it.

This is where the word ‘emotion’ can be slightly unhelpful. It makes us think of dramatic feelings: joy, fear, sadness or the sort of soppy heart-warming story designed to make us cry during an advert (yes, that’s a dig at you, John Lewis). But emotional responses are often much more subtle than that. They might appear as reassurance, curiosity, recognition, relief or the vague sense that something simply feels right.

These feelings help us choose what deserves our attention. They tell us which outcomes are attractive, which risks matter and which possibilities are worth pursuing. Without them, we might be able to compare the available options perfectly well, but we would have no reason to prefer one outcome over another.

That does not mean every feeling is wise or every instinct should be trusted. We can desire things that are bad for us, become attached to an idea for the wrong reasons or mistake familiarity for quality. Our emotional response might be based on poor information, an irrelevant association or a prejudice we have never stopped to examine.

Reason has an important role in questioning those reactions. It can ask how well the product really works, whether we can afford it and whether the claims on the pack are true. But it is often responding to a feeling that has already begun to form: I want this, I am worried about that, this matters to me.

For marketers, that leads to a deceptively simple question: What does the customer actually want?

The answer is rarely limited to the product’s function. Someone buying paint may want to change how a room feels. Someone choosing a skincare product may want confidence or a small moment of personal care. A buyer considering a new garden range may want commercial growth, but they may also want to reduce the risk of backing the wrong supplier.

The product has a practical job to do, but the decision is connected to a human outcome. Good marketing helps people make that connection. It doesn’t invent a desire from nothing, nor does it need to whip every purchase into an emotional drama (thank goodness). It recognises what people already care about and shows how the product might help them move towards that.

That is why a product benefit is more powerful than a feature, but even a benefit may not go far enough. ‘Cuts grass in half the time’ tells me what improves. ‘More time to enjoy your garden’ begins to tell me why I might care.

The strongest communication connects what the product does with something the customer values. Reason can help us assess the promise. But feeling is often what creates the desire in the first place.

The mind uses clues and mental shortcuts

None of us have the time, energy or inclination to investigate every choice from first principles. Even when the information is available, there is usually far more of it than we can sensibly absorb. So we look for clues.

We use what psychologists call ‘heuristics’, although ‘mental shortcuts’ is a far more helpful way of describing them. These are simple rules of thumb that help us reach a decision without weighing up every possible detail.

We might choose a restaurant because it is busy, reasoning that all those people can’t be wrong. We may trust a product because we recognise the brand, assume something expensive is better made, or feel reassured because an item has thousands of positive reviews.

If you stop and think, none of these clues gives us a guarantee. A busy restaurant can still serve a disappointing meal, a familiar brand can make a bad product, and an expensive bottle of wine can be wasted on someone who would have preferred the cheaper one (quite possibly me). Even so, the clues reduce uncertainty and help us decide.

These mental shortcuts are what stop us from being paralysed by decisions. They’re often practical and necessary, and most of the time they get us to a perfectly acceptable answer with very little effort.

The amount of thought we give a choice usually reflects what we feel is at stake. We are unlikely to research a packet of biscuits as thoroughly as a new car, although I am sure there is someone online who would happily prove me wrong. But mental shortcuts don’t disappear when the purchase becomes more expensive. They simply sit alongside more deliberate research.

Someone choosing a car may compare fuel economy, reliability, insurance costs and boot space, but they will probably use the manufacturer’s reputation as a clue to quality. They may take comfort from seeing lots of the same model on the road or feel that one badge says something more appealing about them than another.

Clearly, the facts matter, but mental shortcuts influence which facts we pay attention to and contribute to the gut feeling we experience.

Familiarity can feel safer
Familiarity creates a powerful mental shortcut. When we recognise something, it tends to feel comfortable. We have encountered it before and survived the experience, which is not the most inspiring brand promise in the world, but it carries more weight than it sounds.

This helps explain why people often choose a familiar brand over an unknown alternative, even when they know very little about either product. Recognition creates a small sense of reassurance: I’ve seen this before, so it probably isn’t a complete unknown.

Price can become a clue to quality
When quality is difficult to judge, people may use price as a guide. A more expensive wine, skincare product or piece of equipment can feel as though it ought to be better, even before we have used it.

