Describe what the target is feeling - and do it in an active way - if you want to inspire your creatives

I found this list of human emotions, and believe it´s a great tool for planners when building a story on the consumer. Sometimes I see briefs where the target is described with statistics or demographic facts or "product footprints" describing when, where and why they use the brand, but that misses the emotional part of things. I believe the most powerful insight is about feelings. Pick and choose from the list :) 

Acceptance
Affection
Aggression
Ambivalence
Apathy
Anxiety
Boredom
Compassion
Confusion
Contempt
Depression
Doubt
Ecstasy
Empathy
Envy
Embarrassment
Euphoria
Forgiveness
Frustration
Gratitude
Grief
Guilt
Hatred
Hope
Horror
Hostility
Homesickness
Hunger
Hysteria
Interest
Loneliness
Love
Paranoia
Pity
Pleasure
Pride
Rage
Regret
Remorse
Shame
Suffering
Sympathy

On the other hand, make sure you use the emotional words in an active way. Build your story around verbs, to "sell" it to the creative department, since verbs sell better. When I studied to be a journalist, this was one of the strongest recommendations our teachers gave us: use a lot of verbs in the intro, because it puts people in an alert mood.  

Neuromarketing blog reports that "When the Wall Street Journal interviewed Dee Leopold, managing director of MBA admissions at Harvard, she told the paper what she looked for: 

The best recommendations have a lot of verbs. They say, “She did this,” versus adjectives that simply describe you.

Also, make sure your writing/story telling is simply. "Author Dan Zarrella analyzed a group of stories and posts from a variety of sources – news outlets, blogs, etc. – and compared how often they were shared via social sites. He found that the complexity of language in the content was inversely correlated with the number of shares. The simpler the writing style, the more likely it was to bepassed on.

Zarrella then dug a little deeper, and found that the least shared content had the highest use of adverbs and adjectives. This isn’t totally surprising. Experts have told us for decades that nouns and verbs move the reader forward, but modifiers slow the reader down."


Good luck :)