As the founder and CEO of The Joy Brigade, Shabnam Mogharabi counsels people to rebel with joy.
She’s embraced the strategy herself, doing the research, getting brands to buy in, and executing projects in marked contrast to her journalistic beginnings where she knew “if it bleeds, it leads,” also known as negativity sells.
Shabnam co-founded the mission-driven studio SoulPancake, which focused on uplifting and inspiring content, with actor Rainn Wilson. She served as its CEO for nearly a decade.
But she’s no Pollyanna.
“I think the Pollyanna-look-on-the-bright-side is actually detrimental to harvesting true joy, which requires understanding, feeling, acknowledging the negative points,” she says.
Eliciting true joy requires recognizing the negative while offering a different perspective. “It works in how you tell stories. It works in how you write. It works in how you communicate ideas,” explains Shabnam in our interview after her well-received keynote presentation at Content Marketing World.
Negativity works in marketing, but positive emotions do, too
Negativity, of course, isn’t limited to mainstream headlines to attract an audience. Clickbait headlines abound on social media. “They don’t actually tap into any emotion other than fear,” Shabnam says. “While fear is a great motivator, I think that love and inspiration and joy can be strong motivators as well.”
It’s not just what she thinks; it’s what the research shows. Her advocacy is rooted in the theories of positive psychology. “You can change the way your brain responds and reacts to various situations — good or bad — that you find yourself in,” she says.
But challenging negativity isn’t an easy battle. Shabnam points to John Gottman’s research, which found that it takes 20 positive interactions to counteract a negative one.
It’s biological. Human brains are primed to look out for danger and potential threats. “Joy is a rebellion against how we’re wired,” she says.
Negativity is easier, but the best marketers eschew the easy route. “The best marketing campaigns truly capture the full spectrum of human emotion. They recognize that things are hard, days are stressful, and achieving greatness takes a lot of work,” she says.
Brands see the good in positivity
Shabnam shares a handful of brands among many that have successfully used joy in their marketing. She worked on some of the campaigns through SoulPancake and admired others as a consumer.
They all share one thing: They identify a potential (or actual) negative or challenge but pivot to an insightful or “aha” moment that inspires and uplifts the audience. They make people feel joy, connection, and hope — the positive emotions in the spectrum of that human experience.
Nike does it
Nike is known for taking on negative stereotypes. Shabnam shares an example from the early 2010s when the company produced an ad with a person running slowly on a paved road in the distance. As the runner gets closer to the camera, the viewer sees that it is a young person who weighs more than a stereotypical runner. The voiceover talks about how greatness isn’t reserved for superstars; it’s something everybody can achieve.
The company continues celebrating commitment while acknowledging the difficulties, as this 2024 spot — Joy — shows. The video, with the description, “Feeling great doesn’t always feel good,” shows people sweating, grimacing, gasping, smiling, and crying as they run with the cheery folk tune Joy Joy by Bob Gibson playing in the background.
Procter & Gamble sees little noticed
Procter & Gamble has often shared the hard work it takes to get to jubilation during the Olympics with campaigns like “Thank You, Mom.” This example shows the parents getting their kids up in the darkness of morning, feeding them, doing the laundry, and getting them to sports practice year after year — recognizing the hard, behind-the-scenes work that often goes unnoticed. Then, the ad shows the joy experienced by their families when their athletes compete at the Olympics.
Purina pivots from scientific benefits
At SoulPancake, Shabnam worked on a campaign for Purina, which been marketing the latest product by showcasing the science behind it.
But SoulPancake scrapped the benefits-focused ad and went in an entirely different direction. The team set up a box on a Los Angeles street corner. They asked people about their stresses in life, invited them to go inside the box, and surprised them with a basket full of kittens to play with. Afterward, the once-stressed people shared the positive effects of playing with the kittens.
