Feel first: why every internal campaign needs one emotion
Employee engagement needs to be meaningful and delivered with feeling. Think about the last all-company email you can actually remember. Not one you read. One you remember. Hard?
If you work in a B2B (or B2C) organisation, the odds are it wasn’t the strategy update, the new operating model or the quarterly priorities deck. It was probably the one that made you feel something. Pride when a colleague did something brave. Unease when a restructure was announced in a paragraph that said very little. Or the rare laugh from an internal message that knew it was being read by humans.
That’s the problem with a lot of internal communication in B2B businesses. We write as if our people are processors: give them the information, in the right order, through the right channel, and the behaviour will follow. It rarely does.
People don’t act on what they know. They act on what they feel about what they know.
So what are we treating internal communication as? Too often, the transfer of information. What should we be treating it as? The deliberate creation of a feeling that makes action more likely.
Seven feelings, one face
In the late 1960s, the psychologist Paul Ekman set out to test whether facial expressions of emotion were learned or universal. He took photographs of faces to cultures as far apart as the US and an isolated community in Papua New Guinea. People recognised the same expressions. He started with six; contempt was later added as a seventh. Paul Ekman Group lists them as:
- Enjoyment: Draws us towards something and makes us want to repeat it
- Surprise: Stops us in our tracks and makes us pay attention
- Fear: Makes us protect ourselves, often by doing nothing
- Anger: Makes us push back against something we think is unfair
- Sadness: Makes us slow down, reflect and look for support
- Disgust: Makes us reject something we feel is wrong
- Contempt: Makes us feel superior to, and dismissive of, others
Now this is my reading for internal communication, not Ekman’s. But it makes the point. Each emotion has a job. Each one pushes people in a direction.
And here’s the uncomfortable bit. Your people are already feeling one of these about your next announcement. Change programmes are often met with fear. Cost-cutting dressed up as “efficiency” can produce contempt. A leadership message that ignores what everyone already knows invites anger. If you don’t choose the feeling, your audience will choose it for you.
A fair qualification: not every scientist accepts that emotions fall into neat, universal boxes. Researchers such as Lisa Feldman Barrett argue that emotions are constructed and shaped by context. For a communicator, that doesn’t weaken the argument. It strengthens it. If feelings are shaped by context, then the context we create matters. After all, a smile is still a smile.
One campaign. One emotion.
Most internal campaign briefs I see ask for several feelings at once. Excited about the future. Reassured about job security. Proud of the heritage. Urgent about the targets. On paper, it looks thorough. In practice, it’s a recipe for feeling nothing in particular.
The strongest campaigns are organised around one basic emotion. It is mentioned once in the brief and forgotten – it is central to the brief and central to the behavioural shift required. Used as the test for every decision: the headline, the imagery, who speaks, what they say, the order things happen in, even the timing.
A feeling and emotion that drives behaviour change can drive clear, powerful, creative thinking.
Take a hypothetical safety campaign in a manufacturing business. You could build it on fear: what happens when it goes wrong. Or on enjoyment: the satisfaction of going home in one piece to the people who matter. Both are legitimate. They lead to completely different campaigns. What doesn’t work is a bit of each, because the audience is left to decide which one you meant.
This is where the emotion meets what we at The Team call a Simple Human Truth: the recognisable reality of how people think, feel and behave that sits underneath any business problem. The emotion tells you what you want people to feel. The Simple Human Truth tells you why they will feel that and what they believe.
We’ve used the idea before. In a recent piece on brand experience as a competitive advantage, I wrote that people commit to change when they recognise themselves in it, not when they’re told to comply. That’s a Simple Human Truth. Pair it with a single emotion and you have something people can feel and recognise at the same time.
So before the next brief goes out, ask two questions. Which one of the seven do we want people to feel? And what is true about them that will make them feel it?