Sometimes this might be a reasonable assumption. Higher-quality materials and better manufacturing often cost more. But that clue is not perfect, and our expectations can influence the experience itself. If we believe something is premium, we may pay closer attention to the details that back up our belief.

The opposite can also be true. If a product looks unusually cheap — if the price seems ‘too good to be true’ — we may start looking for where corners have been cut, even when there is nothing obvious.

Safety in numbers
As humans, we often seek safety in numbers. We like to stick with the herd. When we’re confused and need guidance or reassurance, we often look at what others have chosen. Reviews, recommendations, queues and full restaurants all suggest that somebody else has already done some of the work for us. Even a bestseller label can be enough to convince us that a product will be all right.

This is particularly powerful when we trust the source or recognise ourselves in the people giving the advice. A recommendation from a friend may carry more weight than the view of a stranger, while an expert can feel more reliable than a novice. Even a stranger may be persuasive when we recognise something of ourselves or our situation in them.

What other people say or choose doesn’t prove that something is right for us, but it can make the decision feel safer.

Presentation shapes expectation
Well, this part feels like WrightObara’s home turf. We judge products by how they are presented. Clear, well-designed packaging can make a product feel more considered and credible. Confusing information and poor design can put us off, even before we’ve considered the details.

That may seem unfair. The contents of a bottle do not become more effective because the label is beautifully designed. But presentation is one of the few clues available before we purchase a product.

When we can’t see the ingredients, manufacturing process or effectiveness of a product, we judge it through what we can see.

This is why creative work is not simply decoration. Design, message hierarchy, tone of voice and storytelling help people form expectations about quality, relevance and trust. Experience may later confirm or contradict those expectations, but they are already influencing the decision.

Mental shortcuts are not always right
There is a catch. A useful shortcut can also lead us astray. Familiarity can be mistaken for quality. Popularity can be confused with suitability. Beautiful design can give the illusion of credibility, while a genuinely good product may be overlooked because it is poorly communicated.

Our quick judgements can also reflect habits, assumptions and prejudices we’ve never consciously examined. The fact that a decision feels instinctively right doesn’t necessarily mean that it is.

But the answer is not to imagine that people can, or should, remove all shortcuts from their thinking. We couldn’t function if every choice required a thorough investigation. The more realistic task is to recognise the clues and mental shortcuts we use, and understand when they are likely to help us.

For marketers, this presents both an opportunity and a responsibility. We need to understand the clues people rely on, but not use them to disguise a product that fails to deliver. Familiarity, presentation, social proof and price can all make a promise more believable, but the experience still has to support it.

Over time, those personal experiences create another, more powerful shortcut. People begin to associate the business with a set of expectations: reliable, inventive, expensive, friendly, responsible, complicated, safe or even simply not right for me.

And that is where we begin to move from a collection of clues to something we call a brand.

A brand becomes a gut feeling

When we encounter a business repeatedly, we gradually stop judging every interaction as a completely separate event. Our experiences combine to form a wider impression.

We don’t necessarily keep a conscious record of every interaction or experience. Instead, they leave us with a feeling: I like them. They’re quirky and fun. They know what they’re doing. They care about quality. Or, less positively, they’re difficult to deal with.

That accumulated impression is the brand, distilled into a gut feeling.

I’ve come across several definitions of brand over the years, but the one that feels most useful to me brings together both the experiences themselves and what they become in someone’s mind:

A brand is the accumulated effect of every promise a business makes and every experience people have with it, distilled into a gut feeling.

 

Let’s break this down a little. The first part tells us that a brand is not simply something created by a marketing department. It is shaped by the product, the people, the price, the packaging, the sales experience, the service and everything that happens after the money has changed hands. Advertising and design contribute to it, of course, but they are only part of the picture.

The second part is just as important. People don’t carry around a notebook of every encounter they have had with a company. All those individual moments become compressed into a simpler, instinctive feeling.

Another brand definition that corresponds with this idea is that a brand is what people say about you when you’ve left the room. You can see that a brand can be influenced by what you say and do, but it’s the lasting impression your audience is left with that counts.

If we’ve repeatedly had a good experience, we will probably choose the brand again without hesitation. Equally, one poor experience can create doubt that lingers long after the original problem has passed.

This is why a strong brand can make decisions easier. It gives people an idea of what to expect before they have examined all the details.

