The last chapter may have left you feeling warm and fuzzy about designing for emotion. It’s all jokes and monkeys, right? The brute reality is that not all brand personalities afford the liberal use of humor. There are times where we need to appeal to different emotions that inspire confidence and trust in our audience.

As we discovered in Chapter 2, our brains break up complex situations into simple concepts so we can evaluate the costs and benefits of a decision. To protect ourselves from harm, we’re pre-programmed to be skeptical of new brands, products, situations, and even people.

Walk onto a used car lot, and your spidey-sense will tingle when the salesman approaches you with a pre-planned pitch. You can recognize a disingenuous brand trying to sell you a product that seems too good to be true. We can smell bullshit a mile away.