You can't condemn someone for using emotional appeals

by Ariella Brown

This post was inspired by a LinkedIn post that, ironically enough, fell for a  logical fallacy while decrying a certain candidate for trying to win followers by appealing to their emotions. That such tactics can and have been abused by dictators doesn't prove that the one using them now is a dictator. All successful politicians, marketers, and salespeople use appeals to emotion. So long as they're not actually conning you into doing something bad for you, it's not something you can hold against them.

Effective human communication always involves some appeal to emotions. Would anyone argue otherwise?

Sure, you can and should use data to support your assertions, but you only sway people by playing to emotions. Isn't that the crucial difference between the lawyers who win cases in court and those who don't?

The same holds true for ALL branding and marketing, whether it's B2C, B2B, or political.

The impetus for this post was seeing someone attempt to put down a certain candidate by declaring the play on emotions is the sign of a dictator. Well, yes, dictators definitely used the power of persuasion, which involves some emotional manipulation. But so did great presidents like Abraham Lincoln.

Insurance companies definitely play on fear to sell you life and home insurance. They don't share the odd that their actuaries work through. They show you a story to have you envision what could happen to the family if the breadwinner dies or the family home burns down without any insurance to fall back on.

Their goal is to make money, obviously. However, that doesn't mean that people with families depending on them should avoid buying insurance. That emotions come into play doesn't erase the fact that financial planning includes insurance.

It's not the technique that makes you bad or good; it's the ends that are achieve with it.

All great speakers play to their audience's emotions. All great marketing does the same.

Maybe that will convince you to vote for the wrong person or spend more than you had to on insurance. We all have to be responsible for our own actions and take the steps needed to compare coverages and candidate credibility rather than to make our decision based on their campaigns alone.

However, human nature being what it is, it would likely take an emotional appeal to persuade them to do that.

Related:

What B2C and B2B marketers can learn from a viral post

7 ways to grab customer attention in subject lines

Data Mining for Legislative Influence

If you want to learn about the process of getting a proposed bill passed, you can read the official explanation on a state senate site. It’s remarkably similar to the steps involved for federal legislation, according to the explanation offered to the protagonist of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

 What the explanations don’t reveal, however, are the entities behind the proposed legislation.

The actual authors of proposed legislation don’t sign their names, but they do leave signatures of a sort, the signals of individual style that can be found throughout their written work. All it takes is reading through thousands of proposed bills to find the textual clues that link bills to the same source. The only drawback is coming up with the time it takes for humans to read through it all. But this is one problem that technology can solve.

Read more in

Data for Good: Tracking Legislative Influence