Consumers today don’t just buy products—they buy experiences, emotions, and stories. Yet, so many brands cling to outdated notions of marketing, churning out jargon-filled messaging and lifeless content, hoping that a list of product features will somehow spark interest. But marketing success isn’t about simply showing up—it’s about standing out. And the brands that win? They don’t just capture attention; they earn it. They entertain.

Think about your own scrolling habits. How many brand messages do you come across in a day? Now, how many do you actually remember? The gap between those two numbers is where most marketing efforts go to die. Relevance plays a role, sure—but if you’re honest with yourself, a huge part of what sticks isn’t just what aligns with your interests. It’s what made you feel something. It’s what you actually enjoyed consuming.

And this is where so many brands get it wrong. When today’s attention-strapped consumer is navigating an endless flood of online and offline messaging, asking, “What’s in it for me?”, they’re not looking for a breakdown of your product’s specs. They’re asking a more fundamental question: “Why should I bother to remember you?”
Winning that first battle—being interesting enough to claim space in someone’s mind—isn’t about features or benefits. It’s about making them care. Because if they don’t care, they won’t remember.

Marketing is changing—but many brands haven’t caught up. If you only take a few things from this article, let it be these:

TL;DR:

1. Decades of research show that emotional advertising outperforms rational messaging—especially in driving long-term effectiveness.

2. Confirms that emotions are essential for decision-making; without them, logic falls flat. Emotion gives context to logic and is the true driver behind action.

3. Small brands are disadvantaged with lower mental and physical availability. They can’t outspend big brands—but they can out-create them.

4. There are no boring industries—only boring marketing. Creative campaigns in “dry” sectors like prove emotion and humour work in B2B too. Emotional B2B campaigns outperform rational ones 7x in long-term impact.

5. Creative execution is the most important factor in advertising effectiveness under a marketer’s control.If you’re not making people care, you’re wasting your budget.

The power of emotion: Why serious advertising is a serious mistake

For decades, marketers believed the best approach was a balance of rational and emotional messaging. The idea was that logic would convince, while emotion would engage. But Les Binet and Peter Field, two of the biggest names in marketing effectiveness, turned that theory on its head. After analysing thousands of campaigns, they found that purely emotional advertising was significantly more effective than rational messaging alone.

“The more you moved away from rational messages to pure emotion, the more effective advertising was,” Binet explained in Marketing Week. Despite our love for facts and data, humans are wired to respond to emotions first—and that’s not just marketing theory, it’s hard science.

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio found that people with damage to the part of the brain responsible for emotions struggled to make even the simplest decisions. No matter how much logical information they had, without emotional input, they were paralysed, unable to weigh up choices in a meaningful way. My layman’s understanding? Without emotions, we lack a frame of reference for understanding why a decision matters. Emotion gives context to logic, shaping the stakes and urgency behind every choice we make. That means emotions aren’t just part of decision-making—they are decision-making. And if your marketing doesn’t make people feel something, it’s unlikely to make them do anything either.

Yet, despite the overwhelming evidence, convincing decision-makers—especially in the buttoned-up world of B2B—that joy, humour, or even a little silliness could be more persuasive than cold, hard facts is often an uphill battle. There’s a deep-seated belief that rational arguments win rational minds. But reality doesn’t work that way.

The truth is, science—and business data—proves otherwise. The effectiveness of emotional advertising isn’t just about engagement or brand love; it directly impacts the bottom line. A study by the IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising) found that emotionally driven campaigns are 31% more effective at driving sales than rational ones. And that’s across industries, including B2B.

Small brands face a bigger risk: The Double Jeopardy Law

If you’re a big brand, you can afford to be a little forgettable. People will still buy Coke even if their next ad isn’t the most exciting thing in the world. But if you’re a small brand? Forgettable is fatal.

This is where the Double Jeopardy Law comes in. Developed by marketing scientist at the Ehrenberg Bass institute, it shows that smaller brands don’t just have fewer customers—they also suffer from lower loyalty. In other words, not only do fewer people know about you, but those who do are more likely to leave.

To make matters worse, small brands also struggle with two fundamental disadvantages:

1. Lower mental availability – meaning fewer people will notice, recognise, or think of your brand when considering a purchase. Unlike big brands that have built decades of familiarity, small brands must fight to be remembered.

2. Lower physical availability – meaning your products are harder to find compared to larger competitors with bigger distribution networks. If a customer has to go out of their way to buy your product, they’re far less likely to do so.

These two factors lower the impact of your messaging. You could have a brilliant marketing campaign, but if it isn’t seen or reinforced often enough, it won’t have the same effect as a bigger brand’s campaign that’s plastered everywhere.

