Persuasive levers 2: Emotion

The ad is designed to be uplifting, inspiring, aspirational.

It's meant to give the audience a feeling of courage and determination, which makes it more likely they will play a sport and buy Nike gear.

How does it work?

Nike ads are often about extreme contrasts.

We have a young Black girl in a pretty dress which gives a sense of innocence, vulnerability, and beginnings.

BUT she is captured in a strong, dynamic pose and presented in dark monochrome with stark, white, simple text, which gives a sense of dignity, strength, and resolve.

Combine those two emotions and you get the courage and determination to undertake a lifelong mission.

(Especially if you recognise the girl as tennis legend, Serena Williams.) 

Nike obviously want to sell shoes and apparel, but often their advertising doesn't try to make the audience desire specific shoes and clothes.

Instead, they move the audience towards a type of life for which they would need Nike shoes and clothes—a life of sport, action, & achievement.

This ad is an example of that: it doesn't sell Nike, it sells "greatness".

But Nike's specific subset of greatness is sport, which is why the ad shows a diving board.

And it's not about being great so much as going on a personal journey to find greatness, which is why the ad shows a child instead of a professional athlete.

Both of these ads are good examples of moving an audience towards specific beliefs and values, which would then drive their actions.

Companies change their advertising as their brand evolves. It took decades for Nike to get to a position where they could advertise things like "greatness" and still be a functioning shoe company.

Back in the early days, they had to be much more literal:

The Sony Walkman was a triumph of Japanese product design, the iPod of its day, letting you play magnetic audio tape cassettes that could sometimes store up to 20 songs, or two whole albums!

The selling point of the Walkman was that you could listen to music while on the go, and some ads would make that the whole point.

But this ad enhances the emotion by showing a happy young couple in bright colours not just walking but rollerskating through a park while listening to the same Walkman through a headphone splitter! 🤯😍

The ad wants the audience to crave a particular experience of freedom and joy, which they can achieve by buying a Walkman.

(And Walkman was a hit because the claim was actually true.)

Compared to the Nike and Sony ads, this ad sells hard. It pushes the music, sound effects, imagery, motion, story, and comedy to the max in order to make you feel like the Kawasaki Ridge is really cool—business in the front, party in the back.

The emotional effect is aspirational like Nike, but with a different flavour: more practical, gritty, chaotic, more fun. (Nike is aspirational but dignified; there's no party, only work.)

The ad clearly targeted towards males aged 20-50 who do manual work or have very physical hobbies.

• Would males outside of that demographic like the ad?
• Would females like the ad?

They might! Focusing on one audience doesn't necessarily exclude other audiences.

This ad taps into the audience's sense of empathy and care for animals, rather than a desire, say, to own an animal.

We see the sad dog bundled up and feel concerned and want to help, and we admire the woman who has apparently found this sick or injured stray and has taken him to the hospital for care (and is now looking up at a vet?).

The poetic language and imagery are chosen to make the audience feel elevated, ambitious, and responsible: you are a source of light and you should act as a beacon to others.

Jesus's Sermon on the Mount used imagery (light of the world, candle, bushel, city on a hill) to create a vision for the audience that they might aspire to.

In contrast, this snippet from King's "I Have a Dream" uses musicality, mostly repetition and rhythm, to create a driving, wave-like feeling in the audience that propels them forward.

Building enthusiasm, excitement and other positive emotions is important for getting an audience to do something, but if the speaker pushes too hard they can start to seem desperate or selfish, which can make the audience distrust them.

Another problem is that a desperate audience will grab anything that might help, and unscrupulous influencers can exploit this by making all sorts of wild claims and promises about the future, none of which need to be true in order to excite and motivate the audience.