Social messages are challenging
As a neuroscientist with more than 12 years’ experience helping some of the world’s biggest brands develop successful ad campaigns, I have seen that there are many ways to powerfully connect to your audience. However, there are a few fundamental ways our brains work that can make sustainability advertising in particular challenging.
Successfully landing any message with an audience can be difficult because of primal human responses you might not be accounting for. But it can be especially difficult to assess how a sustainability message is landing because people often say that they’ll react differently than they actually do. Best-in-class data providers will help companies around this problem with System 1 methodologies that measure consumers’ non-conscious responses to advertising.
These implicit measures provide a deeper understanding of ad performance with tools like electroencephalograms (EEG), which measure electrical activity in the brain and can pinpoint the exact moment a viewer’s response to an ad is high or low. These tools can eliminate guesswork and help advertisers optimize specific imagery and messaging.
The good news is that there are many ways to communicate a pro-social message well, and when we tap into the fundamental human response, it can be universally powerful.
Let’s explore the science of getting pro-social messaging right
There are five key neuroscience-based principles to keep in mind as you develop and execute your pro-social and sustainability campaigns.
What is pro-social messaging?
Pro-social messaging refers to any media or advertisement that conveys or promotes an altruistic message or behavior. When creating campaigns to highlight ESG initiatives and successes, companies should follow universal principles for crafting social messages that land.
1.
A little bit of negativity goes a long way
- Our brains automatically avoid negativity through emotional self-regulation processes. Pro-social messaging often highlights issues that trigger this automatic, primal avoidance, which inhibits emotional reception of the message.
- In some cases, showing some negativity might be required to motivate the viewer and enhance the ad’s payoff, but it is important to pay attention to the balance.
- This can often be accomplished by reframing your approach. For example, to highlight your brand’s use of recycled plastic, consider spending less time on imagery of environmental harm and use positive framing that shows a healthy environmental ecosystem. This approach is more likely to elicit the intended emotional response.
The key is keeping a balance between positive and negative elements. Incorporating a sense of optimism when focusing on the problem can imply a positive, hopeful path forward and overcome emotional pull back.
2.
Activate empathy with personal details but avoid tribalism
- Humans evolved as empathetic social beings because our social connections were essential for our survival. This network of empathy is most powerfully activated with positive, personal stories.
- This power of social connection has a downside: it also can trigger fear and aggression to anything “outside” our social group. Focusing on differences between groups can result in people falling into patterns of tribalism — an “us versus them” mentality.
- If your message is focused too much on divisions — even inadvertently — it can be susceptible to backlash and skepticism. If you need to show divisiveness, let consumers see themselves as part of the solution quickly.
Consumers are more receptive to positive, personal stories, especially stories they can relate to. In contrast, big numbers are hard to relate to and create distance. Stating “We’ve invested $100 million to support green initiatives” will not be as effective in building empathy as showing the personal stories of people who have been impacted by a company’s “green” initiatives.
3.
Solutions are rewarding—so celebrate them!
- Solutions are inherently rewarding to our brains. For messages about sustainability to be effective, it’s important to make the emotional payoff clear through visuals, body language, and attitudes.
- Making the payoff visually clear and immediate can enable a strong positive takeaway — and help your brand be associated with a feeling of reward and positivity.
4.
Keep it simple
- Our brains have limited resources, so we have evolved to be drawn to (and appreciate) simplicity and easy-to-process experiences. Simplifying content perceptually (by making it easy to see and hear) and conceptually (by having focused, relevant messaging) can make a tremendous impact in emotional motivation.
- This is especially important for pro-social and ESG communication, where advertising may already be taxing peoples’ emotional systems by highlighting difficult issues. Simplification can help consumers process the message in a more receptive way.
5.
Fit your cause with your brand
- Everything we know and learn, consciously and non-consciously, is “built” through repeated occurrences that form a semantic memory network. Brands are no different: we store our knowledge about brands in these semantic networks. Brands grow by building and reinforcing these conceptual semantic networks.
- When we try and connect a brand to a cause or idea that isn’t part of the brand’s network of associations — when there isn’t an easy “fit” between the brand and the cause — it becomes susceptible to skepticism.
- Using the wrong brand association can cause brand dilution and flat sales. To help sustainability messaging reach “Green Divide” consumers, brands should conduct pre-research to see which causes or associations resonate best with their intended audience.
Key takeaways for successful sustainability messaging
Sustainability messaging is rarely about easy issues with easy solutions. To create messages about sustainability that keep consumers emotionally engaged and connected to the content, marketers and sustainability officers can lean into the following core neurological principles that govern how humans process information:
- Use negativity sparingly and try and reframe the issue in a positive way.
- Tap into empathy with the personal while avoiding divisions to steer clear of an “us versus them” mindset.
- Celebrate solutions by getting to them quickly, showing them clearly and hero-ing the consumer.
- Simplify, simplify, simplify, especially if tackling an inherently negative issue.
- Fit with your brand. If there’s not a natural fit between your cause and your brand, create the path between what your brand is known for and the cause.
Get “green” messaging right
NIQ BASES positions CPG firms to create superior brand communication, packaging, and product experiences by directly measuring consumer response from the brain. Our approach (formerly offered under Nielsen Consumer Neuroscience) uses real neuroscience with measures that are valid, reliable, and linked to market outcomes.
About the author
Dr. Elise Temple is Vice President of Neuroscience and Client Service at NIQ BASES. After receiving her PhD in neurosciences from Stanford Medical School, she was a professor at both Cornell and Dartmouth, where she led the Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Lab and the Educational Neuroscience Lab, respectively.
She has published more than two dozen peer-reviewed scientific papers that have been cited almost 6,000 times. Today she leads NIQ BASES’ global neuroscientist team that provides expertise for all projects that incorporate neuroscience and behavioral science methodologies.
