The Joy Deficit: Why Brands Feel Cold (and How to Fix It)

Updated: 1 day ago

We’re living through a joy crisis.

Not just in life, but in marketing. Everywhere you look, brands are louder, faster, and more connected than ever. Yet somehow… emptier.

The average consumer scrolls past 6,000 brand messages a day and feels almost nothing. We’ve optimized content for algorithms, automated empathy into workflows, and replaced intuition with data dashboards. We can target the right person, at the right time, with the right message, but we’ve forgotten how to make them feel something when they get it.

This is the Joy Deficit: the widening gap between what brands say and what people actually experience.

The algorithm ate the emotion.

Once upon a time, brands stood for something. They made people laugh, cry, wonder, and hope. Now, they perform, strategically, predictably, and with surgical precision. We’ve optimized our marketing systems into emotional flatlines.

Every touchpoint is clean, frictionless, A/B tested, and utterly lifeless. Everything looks right and feels wrong. That’s the Joy Deficit in action.

When every interaction is reduced to a data point, what’s left for the heart?

How we lost the plot.

The problem didn’t start with bad intentions. Marketers got smart, then scared. When budgets tightened and CFOs started asking for proof of ROI, we built dashboards, not delight.

We decided logic was safer than laughter. We replaced instinct with insight reports. We started writing for personas instead of people. And in doing so, we confused certainty with connection.

Because joy, real joy, is unpredictable. It lives in the unmeasured spaces: the pause, the smile, the spark. It’s what happens when creativity takes a risk and the audience feels it.

What a joyless brand looks like.

You can spot it instantly:

It sounds like every other brand in its category.
It uses words like “innovative,” “trusted,” and “solutions.”
Its ads show people high-fiving in glass offices or laughing over lattes.
Its website says all the right things and leaves you cold.

Joyless brands confuse professionalism with polish. They mistake perfection for persuasion. They’ve ironed out every wrinkle, and with it, every reason to care.

Why it matters: The business cost of emotional detachment.

Cold brands don’t just feel bad; they perform worse.

Psychologists have been saying it for decades: emotion drives memory, and memory drives behavior. In business terms, that means joy drives recall, preference, and repeat purchase. The HBR-verified truth is simple: emotionally connected customers are worth 2x to 3x more than satisfied ones.

So when joy disappears, loyalty follows. You can spend millions buying reach and still never earn resonance. You can drive awareness without affinity. And awareness without affinity is just noise.

The Joy Deficit in 2025 (and why it’s growing).

Three cultural forces are quietly deepening the problem:

Automation Overload.
We’ve automated everything, from responses to relationships.
Chatbots talk faster than humans, but not better. Personalization has become personalization theater.
Content Inflation.
The volume of branded content has exploded, but emotional distinctiveness has plummeted. More isn’t more; it’s less when everything feels the same.
Fear of Vulnerability.
Brands have mistaken vulnerability for risk. But a real connection requires it.
Playing it safe now costs more than standing out.

The result? Perfectly engineered messages that don’t move anyone.

The fix: Designing joy back in.

You can’t fix the Joy Deficit with another content calendar or AI script. You fix it by designing for emotion, intentionally, consistently, and bravely.

Here’s how.

1. Feel first, measure second.

Start every brief not with “What do we want to say?” but “What do we want them to feel?”Joy is not a KPI, but it should be a design constraint.

When you center feeling early, strategy follows form, not formula. Metrics matter, but they should measure resonance, not just reach.

2. Reclaim surprise.

Joy thrives in the unexpected. Surprise is the most underused creative tool in marketing; it’s the moment the brain lights up and says, “Wait, what was that?”

Surprise isn’t gimmickry. It’s emotional oxygen. Every truly joyful brand moment has a touch of the unpredictable, a turn of phrase, a visual twist, a human truth.

3. Design for the senses.

Joy is multisensory. It lives in sound, texture, color, and motion. Design is how you choreograph feeling: the sound of a notification, the weight of packaging, the tone of voice in an email. When these align, your brand stops being a message and starts being a memory.

4. Make joy everyone’s job.

Joy isn’t just marketing’s responsibility. It’s cultural infrastructure. It starts inside: how teams create, celebrate, and communicate. A joyful brand can’t exist without a joyful culture behind it.

As Richard Branson said, “Take care of your employees, and they’ll take care of your business.”We’d add: “Take care of their joy, and they’ll take care of your customers.”

5. Earn your joy.

Unearned joy feels fake. Audiences smell forced optimism a mile away. Authentic joy is rooted in truth, your product, your purpose, your people.

You don’t invent it. You uncover it.

Joy, rediscovered.

When you bring joy back, everything changes. Suddenly, your copy breathes. Your visuals sing. Your brand starts to feel alive again. Because people can sense when something was made with joy.

You see it in the sparkle of a headline that made a writer laugh out loud. You feel it in the warmth of a film shot by someone who cared. You hear it in the music that wasn’t stock, but chosen with intent.

Joy travels. It transfers. It multiplies. And when audiences feel it, they return it, in attention, in advocacy, in revenue.

What joyful brands do differently.

They don’t chase trends. They create moments. They don’t speak louder. They speak clearly. They don’t aim for “viral.” They aim for vital.

Joyful brands dare to be felt, not just seen. They embrace imperfection because it’s human. They tell stories that make people feel something real, even if it’s quiet, even if it’s brief.

They remember that the brand is not what they say about themselves. It’s what someone feels when they think about them.

The creative courage to care.

There’s a reason joy feels rare in marketing: it requires vulnerability. It means admitting that connection matters more than control. It means creating work that could fail — not because it’s weak, but because it’s alive.

But that’s also where the magic happens. In the space where brands take creative risks that make people smile, think, or tear up, even for a second, they create something bigger than attention. They create affection.

And affection, unlike awareness, compounds.

The future belongs to brands that feel.

The next great marketing revolution won’t be powered by AI or automation; it will be powered by emotion. As technology evens the playing field, feeling becomes the differentiator.

In a sea of sameness, joy is rebellion. It’s what makes your audience stop scrolling. It’s what makes them stay.

The brands that will thrive aren’t the ones with the best targeting. They’re the ones that make people feel human again.

The Joy Imperative.

If the first era of marketing was about information, and the second about personalization, the next era is about emotion, deep, deliberate, joyful emotion.

Because in a world drowning in content, joy cuts through like light. It’s the signal in the noise. The heartbeat in the data. The most efficient form of energy in business.

So, ask yourself: does your brand make anyone feel anything? Does it spark a smile, a sigh, a spark of recognition? If not, the problem isn’t your funnel. It’s your feeling.

Final Thought:

The Joy Deficit is real. But it’s reversible. You don’t need to be fun to be joyful. You just need to be human. Because joy is not the opposite of professionalism, it’s the proof of purpose.

At LO:LA, we believe in Return on Ideas, creativity that doesn’t just sell, but stirs. And if your brand feels cold, maybe it’s time to turn the data down and the feeling up. Because in business, as in life, joy always returns.