How Do You Want Your Audience to Feel?
Before you choose the music or approve a video concept, decide how you want the intended viewer to feel. For a professional-services firm, that choice helps connect the content to the experience of becoming a client. “Build trust” is a useful ambition. The production brief needs to explain what trust should feel like for this person, facing this decision.
Watch How Do You Want Your Audience to Feel? on Youtube.
Make trust specific to the situation
A prospective client may be considering something personal and consequential: choosing an advisor, handling a dispute, or asking for help with an unfamiliar decision. The video gives them a chance to hear how your people respond before they meet.
Consider two illustrative situations. A family office wants to introduce its approach to someone worried about managing a major change in their family’s finances. A litigation firm wants to show a business owner how it approaches a difficult commercial dispute. Both want to earn trust. Their videos may need different kinds of reassurance.
The first might prioritize safety: there is room to ask questions, and the team will explain the decisions without rushing. The second might prioritize competence: the lawyer recognizes the problem and can explain what needs attention. Each gives the producer a direction to test against the audience and the substance.
Start with the person’s concern. Then choose the response the piece should earn.
Choose one feeling to lead
The transcript offers a useful vocabulary: trust, credibility, competence, approachability, safety, exclusivity, urgency, and inspiration. Competence asks the viewer to recognize that the firm knows what it is doing. Approachability makes it easier to imagine asking a question. Safety suggests care and steadiness. Urgency asks someone to act soon, which needs a reason grounded in the actual situation.
For one video, choose a primary feeling. You can add a secondary feeling if it supports the first. A lawyer explaining an unfamiliar process might lead with competence and support it with approachability. Clear answers establish command of the subject; ordinary language makes the explanation easier to follow.
If stakeholders want the piece to feel reassuring, exclusive, urgent, and friendly all at once, ask which response matters most for its job. Otherwise, each review can pull the work toward a different experience.
Translate the feeling into production choices
A feeling becomes useful when it guides decisions the team can make. “Warm” on its own leaves plenty of room for disagreement. Explain what warmth should help the viewer do: feel comfortable asking a basic question, for example.
Then consider the choices together. Does the expert have time to finish a thought? Does the language answer the viewer’s concern? Does the music support the explanation or compete with it? Does the framing help someone concentrate on the speaker?
For a piece intended to convey safety, a considered pace and an unhurried answer may fit. For competence, a focused structure and direct delivery may serve the point. These are starting choices to assess, rather than rules that every financial or legal video must follow.
In the episode, the same footage is edited for two different feelings. the words and person can remain the same while the surrounding choices change the experience.
Keep the feeling accountable to the substance
An intended feeling needs something real beneath it. A video cannot establish competence simply by cutting quickly, or earn trust by adding warm music. The expert still needs a useful answer, and the production needs to give that answer a fair presentation.
For example, an advisor explaining a difficult choice should acknowledge the relevant considerations rather than sound certain about every outcome. A lawyer making a process understandable can show judgment through the questions they ask. The feeling follows how the firm handles the subject as well as how the video looks.
This also keeps feedback useful. Instead of “make it more reassuring,” identify the moment that creates uncertainty. Is the answer unclear? Does an abrupt edit remove context? Is the music creating tension that the explanation doesn’t call for? Fix the particular problem.
Connect the feeling to a business goal
You can choose a feeling and still measure results. Put both in the brief: what should the viewer experience, and what action or understanding should the piece support?
A video answering an early client question might help someone explore a related service page. A firm introduction might prepare a prospect for a first conversation. Track the relevant next step, then use feedback to understand how the piece is landing.
A click alone won’t tell you whether someone feels safe or understood. Nor will an encouraging comment prove that a video caused an inquiry. Treat those signals as different pieces of information when deciding what to improve.
What to do this week
Allow 20 minutes for two exercises.
1. Check the last three pieces. Show them to an honest person who wasn’t involved in production. Ask what they feel, without giving them the intended answer. Record their words and compare them with the brief. This is a useful first check, not a substitute for feedback from your intended audience.
2. Brief the next piece. Write the intended viewer, the business goal, and one primary feeling at the top. Note the concern that makes that feeling relevant. Ask the producer which choices will support it.
Use Ask a Friend Worksheet to track your work: Ask a Friend Worksheet
Watch How Do You Want Your Audience to Feel? on Youtube before briefing the next piece or reviewing a first cut.
Bring that brief into the review. It gives everyone a shared question: does this version create the experience we set out to offer?
Think Like a Producer
Get practical advice from Seena Ghaznavi each week on making useful content, putting your expertise on camera, and building trust. One clear idea and something you can put to work at your firm.
