This installment of Ask the Emotional Expert features John Nolte, Ph.D., noted psychodramatist and author of The Psychodrama Papers.  Dr. Nolte trained under J.L. Moreno, the founder of psychodrama

Here’s what Dr. Nolte has to say about assessing consumer emotions via psychodrama.

Conner:  I always start out with this question: More and more we are learning that emotions drive humans’, and therefore consumers’, behavior.  What are your thoughts about that?

Nolte:  From a psychodramatic point of view, emotions are intentional.  That is, there is always some object to which the emotion is connected.  Basically, an emotion is triggered by a change in the situation in which we find ourselves.  As soon as we perceive ourselves facing a danger, for example, we experience fear not only as an emotion, but as a message concerning what we should do.  Fear tells us to get away from that which is perceived as dangerous.  So an emotion is an immediate evaluation of our situation and an instruction on what to do about it.  If we perceive a barrier between ourselves and a goal toward which we are moving, we experience anger (or one of the several variants of anger) and the instruction to get it out of the way.  If we perceive that something is of value, whether material like a diamond, or not so material as knowledge about something, the emotion aroused is desire which instructs us to possess it.  So I certainly consider emotion to be involved in every act, including the act of purchasing something.

Conner:  How do or would psychodramas work to get at emotions that drive consumers’ behavior?

Nolte:  Psychodrama is so flexible and creative that it is difficult to answer this question in a very specific way, to say that this is the way to do it.  What we know is that people do not act in a vacuum.  That is, every action is preceded by a warming up process, a period of preparing for the action of purchasing.  So a reasonable place to begin is to focus the respondents on a recent purchase, and a purchase which has something in common with that for which the research is being conducted.  For example, the director might ask a group (or individual) to recall the last time that they bought an automobile.  The director might then ask a willing member of the group to re-enact the actual purchase of the car.  In the process, he might ask the protagonist (respondent) to soliloquize the feelings he has as he drives the car away from the dealer.  A next step might be to ask: “When did the idea of buying this car first come into your mind?”  That event is explored and all the feelings involved elicited through psychodramatic techniques, largely for this purpose, soliloquy and doubling.  The director then guides the protagonist through all the steps which were taken psychologically and emotionally that led to the purchase of this specific car.  This could involve researching on the internet, talking with friends or spouse, all the positive emotions instructing him to buy, and the negative emotions instructing him otherwise; for example, “see if you can’t get a better price;” “maybe a different make would be better;” “maybe you can’t afford to buy just now…wait a little while;” etc.  The object is to consider all elements that go into the decision to buy.  In the process, it is quite likely that we would discover that many of the emotional reactions could be related to early experiences in one way or another.  These, too, can be explored and could yield valuable information about the development of attitudes related to the purchase of a car.

One could expect that participating in the psychodramatic action would warm other participants to their experiences, both common and different from those of the first protagonist.  These, too, can be re-enacted and the emotions elicited explored in depth.

It’s likely that however we start, we will discover unanticipated avenues to explore.

Conner:  Many would argue that traditional two-hour focus groups, especially with a good moderator, can do the same thing as psychodramas.  How would you respond to that?  Do you think psychodramas are more effective at uncovering emotions than traditional focus groups?

Nolte:  I doubt that anybody who has participated in a psychodrama would argue that a focus group is as effective as a psychodrama in eliciting both information and emotions.

The advantage of psychodrama over focus groups lies in the action techniques which psychodrama provides for accessing emotions at a deeper level. For example, setting a scene and re-enacting an event activates memory, and the emotions associated with it, in a more complete way, involving all the senses including kinesthetic ones.  Techniques such as soliloquy and doubling permit a detailed exploration of of the subject’s emotional state which almost always includes a mixture of emotions.  Psychodrama also allows for exploration of the subject’s history with emotions or emotional complexes.

So, it’s the action dimension of psychodrama which makes it more effective than the more passive modality of the focus group.

Conner:  What are some of the special techniques used within psychodramas that are especially effective at uncovering important emotions that drive consumer behavior?