Of course, not every interaction carries the same weight. A pleasant social post is unlikely to outweigh a product that repeatedly fails. A beautifully designed box may create excitement, but that bubble will soon burst if what’s inside is disappointing.

A disappointing meal or poor service can undo the goodwill built up over many previous visits. We are not adding up every encounter with equal marks and calculating an average. Some experiences reinforce the pattern, some contradict it and some carry far more emotional weight than others.

Contradictions are especially damaging because they make the brand harder to interpret. A company might talk warmly about personal service but make it almost impossible to speak to a human being. It might claim to be simple and straightforward while presenting customers with a wall of confusing information. You might not stop to analyse the contradiction, but you can often feel it.

This is where consistency is sometimes misunderstood. Brand consistency doesn’t mean forcing the same layout, phrase or image into every piece of communication. And neither does it mean becoming repetitive or refusing to adapt.

It means everything a brand says, makes and does should be heading in broadly the same direction. The packaging, website, customer service and campaign do not need to look identical, but they should reinforce one another and feel as though they come from the same set of beliefs and expectations.

The strongest brands show consistency in their thinking: what the business stands for, what it values, how it speaks, the choices it makes and the experiences it repeatedly creates.

This also explains why businesses do not have complete control over their brands. They can shape the promises and messaging, but the final impression is formed in someone else’s mind.

Context matters, and people bring their own experiences, expectations and prejudices to every encounter. There is no single version of a brand held identically by everyone.

That doesn’t mean branding is hopelessly subjective or beyond influence. Quite the opposite. A business can make deliberate choices about the impression it wants to create, then work to reinforce that impression through what it says and does. It simply needs to recognise that intention is not the same as outcome.

Saying you are trustworthy does not create trust. Repeatedly behaving in a trustworthy way might.

For marketers, this widens the job considerably. We are not simply looking for better ways to describe a product. We are helping to shape expectations before the purchase and ensuring that the promise feels credible alongside the wider business experience.

Take packaging as an example. Its overall appearance can imply quality. A campaign can create desire, while a brand story can give the product greater meaning. Each one makes a promise, whether we state it explicitly or not, about what the customer can expect.

As those promises are kept, their effect compounds over time. Recognition grows into familiarity, familiarity can grow into trust, and the purchase decision requires a little less effort next time around. What began as a collection of separate clues and experiences has become something bigger: a feeling that helps guide future decisions.

But before a business can create that impression deliberately, it has to make some choices: who it is for, what it wants to stand for, where it can create real value and how it intends to act differently. That is where strategy enters the picture.

Understanding people is not yet a strategy

Understanding how people think and make decisions is valuable. Research can help us see what customers want, what frustrates them, what they notice, what they ignore and what makes one choice feel safer than another.

But understanding the situation is not the same as deciding what to do about it.

Strategy is often confused with research and analysis. They both feed into strategy, and without them we risk making choices based on little more than wishful thinking. But on their own, they are not strategy.

A spreadsheet can show which parts of a market are growing. Research can uncover several customer needs. Competitor analysis can reveal where other brands are strong or vulnerable. But none of them can make the decisions for you.

A business still has to decide which customer matters most, which need it wants to address, what value it is capable of creating and which audiences it’s prepared to ignore. It has to choose where it will compete and how it intends to respond in a way that is recognisably its own.

This is why I like the idea of strategy as creative decision-making.

The word creative here is important. It doesn’t mean wacky, contrary or different for the sake of it. It means arriving at an answer that is distinctive rather than generic. An answer that cannot simply be read from the final column of a spreadsheet.

If every business has access to the same market data, copies the same trends and follows the same obvious opportunities, it is hardly surprising when they all end up looking and sounding alike.

Creativity allows us to connect ideas that may not previously have belonged together, reframe the problem or spot an opportunity that is not immediately visible in the numbers. It can create something unexpected and genuinely new.

That does not mean disregarding evidence. The creative leap still has to respond to something real: a problem customers struggle with, a capability the business can use differently or a change in the way people live and behave.

A good strategic choice may not fall neatly out of the analysis, but once the idea has formed, the evidence should help it make sense.

This is also why business strategy and marketing strategy should not be treated as separate exercises. The decisions that shape marketing effectiveness are often business decisions long before they become communication decisions.

