By James Saville, Partner at Goldbug. James leads media and press strategy across PR campaigns.
Look around – worry, stress, economic hardship, geopolitical turmoil and social unease.
It’s on the up.
And the mood of the nation is playing a major role in the type of moments we, as people – as customers and employees – are more compelled to engage with.
It’s tempting to believe that this doom and gloom would cause people to embroil themselves more in negative content cycles – perhaps creating a boomerang algorithm where bad news just flies back round.
Yet the opposite is true.
This week we launched The Engagement Index 2025, in partnership with Opinium.
It serves as a barometer to help brands understand the ingredients to make the most engaging content.
And it shows that moments – including content, stories and campaigns – that bring positivity and hope are engaged with up to eight times more than those that are not.
The leading emotions people felt about the top moments in the Engagement Index were hope, love and happiness.
The moments that were voted most engaging against our robust criteria contained twice as much hope and love as the average – and 50% more happiness.
This presents opportunities for both internal and external engagement.
For internal, we must understand how emotional can we really be in our comms… and how to do it in a way that fits with your brand, tone and culture.
Getting the balance right on emotional vs. rational content is an important element in heading for advocacy. We can see from the results of the index that feelings, over everything, are where it’s at.
Leading with emotional messaging can feel at odds with a lot of the rational messaging we’re often handling in the internal mix, such as financial results, strategic priorities and of course anything that leans into re-orgs or redundancies.
But it shouldn’t stop us from considering the engagement factors needed in the tough messaging.
The Engagement Index talks to many emotional elements that really matter when we need to engage our employee audiences with more formal messaging.
On the outside, it’s clear that audiences are craving something positive to engage with: authentic ‘good’ with no agenda or personal gain.
For brands this provide a chance to showcase the ‘good’ you’re doing, whether that’s through social impact or how you’re ‘giving back’ to wider society or the community.
And it’s not just audiences; journalists are also seeking out lighter content to contrast balance out the negative news agenda. Audiences need to feel something to engage with it.
For brands, this isn’t just about vanity metrics.
Driving engagement through emotion provides an opportunity for brands that ladders right back to the bottom line.
We already know that people need to feel an emotional connection with a brand before they buy into it as a regular customer.
So now is the time to double-down on emotion and move your audience to win hearts as well as minds.