It's a well known fact that emotions play a powerful role in our decision making processes -- nobody ever claimed that we humans were rational actors (well, aside from economists, who are great for making detailed hypothetical models of things that will never happen, but little good for anything else). And it goes without saying that our attitudes about everything from the products we buy to the companies that we work for are profoundly influenced by our feelings towards those places and things. Unfortunately, anybody who has tried to develop a marketing campaign, whether for selling a new product or motivating employees in the break room knows that making a successful emotional appeal is really hard, especially when you're trying to appeal to a broad group of people. That's why this article from the Harvard Business Review really caught my eye. In short, researchers claimed to have cracked the code on making potent emotional appeals, and they have the data to back it up.

The researchers were able to identify hundreds of individual "emotional motivators," any combination of which might be influential to a consumer at any given time. But they were also able to identify 10 motivators that apply broadly, nearly all of the time:

Of course it's easy to say "oh, just give your target audience a visceral, overwhelming pleasure and excitement," but actually pulling it off is a very different thing. For some people, watching a trailer for a new movie might be enough to tick that box. But others might need to BASE jump off of the Statue of Liberty to satisfy the same requirement. And it goes without saying that the approaches to making these emotional appeals is going to vary widely by discipline. Product marketers will rely on one set of tools, HR professionals another, safety officers yet another still, and so on.

The thing I like, though, is that it's easy to imagine a lot of these emotional motivators in the context of digital signage messages. As we know, messages have to be short and to-the-point to be memorable. There are also dozens of other digital signage content best practices to follow to make sure they are clear and communicate core ideas properly. But in addition to that, if this research is to be believed, messages that can also integrate an emotional motivator may be more successful (or memorable, or actionable, or something) than those that don't. And the nice thing is that the emotional component might actually be conveyed better with a non-verbal, visual cue. This is really great, because we know that making messages longer reduces their effectiveness. So while I haven't done any formal research on this matter yet (and I'd love to -- any DS network managers reading this, let's chat...) my suggestion for right now would be this:

Focus your text content on the most important message you wish to convey. But back it up with visual enhancements that make a relevant emotional appeal.