Who is the product for? What problem does it solve? Why should someone choose it? How is it priced? Where is it sold? What experience can the business genuinely deliver?

These questions shape the product, the offer and the way it is brought to market. They also shape the brand story, packaging, campaigns and sales presentations. The customer doesn’t separate them into different departments. They experience the combined result.

If a business wants to compete on simplicity, the product, service and buying experience should all feel simple. If it wants to offer reassurance in a confusing category, that should influence the instructions and customer support as much as the advertising. If it wants to stand for responsible choices, the operational decisions need to support the message.

Marketing cannot live in isolation, creating a convincing emotional pull around a promise the rest of the business is unable or unwilling to keep. That mismatch may not be immediately obvious, but it can often be felt.

At its best, strategy chooses the human need or opportunity the business will organise itself around and finds a distinctive way to respond. It gives creative work something meaningful to bring to life.

Creative marketing creates an emotional pull

A good strategy gives a business a direction, but direction alone can’t make anyone care. Unless people notice the idea, understand what it means for them and feel some desire to act, much of that value can remain hidden.

This is where creative marketing comes into its own.

Creativity is sometimes treated as the part that comes after the serious thinking has been completed. The creative team is asked to add an attractive veneer. But that reduces creativity to decoration, when its real role is much more commercially important.

Creative work helps turn an abstract proposition into something people can grasp and remember. It can turn a familiar problem into something that feels relevant or help someone picture an outcome they had not previously considered. More importantly, it can create an emotional pull.

That phrase has become central to the way I think about marketing. Product marketing should be much more than features and benefits. It needs to create some sense of attraction, recognition, curiosity, reassurance or desire. There has to be a reason for someone to engage rather than simply acknowledge that it exists.

This does not mean every advert needs to make us laugh, cry or feel inspired enough to change our lives. Emotion in marketing is often much more subtle than that.

The emotional pull depends on the product, the category and the people you are trying to reach. A garden tool might make someone feel more capable. A plant-care product might reassure them that they can solve a problem without causing unnecessary harm. An outdoor furniture range might create a desire for long summer evenings with friends. Alongside the product’s function, there is often a promise about how it might make life feel.

The practical product truths are still there. The tool may be easier to handle, the spray may offer a gentler way to deal with the problem, and the furniture may be made from more durable materials. But creative marketing connects those truths with an outcome that feels personally meaningful.

Apple did not ignore the iPod’s capabilities. The size of the device, the number of songs it could hold, and the simplicity of the experience all mattered. But the silhouette adverts did something that a specification table could not. They made the product feel energetic, personal, modern and desirable. They didn’t just explain portable music. They gave it a feeling.

Something we talk about a lot at WrightObara is whether the creative idea is genuinely relevant to the product. Creative marketing should not manufacture an unrelated emotion and attach it to a product in the hope that some of the feeling rubs off. The best work finds the emotion already contained within the product and brings it to the surface.

Sometimes that expression is a long-form story, but often it is not. Storytelling does not always require a beginning, middle and end played out over several minutes. A headline and sub-head can still tell a story. Packaging can suggest a problem, a promise and a better outcome in a few carefully chosen words. A single image can show the life someone wants rather than the product sitting in isolation. It may sound trite, but a picture really can be worth a thousand words (and a film perhaps 10,000).

What you say matters, even when you have very little room in which to say it.

This is one of the lessons I took from Made to Stick. Ideas become memorable when they are expressed with simplicity, clarity, emotion and enough concreteness for people to picture what is being offered. That does not mean reducing every proposition to a slogan or forcing communication into a formula. It means finding the core of the idea and giving it a form people can hold onto.

Creative work often appears simple once it is finished. That simplicity can disguise the thinking required to reach it. A strong headline may only be a few words long, but those words have to carry the strategy, the customer’s need, the product truth and the desired emotional response.

Distinctive visuals perform a similar job. They can attract attention, create recognition and establish an expectation before anyone has read the detailed explanation. All of the design elements — photography, illustration, typography, colour and composition — influence how the brand feels.

This is not superficial. Presentation is part of the information people use to make a judgement.