The wildly successful campaign got billions in views and tons of influencer engagement, Shabnam says. “People really responded to it because we tapped into the emotional side of how people feel about their cats, what their cats offer to them, and the motivation you have to take care of them coming from a place of the love and fulfillment you get from the cats,” she notes.
California Casualty delivers unexpected joy
Insurance isn’t an industry that automatically makes people think “joy,” but SoulPancake changed that. It worked on a campaign with California Casualty, a provider of auto and home insurance for educators.
It brought in five teachers to talk about the challenges of teaching. They talked about how they didn’t even know if the kids were paying attention, the lack of resources, helicopter parents, and more.
Then, those teachers got a surprise. Former students showed up to read thank-you letters to them, describing the impact the teachers had on them and reminding the teachers why they worked so hard.
Shabnam says all marketers can rebel with joy, no matter the brand they’re promoting. “Even if there are no kittens or joyfulness naturally involved, there is something universal you can tap into,” she says.
Dramamine gets the good with The Last Barf Bag
Dramamine is a good example of that. The anti-nausea drug maker celebrated its 75th anniversary in 2024 with a 13-minute documentary, The Last Barf Bag.
Though the film ponders briefly late in the documentary whether Dramamine’s debut led to the continuing decline in airlines providing air sickness bags, the real story centered on a small but fascinating group of barf bag collectors. In the nine months since its debut, more than 300,000 people have viewed the video on the brand’s YouTube channel, with only 3,870 subscribers.
“Even vomit can have an interesting story, and it was brought to you by Dramamine. It was such clever marketing,” Shabnam says. “The work is in finding that universal insight that you can tap into.”
Getting internal buy-in
Of course, creatively tapping into the spectrum of human emotions isn’t the only ingredient to being a rebel. It also will require leadership that approves the concepts and a marketing culture that makes them possible.
Shabnam says the first step is to know how executives view the business. Some may want to expect results in the next quarter; others may take a long-haul view. In some cases, executives are driven by the bottom line first, while others say employee satisfaction. As you identify their priorities, also listen to the language they use.
“If you don’t learn to speak their language, communicating and selling the benefits of changing your approach to marketing will never make progress,” she says. “It’s all about knowing who your audience is and how you adjust the message, the benefits, etc., for that.”
Once you have executive support, you also need to get the marketing team on board. That involves examining the people and the processes. To make more emotive, joyful, and sticky content, you need people whose interests and passion — the things they consume and invest their time in — reflect what you’re interested in building.
You need people who think creatively and can see the data differently. You need team members who are voraciously interested in content, whether it’s books, movies, podcasts, or something else. They want to know what’s happening in advertising and expose themselves to creativity in the wild, such as visiting museums.
And don’t forget, leadership is important here, too. You must act like you want the team to. For example, if you set up a Slack channel for an upcoming campaign and ask team members to share podcasts, videos, books, etc., that relate to the themes or examples to inspire, you should contribute, too.
“People will do what they see modeled. If it’s not being reflected at the top, they won’t model it,” Shabnam says.
In addition to the people, processes should also be examined because they can sometimes stop creativity. Identify points in the process that hinder or help the team’s creativity. Commit to getting rid of extraneous things. Shabnam says if you don’t do this postmortem after every campaign, make sure to do it annually.
“If you’re not really reflecting all the time on ‘Do we have the right people and the right processes,’ you’ll never have the kind of culture that kind of creates this environment of creative thinking and thinking about insights and the type of content you’re trying to make,” Shabnam says.
Strategize to embrace joy
Eliciting the fear factor is easier, but you can do the harder work to evoke joy and connect more strongly with your audiences.
The best content, Shabnam says, acknowledges the full spectrum of emotion. It isn’t just positive for the sake of being positive.
“It is, ‘Hey, we know that there are these challenges. We know there are hard things, but here are inspiring, uplifting, creative, gratitude-filled solutions or ideas that can help address those challenges.
As she explains, “It is much harder and takes much more work to do that. But if we don’t do it, we cannot possibly rebel against these larger (negative) forces at work.”
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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute