The Frequency of Emotion: Why Marketers Match Their Prospects’ Energy

Emotion is the core energy that drives purchases. But the emotion you are selling needs to be matched by your buyer. That’s why you can’t sell home insurance to someone who isn’t afraid to lose their house, or fast race cars to people who don’t enjoy the thrill of driving. You can only win people as customers when you tap into a feeling that they already know. (This follows from the law of attraction).

Conscious and unconscious emotions

We can be aware of emotions we have. These emotions – which we can describe – are called conscious emotions. But beyond the emotions that we are aware of, we also have emotions that influence our lives without us knowing. People around us may notice these emotions, but we don’t.

These emotions are buried so deep in the back of our minds, or hidden in our body, that we call them subconscious emotions. We have no direct way of steering these emotions until we become conscious of the fact that they exist.

There are various degrees of consciousness – meaning that any emotion is not just conscious or unconscious, but probably somewhere in between those two poles.  

How we manage emotions

Whether conscious or not, there are three ways we manage emotions: we supress them, project them or express them.

• Suppression: Here, we pretend the emotion does not exist. We distract ourselves with TV, books, online shows, entertainment, food or other activities to avoid feeling the emotion. In the long run, suppressing emotions pushes them from our conscious into our subconscious mind.
• Projection: We can project an emotion on other people or objects. In that case, we see the emotion in others and our surroundings, but refuse to see it in ourselves. So, we acknowledge the emotion but deny that it has any connection to us.
• Expression: We acknowledge and feel the emotion, and use it as part of our life.

What are emotions?

Emotions are high-density, high-energy manifestations of thought. Emotions build up over time, as we reinforce and repeat particular beliefs. They also arise – as in come to consciousness – when we respond to familiar situations and experiences from our past.

Emotions are somewhere in the middle of the hierarchy of influence – above thoughts, but below our intentions and life purpose. This is because our intentions and life purpose can steer our emotions, and our emotions can steer our thoughts, but affecting a change the other way round (thoughts -> influence emotions) requires much more energy.

The frequency of emotions

Different emotions have different frequencies, in the same way that notes on a piano have different levels of Hz. Higher frequency emotions like happiness and bliss are generally experienced as positive, while we describe lower-frequency emotions such as fear, guilt and shame as negative.

Emotions can manifest in different ways. In marketing, they can show as colours, sounds and words, in the body they can show as blockages and energy flows in the chakras, and in relationships they can show as the words and behaviours between two people.

Emotional intensity and stimulus-response patterns

In a life-or-death situation, your body responds instinctively to the immediate threat. Within seconds, it releases adrenaline to help you flee, freeze or fight and ensure your survival.

High-stakes moments come with high levels of emotional energy that allow you to act quickly for your own benefit. While this mechanism is designed to keep you safe and alive, marketers can exploit it to elicit immediate purchases from potential customers. (If you didn’t know, this is where the stimulus-response model come from).

It explains why fear-based sales and scarcity tactics work: the brain is wired to respond to immediate threats and risks in your surroundings, and fight for its survival at all costs.

Attributes and characteristics of emotional energy

Physical objects, like the screen in front of you, exist across the three dimensions of space and the dimension time. You can describe the screen based on its height, width and length (and its position relative to other objects, and how that changes across time).

While you can also define energy in these terms, it is somewhat more helpful to think of energy as a beam of light. This beam travels from A to B, and as it does so, it can change its form (shape, colour, etc.) and speed, vary in strength or intensity.

So emotional energy has several properties:

• Direction, which shows you where the energy is moving to
• Form/frequency, whichdescribes the type of emotion (e.g. anger, fear, guilt, shame, joy, bliss, etc.)
• Intensity, which shows how strong the emotion is. This tells you how susceptible the energy is to be destroyed, and how easily it can maintain its current form. Intensity also describes the impact it will have on the sender, receiver and anything that crosses its path.
• Speed, which determines how fast the energy can travel, change form and manifest.

How to steer energy

Energy naturally changes its form, from hot to cold, from wet to dry and calm to storming. In the same way that the weather follows a natural rhythm, so do our emotions and feelings throughout each day.