Of course, creative work can also get in the way. A beautiful campaign may be admired without anyone remembering which brand it belonged to. Creativity is not effective simply because it is attractive, entertaining or unusual. It has to connect the feeling with the product, the brand and the strategic idea.

That connection is partly what makes distinctive brand assets so valuable. When colours, design, typography, tone of voice, imagery and ideas are used consistently, the feeling created by one piece of communication can contribute to the wider brand rather than disappearing when the campaign ends.

Over time, creative work helps people recognise not just who is speaking, but the kind of promise and feeling associated with the brand.

This is also why generic creative work is so wasteful. If a campaign could be used by almost any competitor after changing the logo, it may communicate the category without strengthening the brand. It explains what products like this do, but gives people little reason to remember or prefer this particular one.

Strategy asks a business to respond in a way that is recognisably its own. Creative marketing carries that distinctiveness into the language, visuals and stories people encounter. It makes that strategic choice visible.

But visibility is only the beginning. The work needs to connect the offer with something the customer already cares about. It should help them imagine how choosing the product might make life better, easier, safer, more enjoyable or more closely aligned with the person they want to be.

When that happens, the creative work does more than pass on information. The product is no longer simply understood. People have begun to want it.

Reasons still matter

Creating an emotional pull doesn’t make the practical reasons for choosing a product irrelevant. Desire may start us moving towards a purchase, but it is not always enough to complete it.

I might have wanted an iPod before I could properly explain why, but I still needed to know that it would hold enough music, work with the technology I already owned and be simple enough to use. Had the reviews suggested it was unreliable or the price been completely beyond my means, the emotional pull might not have survived the encounter with reality.

The reasons help us decide whether we are comfortable acting on the desire.

They might include performance, price, evidence, convenience, availability, reviews, guarantees or past experience. They answer the questions that begin to surface once something has caught our attention: Can I afford it? Is this the right version? Will it solve my problem? Am I making a sensible choice? What happens if it goes wrong?

Sometimes those questions confirm the feeling that has already begun to form. Sometimes they weaken it. Occasionally, they change our decision altogether.

This is why it would be too simplistic to say that people make an emotional choice and then merely invent a rational explanation afterwards. That certainly happens, but emotion and reason are usually more entangled than that. We move back and forth between wanting, questioning, imagining and checking.

A feature can even create an emotional response in its own right. A five-year guarantee is a factual statement, but for some people it may be reassuring. Proof that a product works quickly might reduce anxiety. The facts and the feeling are not always separate.

The balance also changes according to the choice being made. Buying a packet of biscuits doesn’t require the same level of investigation as buying a car, choosing a new kitchen or appointing a business supplier. As the cost, risk or potential consequences increase, we tend to look for more evidence so we can justify our decision.

Even then, more research does not remove emotion from the process. In fact, bigger decisions can create more powerful feelings: the fear of getting it wrong, relief at finding a good solution, or anxiety about how others will judge the decision.

This last point is particularly important in business purchasing. The person making the choice may not only need to convince themselves. They may need to explain it to a finance director, their manager, a sales team or colleagues who will be responsible for putting the decision into practice.

A retail buyer considering a new product range may genuinely feel excited by its potential, but excitement alone will not secure the listing. They will want to understand the margin, likely rate of sale, promotional plan, supply arrangements and evidence that shoppers will want the product.

The same principle applies to consumers, even when nobody else is formally approving the purchase. We often want reasons we can explain to ourselves or share with others.

“I bought it because it will last longer.”

“It was better value over time.”

“The reviews were excellent.”

“It uses less energy.”

These reasons may be completely true. They may also sit alongside less easily articulated motivations: I loved the design. It felt like the kind of thing someone like me should own. I trusted the brand. I could picture how it would look in my home.

The rational explanation does not necessarily cancel out the emotional one. Both can be part of the value.

Marketing becomes weaker when it assumes that one side can do all the work.

A message built entirely around features and evidence may be perfectly clear but fail to generate any desire. It gives people reasons to choose a product they have no particular interest in choosing.

At the other extreme, a highly emotional campaign may attract attention and create a positive feeling but leave people uncertain about what is actually being offered.

This is especially important for brands that are asking people to change an established behaviour. A shopper may like the idea of a more responsible garden-care product, for example, but still worry that it will not work as well as the familiar alternative. The values create attraction, while clear evidence about performance removes a reason to hesitate.

