HOLY KAMIKAZE IT MUST BE NEAR MIDTERM: Emotional Threads, more Kamikaze Key Fact Insight, Watch for new student Advertising Haiku, add your own

As too often happens, I woke up in the middle of the night and put some KKF thoughts down on a pad.  I finally found the pad in the dogs’ toy box, partially chewed but no notes.  Here’s as close as I can come to what I wanted to tell you:

By now you know how important the Kamikaze Prospect Definition is.  In Kamikaze Creativeland what goes on inside the Prospect is as important as what you see outside.

The key is to discover what feelings, thoughts, attitudes, emotional highs lows baggage the Prospect Group holds in common.  I say Prospect Group as our Prospect can seem so broad, beyond obvious demographics they seemly hold little innerscape in common.

This is where that “emotional thread” running through all of them, no matter how disparate they may seem, comes in.  

It’s one thing to grok your Prospect based on occupation, education, age, stats, figures and obvious surface, societal commonalities.  But because the most effective advertising speaks directly to our Prospect on an intimate, emotional level (as well as a factual, product/competitive/feature/benefit level), we have to find common human ground.  

No matter how different their politics, spiritual beliefs, social habits/requirements, some common emotional tie holds them together.  What we used to call The Great Cosmic Consciousness.

If we can discern this, we can use it in combination with the KKF, to motivate our Prospect – B2C or B2B - on a personal, almost unconscious level.  Gottcha!

Some examples of common emotional threads:

Fear of death, life, poverty, wealth, anonymity¸ fame

Love/Fear of animals, Love/Worries of/about children

Worries about money/economy, politics/war/peace/environment

Worries about love or hate certain types of music, art, literature, popular science, philosophy, fashion, food

Hobbies, clichés, closeness to family, families of friends, being alone – lonely or not.

Weather Issues (hurricanes, tornados, blizzards, ice/hail storms, flooding, drought)

Medical issues (Cancer, blindness health insurance, plague, Influenza), Anxiety, Loneliness

That Summer Feeling when the air/some event/some person, song, place triggers thoughts of being free/young/unfettered

Distrust of “Foreigners,” Trusting blindly, beyond stupidity

Loyalty to family/friends/political party/sports team/club/school/self/country/church/ city/state

Selflessness, Selfishness, Spirituality/Religion/Disbelief

Sport/Exercise/Sense of physical self, Strong/Weak sense of self/ego/confidence

Hormones/minds/bodies blocking sense they can die.  Bodies programmed for rebelliousness

Looking for old dreams, regrets.  Looking ahead, no regrets.

The list is endless.  Truly grok your Prospect, find the right one.  Live inside your Prospect.  Go where they go, read their magazines, special interest pubs and sites, listen to their music, watch their movies, TV,  shop in their stores (food, clothing, music, toys¸ flea markets, whatever).  Take public transportation, go sit in a Rolls Royce, visit the farm, factory, lunch counters.

Millions of people lumped together as one market.  Different jobs, different families, geographies, life stories.  As valuable as demographers’ externals are – income, age, sex, marital status, sexual identity, education, addictions, diseases, number of bathrooms.  It’s the internal, universal, cosmic consciousness commonalities – human emotions, attitudes, hopes fears dreams and dreams deferred – that bond them all in a way we can touch, motivate.

 

When you see “What’s the emotional thread that ties them together?” on your KCWP, that’s what I’m looking for.

It’s integral to the Kamikaze Prospect Definition.  No matter what you learn about a Prospect’s tastes, habits, daily grind, family status, financial security – it’s how they feel about those things – or how they wish they feel about those things – that feeds  our motivational thrust, language, design, colors, imaging.  It touches everything we discuss with our Prospect, every aspect of how we say it.

  

Without it we can make an argument, hope they buy in.  With it they identify, feel, skew the decisions – emotional and intellectual - in our direction.  Combined with the Kamikaze Key Fact, it’s the most powerful road to true Participatory Concepts we can take.

What, then of the Kamikaze Key Fact? 

The KKF is bigger picture.  Something going on in the Prospect’s World/Memory felt strongly enough to motivate the Prospect, make them part of the conversation.  For some reason, many students find the concept of the KKF difficult to grasp.  I think it's largely due to how little about the Prospect’s world they truly understand.  Unless they’re advertising/concepting to/for themselves, they lack historical, philosophical, literary societal and practical experience to find KKFs that truly resonate w/their Prospect.

 

If this is the case, where do you look?  For common experiences that affect/affected their lives in ways we can relate to the client’s product.  Here are some KKF hiding places:

History – events that somehow changed the way the Prospect perceives the world.  Vietnam, Duck and Cover, 9/11, The Peace Movement, Hippies, Iraq, Chicago, car culture, assassinations, politicians,The Korean War, super heroes, super nerds, popular literature, cowboys in white hats, magazines, entertainment (movie & TV, as children and adults), Super Mario, Dynasty, Ozzie Osborne, fraternities/sororities, Ricky Nelson, D&D, Elvis, Frank Sinatra, Match Box 20, Hank 3, Waylon and Willie, Rap, Ska, Beyoncé, bikinis, Liberace, yoyos music proms athletes high school football Halloween I think you get the picture.

Fashion – colors, design, interior and popular, personal, societal, industrial, architectural, advertising.

Formative economy – national, international, local, familial.  In childhood, teen, young adulthood.  The past, present, future.

Hobbies and Sports – Hula Hoops, Wind boarding, Sailing, Olympics, Football, Yoga, X-Games, Baseball, Basketball, Pool, Poker Psychics Reality TV are you starting to get the idea?

Kamikaze Key Facts lurk in every aspect of the Prospect’s total life experience.  The ones (and there are always more than one KKF) that align most with that Common Emotional Thread are what you’re looking for.  Try one.  Try a dozen.  See where they take you, what kind of conceptual context, language of concept - visual and verbal – this powerful combination (Emotional Thread + KKF) offers.  

Which do you use to insinuate your client’s product into their lives, connect with that special place, event, emotion?

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It’s a powerful combination of Prospect and Product knowledge.  It’s the jumping off point for truly conceptual thinking.  Sure, some people can get there without the KCWP, Kamikaze Prospect Definition, Emotional Thread, Kamikaze Key Fact.  Some people have instinctual creative magic.  Still, they all had to start somewhere.  The Kamikaze Creative Work Plan teaches you how to think, organize ideas, thoughts input in a way that mimics the Creative Process.  With it, you’ll go farther, get there faster.

For my Circus class it’s time to share the results of your Advertising Haiku assignment.  For those playing at home, go to my blog post of 1/13/13, “What Japanese Poets know about Kamikaze Copywriting” and come up with some of your own. 

My students are required to post all their final approved and newly revised Haiku (three/student, as usual) in this post’s “Comments."  Everyone else is invited to do the same.  Let us know which you like best.  Since the class is mostly skyped one-on-one, it’ll give us a chance to see what/how the rest of the class is doing.

 

It’s also a great warm-up for jumping to our topic for the next live Circus class Thursday afternoon, August 15^th:  Style/Copywriting in the Language of Concept. 

©2113, Doreen Dvorin/Kamikaze Creative