And here’s the harsh truth: if you’re a small brand, the big brands are going to outspend you. They already have bigger budgets, bigger teams, and bigger brand awareness. You can’t win on spending power alone.

But what is in your control? Creative execution.

A meta-analysis of 28,000 campaigns commissioned by Thinkbox found that creative execution is the single biggest driver of profit under a marketer’s direct control. The study showed that while factors like media spend (38%) and brand size (15%) matter, creative quality alone contributes 47% to advertising effectiveness. In other words, small brands don’t need to match big brands in budget—they need to outthink them in creativity.

This means every piece of communication you put out needs to count. You don’t have the luxury of wasting impressions. Your advertising needs to entertain, engage, and be unforgettable, because you have fewer chances to make an impact than the giants you’re competing with.

If you’re not making people smile, you’re losing customers—and money

According to a study by Oracle, 41% of consumers said they would walk away from a brand if it didn’t make them smile or laugh regularly. That’s nearly half of your potential customers, actively disengaging because you failed to entertain them. And yet, most brands still play it safe.

Humour isn’t just a gimmick—it’s a shortcut to memorability. Research from the Journal of Consumer Research found that humour increases brand recall by 47%, and Stanford Business School discovered that people are 22 times more likely to remember a story than a fact.

And yet, only 32% of brands use humour in their marketing, according to Kantar. Why? Because brands—especially in B2B—tend to equate seriousness with credibility. But the truth is, the most successful brands in the world are the ones that understand that attention is the currency of marketing—and nothing earns attention like entertainment.

A study by WARC and System1 found that campaigns with strong creative quality generate 5.7x higher profit ROI than average campaigns. Aldi’s long-running Kevin the Carrot campaign achieved a 15.1% sales uplift.

This isn’t a coincidence. Creative, emotionally engaging advertising isn’t just effective—it’s more effective than rational advertising. Why? Because people don’t just buy what makes sense—they buy what feels right.

If you’re a small brand fighting for survival, this is the single biggest advantage you have. The giants might be able to outspend you, but they can’t outmanoeuvre a truly creative brand.

“But that doesn’t apply to my B2B sector” You’re wrong. It does.

To borrow a phrase from the legendary John Hegarty in his recent conversation with System1’s Orlando Wood, “There are no boring industries—only boring marketing.”

It’s a simple, almost obvious statement, yet it’s one that so many brands—especially in B2B—continue to ignore. Too often, businesses in so-called “serious” industries assume their subject matter is too dry for creativity, too complex for humour, or too niche for emotion. They default to safe, formulaic campaigns that rely on technical specs, corporate jargon, and rational arguments. But as we’ve seen time and time again, rational arguments alone do not make people care.

Take Mailchimp’s “Did You Mean Mailchimp?” campaign. It took a simple insight—people often mispronounce its name—and turned it into an entire creative campaign featuring fake brands like “MailShrimp” and “MaleCrimp.” The campaign was so bizarrely entertaining that it went viral, proving that even in B2B, unconventional, humorous marketing works.

Then there’s Cisco, which turned one of the most boring subjects—IT networking—into a comedy-driven content series called The Network Effect. Instead of talking speeds and feeds, they created a humorous, narrative-driven campaign featuring IT superheroes saving businesses from disaster.It worked because it made IT leaders feel something.

There’s a reason why these brands have carved out dominant positions in markets that, on paper, should be “boring.” They understand that marketing is not a function of the industry—it’s a function of imagination. It’s not about what you sell; it’s about how you make people feel while selling it.

Even in industries where decision-making is highly technical, emotional engagement is the deciding factor. Research from LinkedIn’s B2B Institute found that emotionally led B2B campaigns outperform rational ones by a factor of 7 in terms of long-term business impact. Yet, most B2B brands still allocate the majority of their marketing budget to short-term, functional messagingthat fails to build memory, brand preference, or loyalty.

And that’s the real tragedy of “boring marketing”—it doesn’t just fail to entertain; it fails to be effective.

If you believe your industry is too dull for creativity, you’re missing the point. The goal of marketing is to make people care about something they wouldn’t normally care about. The world’s most successful brands understand that interest is created, not inherited.

So, how do you stop being boring?

First, stop thinking of advertising as an obligation. It’s an opportunity. If your marketing is just another corporate message that fades into the background, it’s not worth wasting precious marketing budgets on.

Take a cue from the brands that get it right. They use humour, playfulness, and storytelling to create campaigns that people want to engage with. They lean into creativity instead of avoiding it. They take risks.

And most importantly, they never settle for being forgettable.

Think about it: in a world where people literally pay to skip ads, the biggest challenge isn’t getting in front of people—it’s making them care.