Why feeling closes the gap
None of this is new territory for us. Back in 2017, I argued that entertaining content is key for successful brands, because the best brands were blurring the line between entertainment and advertising. In 2019, I made the same case for the inside of the organisation: treat communication as entertainment. Entertain people first, then lay in the information and education. Lord Reith’s BBC got there before any of us: inform, educate and entertain. And last year, in rethinking internal communications, the point was that creativity is what cuts through and makes information memorable.
Entertainment matters – it’s a reliable way to make people feel something. But feeling something is not the end goal. Doing something is. That’s when change happens.
My colleague Sally Tarbit has written about why that’s harder than it sounds. In The Biggest Barrier to Brand Success, she describes the intention/action gap: “The gap between what people say they’ll do and what they actually do isn’t a character flaw. It’s a structural feature of how human minds work.” In Emotional storytelling increases brand effectiveness, she draws on the IPA effectiveness research of Les Binet and Peter Field and puts it plainly: “Before you can change behaviour, you need people to feel something.”
I picked up the same thread in Why people don’t do what you want them to do. Most of your people already know what they should do. Everyday behaviour begins with habit, with emotion, with whatever feels easiest in the moment.
Put those together and the role of emotion becomes clear. Information builds intention. Feeling turns intention into action. And a single, clear feeling does it far better than a confused one, because people aren’t spending effort working out what you meant.
One caution, which Sally makes too: emotion isn’t a substitute for removing friction. If the new expenses system takes eleven clicks, no amount of enjoyment in the launch video will fix it.
Know what you’re brilliant at
There’s a catch. You can’t pick the right emotion until you know what you need your people to be brilliant at. And that depends on what the business is genuinely good at.
In 1995, Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema published The Discipline of Market Leaders. Their argument, first set out in Harvard Business Review, was simple and brutal. You can’t be the best at everything. Market leaders are world class at one discipline and good at the other two. Try to be outstanding at all three and you’ll end up outstanding at none.
Their three disciplines were product leadership, customer intimacy and operational excellence. I find it more useful to translate them into what customers actually experience:
- Product: The quality of the product meets or exceeds expectations
- Service: Service intimacy, responsiveness and anticipation
- Process: A seamless process and workflow experience
Now think about an airport. Specifically, security. It’s not B2B, but you’ll get the point.
Nobody goes through airport security for the product. And while a friendly word at the scanner is welcome, it’s not why you’d choose one airport over another. What you want is a process that works: quick, predictable, safe, with no surprises. Security is a process discipline. Get the process world class and keep service and product good, and passengers leave feeling calm. Get the process wrong and no amount of smiling will save it.
That has big consequences for internal communication. A security team doesn’t need a campaign about “delighting customers”. It needs a campaign that makes every officer care about the flow: the tray that’s ready, the queue that moves, the handover between shifts that doesn’t drop a thing. The emotion follows from the discipline. Perhaps it’s the quiet enjoyment of a shift that ran like clockwork. Perhaps it’s surprise, used to break the autopilot that makes repetitive work dangerous. Either way, it’s one emotion, chosen because it serves the discipline that wins.
This is the link most internal comms misses. Feeling without focus is noise. Focus without feeling is a process manual. You need both, pointed at the thing you’re best at.
Before the next brief goes out
B2B organisations are full of people who are rational, expert and busy. That’s exactly why they need to feel something. Expertise doesn’t switch off the human brain. It just gives it more to rationalise afterwards.
So here’s the test for your next internal campaign brief – preferably to us. Can you answer these four questions in a sentence each?
- What is the one discipline – product, service or process – that this business must be world class at?
- What do we need our people to do differently to deliver it?
- Which one of Ekman’s seven emotions will make them want to do it?
- What Simple Human Truth makes that feeling believable?
If you can’t answer all four, you don’t have a campaign yet. You have a set of messages. And messages, however well written, rarely change what happens on Tuesday morning.
We’re on your side in this. If you’d like to talk about finding the feeling at the heart of your next campaign, get in touch.
