Opinion: Return on Emotions is the New ROI

Opinion Article: Return On Emotions is the new ROI

Summary: The author argues that the days of quick and easy ROI measurement are over; while clean and quantitative forms of measurement such as clicks, impressions - even proven eyeballs - are nice metrics to have, the author quotes a HBR study as it's basis for arguing that return on emotions may actually be the thing to optimize for: “Emotionally connected customers buy more of your products and services, visit you more often, exhibit less price sensitivity, pay more attention to your communications, follow your advice, and recommend you more—everything you hope their experience with you will cause them to do.” In other words, 

I've seen this first-hand: While optimizing for clicks or conversions can certainly lead to sales and acquisition of customers - if ROE is not taken into account, these positive outcomes are likely to be relatively short-lived. In other words: campaigns that don't take ROE into account are much more likely to attract your "one and done's", or customers that don't purchase a lot or often and therefore have a lower Customer Lifetime Value.

While the article turns its focus to "experiential marketing" as a likely solution, I'd argue two things:

1. Traditional quantitative metrics are still a useful complement to what I agree should be the new focus of campaign optimization, so to speak - namely: Return on Emotion (ROE)
2. While experiential marketing is certainly one way to create ROE, it's not as scaleable as digital marketing methods - which I'd argue can be even more successful, if executed properly.

In summary: I believe that a clever focus on content for digital campaigns can create ROE, as long as it's coupled with a focus on getting that content out there (ie: optimizing toward more traditional quantitative metrics).

Anyway, this led me to think of two recent examples of marketing campaigns which I found simply brilliant:

Example 1 - The Weird Road to Burger King's Moldy Whopper
Yesterday, Burger King launched a global ad campaign featuring a time-lapse video of a decomposing Whopper. The Tagline: "The beauty of no artificial preservatives." To tie it back to the HBR findings about emotional drivers - This makes burger king "Stand out from the crowd" by offering a somewhat counterintuitive way of suggesting that eating their food foster's "a sense of well-being". If you check out the reaction on Linkedin, many have applauded Burger King's artistic (and somewhat counter-intuitive) approach to the campaign, which in many ways is already much more successful than similar campaigns run by McDonald's and Kraft's (arguably much less successful) 2016 campaigns, which attempted to convey a similar message. For example, David Griner posted "I've been covering advertising 13 years, and I've never seen a global campaign like this. Not many brands would show their product decomposing in high-res ads, so you have to give a lot of bravery points to Burger King Corporation, Fernando Machado + agencies Ingo, David and Publicis."

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Example 2 - MM La Fleur is Lending Clothes to any US Woman Running for Office
Pretty self-explanatory: If you're a woman running for office, MMLF has you covered (from a clothing perspective, at any rate)! They delivered the message via email to their subscribers, and have relied on a combination of organic social media (à la twitter conversation above) and targeted ads to get the message out. To tie this one back to the emotional drivers of top importance discovered by HBR and cited in the initial opinion piece this campaign evokes the following: "Have confidence in the future" (hey, anyone who runs is running to WIN, right?); "Be the person you want to be" (ie: if you don't like worrying about your appearance, now you don't have to, and can focus on more "important" things... like winning your race); "feel secure" (these clothes are quality, and appropriate for any professional environment) and "succeed in life" (basically: With our help, you'll be more likely to WIN / We support WINNERS).

Bravo, Burger King & MMLF - Bravo. I don't know exactly how they'll be measuring the actual "success" of each campaign (naturally, they'll need to distill this into a quantitative metric such as lift in sales), but I have no doubt that the ROE focus of each campaign has heightened it's likelihood of overall success - whatever each company's ultimate metric may be.