The order may vary. Someone may first notice the performance claim and then become interested in the wider story. Another person may be attracted by the brand’s values before looking for proof that the product delivers. We are different people making different decisions in different circumstances, so there is no single sequence that applies every time. Welcome to being human.

What remains consistent is the need to understand both sides of the choice. What makes this product wanted? And what makes choosing it feel sensible? Those questions should not be handed to separate teams or answered in isolation. The emotional promise and the supporting evidence need to work in harmony.

Perhaps the most useful way to think about it is that creative marketing gives people a reason to engage with the product, while evidence gives them confidence in their decision.

People want something, then ask whether they should have it. Sometimes the answer is no. But when the emotional pull and the practical case reinforce one another, the decision becomes far easier to make.

What this means in practice

All of this becomes much more useful when we stop treating it as an interesting observation about human behaviour and start asking what it changes.

If people make decisions through a mixture of feeling, experience, quick judgements and conscious reasoning, then marketing cannot concentrate on information alone. Nor is the answer simply to make every message emotional. The real task is to understand what people care about, make a distinctive choice about how the business will respond and then bring that choice to life in a credible way.

A good place to start is by asking what kind of response you want to create.

That might sound a little vague, particularly in a business meeting where people are more comfortable discussing sales forecasts, launch dates and margins. And people rarely identify their own emotional response with scientific precision. They are more likely to say that something feels right, gives them confidence or simply leaves them with a positive impression.

At brand level, it may therefore be more useful to think in broader terms. Do you want the brand to feel friendly, trustworthy, exciting, reassuring or expert? These are not single emotions so much as blends of qualities, expectations and feelings that accumulate over time.

A particular message can be more focused. Do you want someone to feel reassured that the product will work? Confident that they can achieve a better result? Excited about how their garden might look? Relieved that a frustrating job has become easier? Proud that they have made a more responsible choice?

The customer may never name that feeling in quite those words. But it can still influence whether they engage with the product or are turned off by it.

The answer will depend on the product, the category and the people you are trying to reach. A first-time gardener may want confidence and simplicity. A knowledgeable enthusiast may be more interested in performance, specialist detail or the promise of a result they could not achieve with a more basic product.

Neither audience is inherently more emotional or rational. They simply care about different things and need different forms of reassurance.

The next question is whether the product and the business give you the right to create that feeling.

It is easy to decide that a brand should make people feel confident, inspired or cared for. Those are attractive words. The harder question is what makes that promise true.

Confidence might come from proven performance, clear instructions and a product designed to reduce mistakes. Reassurance might come from credible evidence, responsive customer service and years of specialist experience. A sense of responsibility might come from the formulation, sourcing, packaging and behaviour of the business, rather than a green leaf added to the front of the pack.

The emotional promise needs to emerge from something real. Otherwise, the marketing may create a temporary impression that the experience cannot sustain.

We saw this in our work with ecofective. The original brief focused on packaging, but the bigger opportunity was to move the brand beyond being seen as a worthy ‘eco’ alternative. By defining a clearer audience, a more confident personality and a story based on doing the right thing without compromising results, the product’s functional strengths gained a stronger emotional dimension. The strategy put emotion and efficacy side by side, then carried that thinking through the naming, packaging and retail communications.

Read the ecofective case study.

Packaging is one of the clearest places to see this thinking in action. It has to attract attention, create the right expectation and communicate enough information to help someone choose, often within a matter of seconds.

The shopper may not consciously analyse why one product feels more trustworthy than another. They are responding to the combined effect of the brand, product name, imagery, colour, language, claims, hierarchy and overall presentation.

Packaging can make a product feel specialist, simple, effective, premium, gentle or environmentally responsible before the shopper has read every word. The flip side is that it can also create doubt. Too many competing claims may make the product feel complicated. Poor design may reduce its appeal. Unclear benefits may leave the shopper wondering what the product actually does.

This is why packaging decisions cannot be separated neatly into rational information and emotional design. The two are working together. Clear benefits create confidence. Evidence helps demonstrate the product’s effectiveness. The overall design influences whether the shopper wants to pick it up in the first place.

Campaigns operate on the same principles.

Instead of asking, ‘What can we say about the product?’, a better approach is to discover what the product means to the people we want to reach and which part of that meaning offers the strongest opportunity.

