Emotions open the door. Facts seal the deal. That works far better than the other way around.

We’ve worked on category design with hundreds of startup CEOs. These are all super-smart people. When they talk about their company or product, most tend to favor logic and numbers. Technical founders, especially, are rightfully proud of what they’ve built, so they want to tell you what their product does and how it works.

All of which is aimed at the rational parts of the brains of potential investors, customers, or hires. But that’s actually the wrong way to start if you want to persuade someone.

The Power of Emotion in Decision Making

Whether we like to admit it or not, our decisions are governed by emotions and biases, most of which we are barely aware of. If you don’t win over those emotions and biases first, all the facts and product specs you can muster won’t do a thing.

There’s the famous story about how Steve Jobs convinced John Sculley to leave his position as president of Pepsico to join Apple in the 1980s. Jobs didn’t win Sculley over by showing him Apple’s finances or product roadmap. One emotional appeal got Sculley on board: “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to change the world?”

Think, too, about most pharmaceutical ads you see. They start with the way some condition negatively impacts your life, then shows your happy life once you use that drug. It’s purely emotional. Drug ads don’t delve into how the drug works – no details about how it blocks some kind of protein or opens up capillaries. 

The Elephant and the Rider: Understanding Our Cognitive Biases

One of the best and most often cited explanations of how and why this approach works comes from New York University Psychologist Jonathan Haidt. In his book The Happiness Hypothesis, Haidt compared our decision-making process to a rider on an elephant.

The rider is the rational part of our brains. It deals in facts and reason. It makes plans, does the math, plots the course.

The elephant is everything else that’s going on in our brains. Or, as Haidt put it in a podcast discussion, the elephant represents “99 percent of what’s going on in your mind that you’re not aware of.” These are the cognitive biases that have been embedded there. These are our emotions and fears and needs.

The elephant is far bigger and more powerful than the rider, Haidt explains. If the elephant doesn’t want to move or change direction, the rider can’t make it. If the elephant gets touched off by something and wants to charge in the wrong direction, the rider doesn’t have much chance of stopping it. 

Yet if the elephant is on board, the rider can easily guide it. They can work in sync.

Haidt uses this metaphor to make a point: If you want to persuade someone, reach the elephant first. Once you get the elephant’s attention, then appeal to the rider with logic and facts.

On the other hand, if you begin by addressing the rider but don’t appeal to the elephant, you’re wasting your time. The rider won’t get the elephant to budge. It’s also important to address both elephant and rider, not just one of them – but always the elephant first.

Strategies for Engaging the Elephant: Emotions in Category Design

With that in mind, try opening up a bunch of tech company websites. You’ll likely find that almost all of them begin by telling you what the company does. They probably cite some statistics and throw around impressive-sounding technical terms for good measure. All of that is directed at the rider. Rarely do you find a company that first appeals to the elephant with a pitch aimed at emotions.

When working with companies on category design, we try to find a way to appeal to the elephant. When we write a company’s POV (point of view), we use numbers and product specs very sparingly and strategically. Instead, we want to describe the problem that potential customers are grappling with – the problem the company’s product will help alleviate.

We want the elephant – the customer’s emotions – to feel that the company understands its fears and needs. By being empathetic, the company builds emotional trust. The elephant thinks: If you understand my problem, maybe you also understand how to fix it.

Once the elephant gets on board, then rely on facts and logic to convince on the rider. That’s when you get into how a product works and the details of what it does. If the elephant is assuaged and the rider buys into the details, together they will move where you want them to move. 

In other words, the customer will buy.

This also works when pitching investors. Most pitch decks aim at the rider first. The best ones begin by addressing the elephant. 

The same goes for job descriptions and recruiting pitches. How many job descriptions have you ever read that first appeal to prospects’ desires and goals? Instead, they’re almost always dry facts. Make your hiring pitches emotional, the way Jobs addressed Sculley.

Companies don’t need category design to learn how to address the elephant. But the category design process can help. The first goal of category design is to identify a new market category that a company can create or claim. But key to winning that category is defining and describing it in a way that captures the elephant first, opening the door for the company to seal the deal with facts and logic.

Moving Elephants and Riders Together

Figure out what the elephant needs to hear. Then articulate that in an empathetic way. That will open people’s hearts so they can hear and accept the facts about what you do and how you do it.

If you want to talk about your elephant, you can book office hours with us here.