Nolte:  “Setting the scene” anchors the protagonist in a concrete situation which includes all of the respondent’s previous experiences, including emotions.  Movement in this structured space enhances recall of both an experience and the emotions associated with that experience.  Psychodramatists know that memory is not simply a neurological process — it’s a neuro-muscular one.

“Soliloquy” involves inward focus on the bodily manifestations of emotion as well as on conceptualization which can arise from emotion as well as elicit emotion.

“Doubling” adds the assistance of another person in the search for emotional expression.

“Mirroring” and “role reversal” are two other highly useful techniques.

Conner:  Are psychodramas better conducted in group sessions or in individual sessions?

Nolte:  By and large, psychodrama in groups is more effective than when it is used individually.  There may be special circumstances which point to working with an individual. They are rare.  The group can be considered as a significant and integral aspect of the psychodramatic method, and a psychodrama can be considered as a product of group effort and collaboration.

Conner:  And how about the amount of time and number of respondents needed to make a group psychodrama most effective?

Nolte:  This is another flexible component of psychodrama. The most workable group is probably between 7 and 12 participants with 2½ to 3 hours for a session.

Conner:  What advice would you give consumer researchers who are interested in using psychodramas in their work?

Nolte:  Engage a well-trained, experienced psychodramatist who has experience working outside the field of psychotherapy and who is comfortable with non-therapeutic applications of psychodrama.

Conner:  Thank you very much, Dr. Nolte.  I know this from my experience, but you’ve neatly explained why psychodrama is a highly effective emotional assessment technique.

I did it for two reasons.  First, to get attention by leveraging some buzz words (particularly neuro) that seem to be everywhere these days in marketing.  Second, and most importantly, I made up the title to characterize a research technique that’s better at evoking and assessing compelling drivers of consumer behavior than traditional, dare I say, focus groups.

I’ll be honest.  I’m not fond of traditional focus groups.  That’s not to say that traditional focus groups have no value.  They can and do, especially when conducted by highly trained, highly skilled moderators for the right purposes.  But traditional focus groups are too often poorly conducted and/or applied.  Even when they are used for the right purposes (in short, developmental idea generation), they can fall short for a variety of reasons including insufficient time for building rapport, insufficient time for deep individual elaboration, social demand challenges, and problems with semantic memory to name a few.

If you are interested in conducting focus groups because you like to get targeted consumers together to open-endedly talk about targeted products or services (nothing wrong with that), I’d like to introduce you to an alternative –psychodramas.

Psychodramas involve respondents (called “protagonists”) re-enacting relevant behavior in a group setting.  They are led by a “director” (analogous to a focus group moderator) and include other group members as “auxiliaries,” the “audience,” and even, when called for, substituting for inanimate objects.

Like traditional focus groups, psychodramas offer the following…

• Opportunities to watch and listen to your targeted consumers in-person;
• Group interviewing in which respondents play off of each others’ comments;
• Opportunities to show products; and
• Opportunities to open-endedly explore deeper issues.

But, when conducted correctly by a highly skilled psychodramatist, psychodramas offer two benefits that focus groups can’t match, no matter how good the focus group moderator is:

• They naturally build stronger rapport (which gets more to the truth by creating comfort that mitigates defensive rationalizations).
• Most importantly (and here is the tie-in to this article’s title), they more readily “neuro-dynamically” activate and bring to the surface unconscious emotions and cognitions that drive consumer behavior.

Neuro-dynamically?  What the heck is that?  Again, a word I kind of made up.  But the word does reflect an accurate foundation.  The foundation comes from the fact that people’s past behavior, thoughts, and emotions are neurologically connected in their brains.  All three dynamics (behavior, thought, and emotion) are encoded together when they happen.  Some encoded associations are stronger and last longer than others depending on (among other things, I’m sure) repetition and significance to one’s well-being.  (Significance to one’s well-being is where emotions come into play.  Events that have more significance to one’s well-being receive stronger emotional encoding.)

Back to psychodramas, when people re-enact relevant events, they invoke the behavioral component of the original encoding, which activates the other components, including the emotional component.  Automatically, and often surprisingly because unconscious forces are unleashed, emotions and their associated cognitions surface and can be examined more deeply.