This approach requires thought and judgement. A product may have a long list of benefits, but trying to communicate all of them usually produces work that may be accurate but is also forgettable. The task is to find the thought that can carry the rest.

That might be a customer tension, a new approach to an old problem or a fundamental value that connects a particular group with the product.

The creative work then has to turn that thought into something distinctive enough to be noticed and simple enough to be remembered. And the way we do that is through storytelling.

A story can show the problem, the possibility and the change the product creates. It can help someone picture the outcome rather than simply read about it.

And the story does not need to be long. A film can unfold it over several minutes, but packaging may only have a headline, image and short benefit statement. A shelf strip may just have a handful of words.

No matter the space available, the need for a clear story is critical.

Retail sell-in presents another version of the same challenge. A buyer needs the facts, of course, but facts alone rarely make a proposition compelling.

The first job is to help them feel something about the product itself. They need to understand why it is interesting, relevant or different, and to see why shoppers might want it. In some categories that may create genuine excitement. In others, it might be curiosity, confidence or simply the sense that this product solves a familiar problem in a better way.

A good sell-in story brings that product appeal to life. It helps the buyer picture the product on shelf, understand what will draw shoppers towards it and believe that the idea has enough meaning to earn attention beyond the presentation.

The commercial case then gives that response something solid to rest on. The buyer still needs to understand the size of the opportunity, margin, supply, promotional support and expected rate of sale. Those facts help them decide whether the product they are drawn to also deserves space in the range.

This is particularly important because getting ranged is only part of the job. A product can win a listing and still fail if the proposition is unclear, the packaging disappears on shelf or the marketing gives shoppers no reason to care.

The buyer is not only assessing whether the numbers work. They are deciding whether they believe in the product and whether shoppers are likely to believe in it too.

The wider customer experience matters for the same reason. Every promise made by the marketing creates an expectation that the business then has to meet.

If a campaign promises simplicity, the instructions should not feel like a technical manual. If a product claims to make gardening more enjoyable, it shouldn’t create new frustrations during use. If a company presents itself as friendly and supportive, customers should not have to fight their way through several automated systems before reaching a person. These moments may sit outside the marketing department, but they still influence the brand.

This is why marketing effectiveness cannot be judged only by whether a message was seen or remembered. Attention matters, but the stronger question is whether the work has helped move someone towards a decision and whether the experience that follows reinforces the promise.

Marketing consistency has to run deeper than appearance. Using the same colours and typeface across every channel may improve recognition, but it will not rescue a confused proposition or a brand with no clear character.

The stronger consistency comes from the thought and feeling behind the work. The same understanding of the customer, the same strategic choice, the same product promise and the same brand personality should run through the product, packaging, campaign, presentation and experience.

Each piece may have a different job. A social post might attract attention. Packaging may help someone choose. A buyer presentation needs to demonstrate the commercial opportunity. Customer service has to resolve a problem. They should not all say the same thing in the same way.

But they should feel connected. The brand’s personality should shape how each of those jobs is carried out, so that the language, design, behaviour and experience all feel like natural expressions of the same underlying character.

For marketers, this requires a broader view of the brief. The question is not simply what asset needs to be produced or which claim needs to appear. It is what decision we are helping someone make and what needs to be felt, understood and believed before they can make it.

That may lead to a few uncomfortable questions. (uh-oh)

Are we relying on a long list of features because we have not decided which benefit matters most? Are we using emotional language that the product does not genuinely support? Are we hoping the campaign will repair a weakness in the proposition? (I’ve seen this too many times before!) Are we giving people the right evidence to believe the promise? Does the experience strengthen the impression we are trying to create, or does it undermine it?

These are not questions for marketing alone. They reach into product development, pricing, sales, operations and service because the customer doesn’t see these things in isolation. They experience the combined result.

That is why business strategy and marketing strategy need to be so closely connected. The most effective marketing does not invent a story around a set of decisions made elsewhere. It helps the business recognise which story it is capable of making true.

When strategy, product, creative work and experience reinforce one another, marketing begins to do more than communicate value. It helps create it.

Not just understood, but wanted

Looking back, I did eventually find plenty of reasons to justify wanting an iPod. It was beautifully designed, sleek and compact, easy to use and capable of holding far more music than I could realistically listen to.