There are times when we feel happy or elated, and moments when we are sad or frustrated. While emotional energy will automatically change its form over time, we as human cans directly steer energy in a number of ways. These include:

1. Feeling the energy and letting it go – when you really feel the energy that is, it passes on and the next energy comes along
2. Using intention to transform the energy e.g. “I ask that this anger and fear be transformed into love and peace”
3. Visualisation: You can create new sceneries and versions of reality through the senses of sight, touch, hearing, smell and taste. A different mental image can help elicit a different emotional response. This is why Tom Bunn, from SOAR, teaches fearful flyers to imagine their plane moving not through an empty void, but to imagine that air is like jelly. When the plane is in the air, this jelly can wobble (turbulence), but it will always provide a firm enough barrier to keep the plane in sky.
4. Asking angels, fairies, spirits, witches, etc. or using specific rituals to transform energy your behalf.
5. Change your perception of the situation that brought up the emotion. Say, for example, that your copy is not as good as you want it to be. You can choose to be mad at yourself or you can feel energised and inspired knowing that you have room to grow. Same situation, but completely different feelings based on a different outlook on life.

How marketers steer emotional energy

Just like all of us, marketers manipulate perception by changing the direction, intensity, frequency and speed of energy to fit their needs. They can move between feelings of fear and love, change the pace of the communications, and work with different tools to influence how advertising will be perceived.

Feng shui and web design

For example, our eye naturally follows the direction of movement of objects. So, if we see a picture of a bird flying, our eye will naturally move in the direction it flies. Or we if see people are inclined to look where they look. Marketers who understand these movement patterns can use them to direct energy and attention to specific parts of a flyer, webpage or screen.

Similarly, we see “big things” before we look at the finer details. Marketers aware of Feng shui design principles will therefore use large fonts, and bold, underlined or highlighted words to reinforce important messages.

Colour psychology

Marketers can also use colours to match the energy of recipients of their marketing message, or to reinforce emotions in the narratives and stories they are sharing. Using colours works because each colour has its own frequency, and that frequency elicits specific emotions. For example, red is considered the colour of love, and hate, while blue unites fear and serenity.

Stronger colours – i.e. those that are brighter, also carry more energy than faint colours, and therefore have a stronger psychological effect on the person viewing them. Varying brightness and saturation allows marketers to increase or decrease the strength of the messages they are sending.

Abrupt changes of speed in video editing and copywriting

Since the 1930s, average shot length in English language films has from about 12 seconds to less than 2.5 seconds today. And it isn’t just movies that have become faster– video editors also make more frequent cuts to jump from frame to frame. These sudden changes in help the entertainment industry to hold viewer’s attention, while advertisers can vary the pace of their messages to achieve specific effects.

Meanwhile, copywriters use words like “right now” and “immediately” to elicit a direct response in a call-to-action. They also vary sentence length on landing pages and play around with the pacing of their copy to to keep readers engaged.

High-stakes, high-energy situations

While movie makers often show one situation from different perspectives to create drama and tension, the advertising industry tries to steer energy more quickly. Historically, this may come from pressures to fit commercial messages in the shortest possible time – as TV adverts were expensive, and paid for by the minute or second).

Advertisers therefore either create drama quickly, or pay for commercials right after a cliff-hanger in movie. A cliffhanger creates high levels of suspense and tension that are momentarily unresolved. This leaves the viewer in a state of “wanting to know what’s next”.

When the next thing they see is the advert, that advert is – at least in the first few milliseconds, consumed from the mindset of “I want to know how the story goes on.” While the viewer can quickly shift in mindset when they realise they are watching an advert, the prior emotional intensity did increase memory and will therefore improve brand recognition.

(Remember, strong emotions are more memorable. We remember the positive as something we want to repeat, and the negative as something to avoid at all costs).

Conclusion

Strong emotions like love and fear allow marketers to effectively change the thoughts and behaviours of prospects and customers, and thereby guide them to emotional purchasing decisions.

That said, the influence of the marketer weakens when the person engaging with marketing materials is aware of how and why emotions work – and how they can be changed and manipulated (both by themselves and others).