Tian Dayton, a renowned psychodramatist, put it nicely in her book The Living Stage: A Step-by-Step Guide to Psychodrama, Sociometry and Experiential Group Therapy:  “All action is motivated by some inner impulse.  …Behavior is, in a sense, concretized thought and emotion.”

Traditional focus groups lack the behavioral activation.  When people only talk about their experiences, their memories are all they have to draw upon.  However, when they actually re-enact their experiences, their ”action” forces emotional associations to emerge.  Yes, respondents can certainly manage these emotions — i.e., explain them away if they don’t want to talk about them when they become visible.  But this is less likely in a group situation with a good psychodramatist.  Why?  First, rapport is stronger, so respondents feel more comfortable sharing their feelings.  Second, emotions are more exposed, so attempts to explain them away become more difficult (again, particularly with an expert psychodramatist).  Third, many respondents don’t feel a need to hide them, so when they emerge, they are more than happy to share them with others, if not learn about them for themselves.

In short, psychodramas are not just an interesting, entertaining twist on interviewing people.  They have a functional advantage over traditional focus groups that is founded in how people are naturally “wired” to behave — i.e., through neuro behavioral-cognitive-emotional connections.

So I hope we are OK with the made-up title.  To read more about psychodramas, come back in the next week or so where I will feature a highly trained psychodramatist in the next installment of Ask the Emotional Expert.

(And please contact me if you would like to conduct psychodramatic research!)

Until next time…

Here’s what Patricia has to say about assessing consumer emotions via “anthropological ethnography.”

Conner:  More and more we are learning that emotions drive humans’, and therefore consumers’, behavior.  What are your thoughts about that?

Sunderland:  There is no question that emotions are a crucial force in human social life in general and for consumption in particular.  In fact, the notion that emotion could ever be abstracted from human thought and consumption — or that such a thing as human behavior exists in which emotion plays no role —  is in large part a result of the historical bifurcation of thought and emotion in Western intellectual traditions.  Thus also Western research traditions.  In terms of understanding consumption, it is a history best left behind.  Moreover, many of the best practices in consumer research take emotion, at least implicitly, into account.

Conner:  What are some techniques you use in your work — anthropological ethnography — to assess emotionality in consumer behavior?

Sunderland: First of all, in our work we incorporate and build on some of the established practices in qualitative research that have taken emotions implicitly into account.  For instance, we often use projective collages and other open-ended assignments as jumping off points for insight and conversation.  Second, in our ethnographic work, in our commitment to attend to the naturally-occurring, in-context unfolding of human action, we provide the space for emotion, thought, and action to naturally emerge and intertwine, and for our attention to attune to that intertwined constellation.  For us, embedded metaphors in language and nuances of word choice and ways of speaking are often among the clues we utilize for appreciating differences in emotional meanings and valence.  Finally, we have found video and audio diaries an enormously useful means of extending ethnographic inquiry in time and space, and the small size of digital audio recorders, which seems to foster a kind of intimacy for participants, has been an unexpected boost in garnering emotional details.  We have had great luck, for example, in asking participants to register tiny, tiny details of changes in moods as well as the minutiae of situations and circumstances that accompany those changes in moods with these recorders.

Conner:  What advice would you give consumer researchers who are interested in assessing consumer emotion?

Sunderland:  If there was one tip I would give, it would be to always keep the cultural and situational specificity of emotions in mind.  As a cultural anthropologist, I am deeply committed to the recognition that emotions and the expression of emotions are variable rather than universal. The sources of inspiration in the cultural terrain of emotion are the nuances and the differences, not the similarities.  Likewise, it is important to consider the context of the occurrence of emotions and the ways in which variations in emotional expression are dependent on context.  Just think about parents and children and the ways a parent’s emotions toward and for a child can depend on the moment — what the child has done as well as what is happening both for the parent and child. And even if there are overarching feelings, the emotions experienced in that moment depend on that particular moment and instance (which, as humans, includes memories of past experiences).  How experienced emotions are expressed is also context dependent. Where are the parent and child?  At school, at home, in the car, in the store?   And it is the same for brands and products.  The context in which brands and products are encountered impacts the interaction with and emotional experience of those brands and products.  I would say we have more to learn and offer our clients by keeping the nuances and specificities of emotions in the forefront than in their glossing over and backgrounding.

