No Surprise! Advertising Age Writes That Emotional Soft Sell Messages Are More Effective Than Rational Hard Sell Ones
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Advertising Age (or AdAge) magazine delivers news, analysis, and data on marketing and media. In the March 2, 2009 issue, in an article about the difference between soft and hard sell, accrording to authors Hamish Pringle and Peter Field:
What the data show us is that emotional campaigns are almost twice as likely to generate large profit gains than rational ones, with campaigns that use facts as well as emotions in equal measure falling somewhere between the two.
Pringle and Field characterize hard sell as “persuasion-based rational arguments”; and soft sell as “campaigns that inspire strong emotional responses and create true engagement.”
Advertising Age is no namby-pamby, new age publication. It’s a bottom-line driven, let’s-find-what-works, no-nonsense magazine that is distributed world wide.
So their support of soft sell isn’t spiritual, it’s strictly business.
We are grateful to our friend Jeff Hutner who told us about the article and then tore it out and sent it to us. Thanks Jeff.
Now, there’s the spiritual element, one that’s even more important.
Emotion and emotional connections can be abused as well, used to draw as much money out of people as possible. We were disappointed to see the word “exploit” used in the article—“Apple …exploited the emotional power of their brands…”
That’s why the spirituality of marketing and sales is so important. Marketing with consciousness and conscience, which is the basis of how we approach and teach soft sell marketing, can prevent the unconscious (or conscious) manipulation of emotion and the connection that emotions can generate.
Building a long-term customer relationship almost entirely depends on the emotional connection between you and you customers. So that’s why we encourage you to be as aware as possible of the impact your sales and marketing messages have on your reader AND on the inter-connected world-psyche we all share.
Your business success and the respect you feel for emotional, human-to-human connections go hand in hand. Your hand and your customer’s hand.
Because It’s All in the Connection,
Judith & Jim
PS – If you’re looking for a soft sell copywriting course, to help you write emotionally engaging copy that respects you AND your potential customer, take a close look at our Soft Topic Copywyrting Secrets home study course. We show you how to Match Your Message to the Heart of Your Market.
Thanks for referencing our Advertising Age article and I hope this may encourage people to review the two others that also draw on themes explored in more detail in ‘Brand Immortality’. I rather agree that our use of the word ‘exploit’ sounds a bit aggressive, but the context is that Apple (and other great marketing companies) see brand values as assets to be built up and drawn upon. An analogy is the image of a dam full of water which can be drained off to create hydro-electric power, but only for so long. Similarly with brands: if you draw on their emotional and pyschological capital by discounting them too often without topping them up with added emotional and pschological values, they will gradually cease to engage customers and generate long-term profitable sales. So the ’soft sell’ enables tactical use of the ‘hard sell’ and as we said in Ad Age: “Our analyses also show that emotional strategies continue to work well during downturns – though there is also a need to match the competitive price and promotional messages that proliferate during these times.”
Nice page. hope to definitely come back again!!