Our reading
The axis most brands get wrong
The instinct is to sort content into positive and negative and stay on the positive side. This study says the more useful axis runs from activating to deactivating.
A brand film that leaves people feeling warm and settled is pleasant and inert. Settled is the opposite of the state that makes someone send a thing to a friend.
- Travels: awe, delight, indignation, genuine surprise, anxiety.
- Does not travel: sadness, sympathy, contentment, mild interest.
That second list is where an enormous amount of well-made brand content lives, including a good deal of cause marketing, which routinely aims for exactly the emotion the evidence says goes nowhere.
Awe is the one to aim at
Of the emotions that travel, awe is the only one that is both high-arousal and safe to attach to a brand. Anger and anxiety work, and using them deliberately is a decision to be made with your eyes open — it is the mechanism behind most of what is wrong with the modern feed, and it has a way of attaching itself to whoever provoked it.
Awe, in practice, is not grandeur. It is scale, craft or effort that is legible in a couple of seconds. The process shot. The thing made by hand. The number nobody expected.
Useful still counts
The controls in the study are easy to skim past: practically useful content was independently more likely to be shared, on top of the emotional effect. Sharing something useful is a social act — it makes the sender look good.
Which is the most reliable route available to most brands. Genuine utility is a repeatable brief. Awe is not.
The honest caveat about feeds
This is pre-algorithmic data. Today the sharing decision only happens after a ranking system has decided to show you the thing at all, and that system optimises for time spent, not for what you would pass on.
So treat this as a model of the person, not of the platform. It tells you what makes someone want to share. It does not tell you how to get in front of them, and anyone selling you a viral formula on the strength of a 2012 email dataset is selling you something.
The study above is the work of its authors and is not ours. The summary and commentary on this page are written by Big Bang Story and are our interpretation, not the authors’. We do not host copies of other people’s papers — read it at the source.