Conner:  In the words of Christopher Walken in a Saturday Night Live skit I saw once, “Wowie, wow, wow!”  This is fabulous information.  Thank you!

Patricia Sunderland, located in New York, is a partner of Practica Group LLC (practicagroup.com).  She can be contacted at psunderland@practicagroup.com.

This installment of Ask the Emotional Expert features Paul Bolls, Associate Professor, Strategic Communication and Co-director of the PRIME Lab at the University of Missouri, Columbia.  The PRIME Lab is dedicated to studying consumers’ neurophysiological reactions to various forms of media.

Conner:  More and more we are learning that emotions drive humans’, and therefore consumers’, behavior.  What are your thoughts about that?

Bolls:  It’s not at all surprising that marketing researchers, particularly those working in the area of neuromarketing, are concluding that emotions are the fundamental driver of consumer attitudes, decision-making, and ultimate purchase behavior.  Neuropsychologists have discovered that human emotion, at its most basic level, consists of foundational “approach and avoidance” motivational processes. Activity within these motivational processes gets translated into specific emotions and feelings associated with products and brands. This overarching emotional process determines our more enduring attitudes towards brands which then in turn shape our decision-making and behavior towards specific brands of products. Marketers who do not grasp how critical emotional processes are in determining the degree to which consumers are willing to approach their product, and the role marketing communication plays in associating emotions with brands, are setting themselves up to lose ground to competitors that truly understand how to connect with and sell to the emotional brains of consumers.

Conner:  Tell me generally what you do in The PRIME Lab to study the issue of emotions driving consumer behavior?

Bolls:  In the PRIME Lab, which is housed within the Missouri School of Journalism, we focus on studying how different ways of producing an advertisement impacts emotional processing of the message. We primarily focus on understanding how very specific features of advertisements engage distinct emotional processes during real-time exposure to them. Basically, we study how brand messages can effectively evoke emotional processing that is likely to serve marketing objectives. We combine psychophysiological measures of emotional processing — heart rate, galvanic skin conductance, and facial EMG — with self-report measures of emotional experience, attitudes, memory, and behavioral intentions to fully understand how specific advertising executions are processed by targeted consumers.

Conner:  Can you share an example or two of studies you have conducted that have led to important insights for marketers?

Bolls: Recently, my colleagues and I have done some work examining features of health messages — specifically anti-tobacco messages. In doing this, we have studied the effectiveness of negative graphic images in TV advertisements that evoke strong aversive emotional activation. This research has provided insight into how emotionally aversive content in advertising can in some contexts, when executed appropriately, be extremely effective. The presence of disgusting visual images in anti-tobacco ads when combined with message copy focused on physical health threats resulting from tobacco use was found in our experiments to evoke strong defensive responses in viewers that can potentially decrease memory for the message. However, also including efficacy related copy that is intended to increase confidence in a smoker’s ability to stop smoking was found to dampen smokers’ defensive responses to negatively graphic messages, potentially making such messages more persuasive. It seems like the traditional school of thought in designing public health campaign messages has been to either completely steer clear of emotionally aversive messages or try to scare the daylights out of the target. Our research suggests clear strategies that reflect a more intelligent approach to the execution of negatively graphic health messages that unfortunately few public health campaigns have managed to adopt.

In the realm of radio advertising I have done some work studying how listening to radio ads produced to evoke visual mental imagery is an extremely engaging, emotional, personally relevant experience. High imagery radio ads engage visual cognition and have the potential to positively boost brand attitudes as well as purchase intentions. However, this potential is most realized when emotional images evoked by the radio ad are highly connected to the advertised product. A lot of radio advertising either completely fails to evoke emotional visual imagery or stumbles in associating evoked emotions with the advertised product. What is extremely exciting to me about this line of research is that it is applicable not only to traditional radio advertising, but to any form of audio advertising potentially delivered through podcasts, Internet radio, as well as other websites.

