How Emotions Shape Our World. (3)

Anthropology offers insights from our ancient past

What's the most effective way to communicate with someone feeling lost, hopeless, and afraid? Reason with them logically, or acknowledge their emotions?

Of all places, there's an answer to that question in an article called, How to Solve Toddler Tantrums: Think Like a Neanderthal by anthropologist Meredith Small. The parallel observations she makes regarding human adults in an article about, of all things, two-year-olds, were more useful and profound than much of what's written on social marketing or public health.

Small cites the theories of pediatrician Harvey Karp, who suggests toddlers are driven by instinct and emotion more so than reason. Specifically, seeing toddlers under the lens of human development, children are like our distant ancestors, the Neanderthals.

Karp suggests speaking in succinct phrases that acknowledge the toddler’s feelings ("You are angry") rather than in analytical, Homo Sapiens terms (“Axel, Fuddruckers simply isn't the place for civilized people to carry on in this way") avoids infuriating them further. They only want to know they are heard, and that their emotions are valid.

Neanderthals were no dummies. Their brains were bigger than Homo Sapiens' and most likely capable of sophisticated logic, but history worked against them. They had not yet developed the tools of language.

[Karp's] advice is better couched in the notion that Homo sapiens, and presumably our ancestors, were designed to feel very deeply, and little kids simply want their emotions acknowledged, just like adults. In fact, adults spend millions of dollars each year to talk to counselors and get their feelings heard.

I was immediately struck, upon reading that, by how frequently health care messages are posed to patients and consumers in a Homo Sapiens kind of way. Because health care is treated as a “technical” subject — involving the application of tools to fix symptoms in the machine of the human body — messages hinge around technical imagery couched in slightly pedantic, analytical language, which Karp suggests infuriates the Neanderthal brain.

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How Emotions Shape Our World. (4)

Clubbing us over the head: excerpts from actual campaigns

Here are excerpts from actual ad campaigns that might infuriate or fall flat with me if, in becoming a confused consumer, I am retreating into my Neanderthal sensibility.

Insurance company

This out-of-home campaign features not only pictures of an insurance card, but the torn-out excerpt of a Summary Plan of Benefits, replete with linear, Vulcan phraseology. This provider also prominently featured the word "colonoscopy" in recent ads appearing on buses and bus shelters. This campaign emphasizes bureaucratic process and procedure, with a little scary, technical terminology thrown in for good measure.

Hospital system

On billboards, this hospital system makes strides by showing human faces, but the faces of stock photo models — not mine, nor those I could interpret as being my family’s, and mostly Caucasian I might add — with technical terms like “surgeon” and “cardiac center” floating above. Showing people is good, but consumers can easily sniff out and disregard what is too obviously stock art. And again, we can't seem to get away from technical terms that focus on the scary procedure instead of on the positive, human outcome.

HMO

This one shows a folksy, retro-inspired illustration of a dirty hand, and tells me to wash mine. This is part of a campaign whose launch featured giant, anthropomorphic specimen cups and syringes. The effort to use unique design — albeit representing the same, overtly medical subjects — is laudable in a market flooded with its opposite. It's a step forward. Somehow, the message went in the opposite direction, seeming paternalistic and slightly demeaning.

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How Emotions Shape Our World. (5)

The McKinsey Quarterly says, “Consumers are confused, concerned, and uncertain about their health insurance and financing needs. Companies should listen to them.”

This confusion and concern extends from health care financing to health itself. I’m scared and confused by my symptoms. Won’t somebody listen to me?

The camera pulls back again to the pale blue dot, that mote of dust suspended in the sunbeam. In the vast cosmic plane, where our shouts could echo on forever, or land with another person, forming interlacing connections that give solid shape to the emptiness, it’s the presence of some listener that makes a universe of difference.

Listen to me! The first tools (provided by the influence of weird, unexplained monoliths) serve not to build shelters or get food but express existential rage in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Metro-Goldwyn Mayer, 1968

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A quick look at what good looks like.

What A.L. has said so far.
A summary argument for better health care creative

1.
Mostly, Americans have done the best with what they have.

2.
Busy (and broke) as some of us are, much of what we have is cheap, convenient, and
comforting.

3.
Can you blame us? Apparently, yes. Much of public- and consumer-health messaging pushes individual accountability in pedantic tones, telling us to "do" or "not do" things it defines as "healthy."

4.
In fact, eating, drinking, and smoking are exactly what American society and our economy tells us to do. We're encouraged to be consumers. So we consume.

5.
Landmark research suggests a better approach. Better than merely blaming us for our own bad habits, public health messaging can reveal the ways food and consumer product manufacturers haven't always given us healthy choices...

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A quick look at what good looks like. (2)

6.
....For example, foods are loaded with super-simple carbohydrates, nasty oils, coloring. These additives manipulate our bodies' powerful abilities to use flavor/cravings as indicators for foods we need. Granted, we're adults. We can take some responsibility for overlooking these ingredients, often found, however, in cheap, quick foods that satisfy a real need for the cash-strapped. But, what about kids?

Are kids' bodies being programmed for a taste for fake food? Is it harder and harder for stressed-out parents to battle the onslaught of messaging, not just for junk food, but junk recreation, that encourages kids to sit idly in front of TV, PC, and Wii screens?

Messaging that unites us in a shared motivation to counter the ploys of manufacturers creates a grass roots movement. Grass roots movements influence markets as well as policy. Ultimately, research suggests, they drive widespread change by getting us to think socially and politically as well as individually.

Social media are channels we can explore to take a socially-driven approach to moving society forward.

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A quick look at what good looks like. (3)

7.
As much as we can think about people in groups, there's still great value in thinking about them as individuals. This is a time-tested strategy for effective advertising. Advertising has changed. It's become more about listening-to than telling. Let's listen to the genuine fear and confusion people are experiencing about health care. Anthropologist Meredith Small says people are emotional beings. Appeals to rationality may infuriate or fall flat withconsumers. Health-care-speak is an example. McKinsey Quarterly says we should listen to and reassure them.

8.
Examples from high-profile health campaigns (see "Clubbing us over the head...") show us
what not-so-good looks like.

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A quick look at what good looks like. (4)

9.
What good might look like:

• Tell stories using humor, metaphors, and images, restating health care in a form that speaks to consumers' psyche as advertisees rather than propagandees. The latter is more easily tuned out.
• Show you're listening and offer reassurance.
• Employ social media, with a plan. Find the places where people naturally assemble to talk about health stuff, where you can listen to their fears and questions and provide answers ---- answers they'll pass on, rather than being force-fed information that stops there.
• Use content and editorial. Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Digg are transforming our tastes. We want news. We're looking for "updates," personal updates from people we know as well as from the world at large.

All of these ideas are founded in the same climate that has spawned social media. Social media help marketers, of which health care leadership is one example, build relationships in the same way we build relationships with each other. We remove blame and recognize each other's emotions. We can recognize that people essentially do the best with what they have. We can give them more.

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