All of that was true. But none of it explains why I wanted one quite so badly in the first place.

The desire came from something less orderly. The product, the advertising, the design and the wider cultural moment combined to create a feeling. I could picture what owning it might be like before I had properly considered whether I needed it. (And no, I couldn’t picture myself with dreadlocks leaping from my skateboard and street dancing!)

That does not make the decision irrational, at least not in the dismissive sense of the word. Human beings rarely approach choices as detached analysts. We rely on experience, instinct, familiarity, presentation, other people’s opinions and whatever clues feel useful at the time. We notice some facts and ignore others. We respond differently according to the product, the stakes, our own temperament and the situation we find ourselves in.

Some people will research every detail. Others will decide quickly. Most of us move between the two depending on what we are buying and how much we care. Even the most diligent researcher may be seeking reassurance, control or relief from the fear of making the wrong choice.

So the point is not that emotion defeats reason. It is that feeling and reason are both part of how we decide.

Feeling gives the choice direction. It helps us recognise what matters, what attracts us and what we engage with. Evidence helps us judge whether the claims are credible and whether we’re comfortable acting on that response.

For businesses, understanding this is useful, but understanding alone is not enough. Research and analysis can reveal patterns, tensions and opportunities. Strategy requires a business to decide which of those human needs it will respond to and how it will do so in a way that is recognisably its own.

That choice cannot always be found in a spreadsheet. It may require an imaginative leap, a connection between ideas that did not previously belong together or a different way of seeing a familiar problem.

Creative work then brings that strategic choice to life. It turns an idea into language, imagery, stories and experiences that people can notice, understand and feel. At its best, it brings the meaning already contained within the product and the business to the surface, creating an emotional pull.

Practical evidence is essential. It gives people confidence and helps them explain the decision to themselves or to others. But facts become more powerful when they are connected to an outcome someone genuinely wants.

The product, the brand and the experience also have to reinforce one another. A campaign can create desire, but the product must deliver. Packaging can imply quality, but the experience has to justify the expectation. A business can promise simplicity, care or expertise, but those qualities need to be felt in how it behaves.

Over time, those promises and experiences accumulate. People may not be able to name the exact emotion a brand creates, and different people will respond in different ways. But they will be left with an impression: this feels trustworthy, exciting, friendly, complicated, reassuring or simply not for me.

That gut feeling becomes a fundamental part of future decision-making.

This is why marketing cannot be reduced to explaining what a product does. Clear information matters, but understanding is not the same as desire. A product can be perfectly well explained but still leave someone unmoved.

The stronger opportunity is to connect what the product does with something people care about, then give them enough evidence and experience to back up the promise.

That is the role we believe creative marketing should play.

Not simply making a product understood.

Making it wanted.

Sources and further reading

Books that helped shape this article

• David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature
  Particularly his writing on reason, passion and what motivates us to act.
• Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
  A wide-ranging exploration of intuitive and more deliberate thought, judgement and decision-making.
• Rory Sutherland, Alchemy
  On the psychological value created through perception, meaning, context and ideas that do not emerge neatly from conventional analysis.
• Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Made to Stick
  On why some ideas are understood, remembered and acted upon while others disappear.
• Richard Shotton, The Choice Factory
  A practical introduction to behavioural science and its application to advertising and marketing.
• Malcolm Gladwell, Blink
  An accessible exploration of rapid cognition, instinct and the strengths and weaknesses of snap judgements.
• MichaelAaron Flicker and Richard Shotton, Hacking the Human Mind
  Case studies exploring how established brands have applied principles from behavioural science.

Selected research and academic reading

• Jennifer S. Lerner, Ye Li, Piercarlo Valdesolo and Karim S. Kassam, “Emotion and Decision Making”, Annual Review of Psychology, 2015.
• Paul Slovic, Melissa L. Finucane, Ellen Peters and Donald G. MacGregor, “The Affect Heuristic”, European Journal of Operational Research, 2007.
• Gerd Gigerenzer and Wolfgang Gaissmaier, “Heuristic Decision Making”, Annual Review of Psychology, 2011.
• Jennifer L. Aaker, “Dimensions of Brand Personality”, Journal of Marketing Research, 1997.