Conner:  What advice or direction would you give to marketers interested in employing some of these techniques?

Bolls:  I think marketers first and foremost need to fundamentally understand both the implicit and explicit emotional associations targeted consumers make with their product’s current design, packaging, as well as brand messaging. Armed with this understanding, marketers can then move towards figuring out how to elicit foundational patterns of appetitive and aversive emotional responses in targeted consumers that will promote a strong favorable emotional relationship between consumers and the brand, purchase behavior and brand loyalty.

Conner:  OK, here’s your chance!  Without getting too salesy, how would you plug your work at The PRIME Lab?  What might you be looking for from people who read this interview?

Bolls: As a research lab housed in a major university, the primary mission of the PRIME Lab is basic research into the design of emotionally powerful brand messages that are more likely to achieve marketing objectives. This is best accomplished through collaborations between academic researchers, like myself, professional marketers, and other marketing researchers. In the process of conducting our basic research we offer the opportunity for testing specific advertising executions. I thoroughly enjoy discussing how the emotional human mind processes brand messages and the implications of this for effective message design. So, if anything in this interview has piqued your interest, I would love to talk with you to discuss any questions as well as the possibility of conducting work in the PRIME Lab that meets specific research needs you might have.

Feel free to contact me at 573-884-0170 office, 573-673-5030 cell, or bollsp@missouri.edu.

Conner:  Thank you very much!

1. Emotions, which are triggered by experiences and thoughts, ultimately inform and direct consumer decisions and behavior.
2. Emotions’ influence is difficult to assess because it is often hidden from view — either operating in the consumers’ unconscious or being guarded by consumers when asked directly about how they are feeling.
3. For this reason, effectively assessing emotions’ influence on consumer decisions and behavior needs special techniques — ones that get at emotions’ “implicit” or “hidden” nature.

These points have been firmly established in neuroscience, psychology, or marketing research in recent years.

(If you’ve read any of my previous articles, presentations, or reports, I apologize for starting this way because this information is redundant.  Blah, blah, blah, there he goes again, emotions, emotions, emotions.  Sorry, but it’s important!)

Accepting the need for special techniques to effectively assess emotions’ implicit influence, there are many to choose from. They include projectives and laddering, which are often used in traditional interviewing, along with less traditional interviewing techniques such as psychodrama, metaphor elicitation, neurolinguistic programming, and even the highly misunderstood hypnosis-interviewing.  They also include naturalistic observation techniques, commonly called ethnography.  These days neuromarketing is becoming very popular, so “hot” implicit emotional assessment techniques include psychophysiological emotion indicators such as fMRI, EEG, other biometrics, and facial coding & electromyography to name a few.

However, there is one family of implicit emotional assessment techniques that is not as well known or used in consumer research as the ones just mentioned.  But these techniques can be just as effective, if not more.  This family of techniques is commonly called Implicit Association or Misattribution.

These techniques come primarily from social and cognitive psychology and they are often used in those disciplines to expose hidden negative emotions or attitudes, like various forms of socially unacceptable biases.  Noted experts in this family of techniques are Anthony Greenwald (the inventor of the Implicit Association Test) and Russell Fazio (well-known for initiating implicit “priming” techniques). However, there are dozens of others.  (Send me a note at pconner@experiemotive.com and I will send other names.)

These techniques, which allow quantitative emotional scoring and graphing, work by first quickly (and sometimes subliminally) presenting representations of objects of interest (e.g., brands).  This “priming,” as it is commonly called, activates unconscious emotional associations respondents have with the targeted objects.  After this, respondents are misdirected to complete a feelings task that appears unrelated to the priming.  For instance, they might be asked to indicate whether or not a group of letters on the screen (some of which form actual feeling words) represent a real word or not.  Or they might be asked to rate how much an ambiguous image conveys a particular feeling.  Implicit emotions toward the targeted object are “measured” by observing the respondents’ performance on the misdirected task after being primed with the targeted object’s representation vs. being not primed at all or being primed with some sort of neutral control representation.

The graph below shows what can result from this type of an approach.  This is an Emotional Profile that we recently developed for a well-known consumer foods brand.

This graph neatly illustrates how those with higher shares of purchases for this brand felt about the brand explicitly (in red; within their awareness and willingness to share) and, most importantly, implicitly, too (in blue; outside of their awareness or willingness to share).  This provides information that would not have been possible using traditional explicit self-reports alone (which is most often used in market research).  Furthermore, additional analyses (e.g., multiple regressions) can confirm which of these emotions most drives purchase or brand preference.  In this study, implicit (not explicit) loving was the emotion that most drove share of purchases for this brand.  Again, this insight would not have been possible from traditional explicit self-report methods.

For more information on this type of technique, please visit our “Your Brand’s Emotional Profile” page and/or download our Samsung/Sony report.

So if you are interested in, or already believe in, the importance of emotions in consumer behavior, and if you are interested in an effective technique for revealing emotions that self-reports miss or misrepresent, consider Implicit Priming.

I hope this has been valuable.  As always, please submit your comments, contact me directly, or share this article with others (by using the e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn icons above).

Until next time…

What do you see? You might be saying:

“This is a smiling car.”

Is this car really smiling?  I don’t think so.  People smile, and maybe animals, but not cars.  If you see a smiling car, you’re not crazy.  You’ve just “anthropomorphized” it.  This means that you’ve imagined it as a person.

(Because “anthropomorphize” is a long, hard to type, and hard to say word, I’ll abbreviate it as APM.)

It’s well-established that we APM products and brands.  Why do we do it?  Because we’re by nature social animals and APM’ing gives us a better “feel” for products and brands, which directs our buying decisions about them.  More academically, APM’ing is a natural social heuristic that helps us optimize our (consumer) lives.

(If you’re interested in learning more about what APM is and why we do it, I suggest searching for and reading works by Susan Fournier, Grainne Fitzsimons, Nicholas Epley, Adam Waytz, and Pankaj Aggarwal to name a few.)

I’m particularly interested in APM because I’ve come to believe that we automatically APM almost everything we come into contact with — including products and brands — again, in order to more easily examine our feelings toward them and decide what to do with them.

Recently though, I’ve read many articles indicating that maybe APM is not as automatic as I had thought.  (Some of these articles, and more about APM, are highlighted in a recent EMA Facts newsletter that you can download for free at the newsletters page of this website — it’s #13.)

What I’ve learned so far from this reading has lead to the following points about how to optimize the benefits of APM marketing:

(To further understand these points, again, it will be helpful for you to download EMA Facts 13 from this website.)

I’m sure there’s much more to APM’ing, but these points represent some of the important things I’ve learned about optimizing APM marketing efforts.

These APM caveats or best practices have not completely shaken my belief that we automatically APM almost everything, including products and brands.  So I’ll continue to search for research to support my belief and will likely revisit the topic at a later date.  Stay tuned and return often!

And please submit your related comments and pass this along to others you think might be interested.

Until next time…

In my favorite of his studies (Unconscious Affective Reactions to Masked Versus Angry Faces Influence Consumption Behavior and Judgments of Value, 2005), to regulate people’s moods unbeknownst to them, he (and his colleagues Kent Berridge and Julia Wilbarger) subliminally primed thirsty respondents with pictures of either happy faces or angry faces.  He then had them engage in a couple of “consumer” tasks — drinking a beverage and indicating how much they would pay for the beverage.  Between the priming and the beverage drinking/rating, respondents engaged in a seemingly unrelated task — explicitly rating how they felt after seeing a series of emotionally neutral faces.

The results were amazing, I think.  The thirsty respondents who were subliminally primed with happy faces drank more of the beverage and said they would pay more for it than the thirsty respondents who were subliminally primed with angry faces.  In addition, both groups of respondents explicitly rated their feelings the same.  Furthermore, the invisibility of the happy vs. sad prime was confirmed — people were not consciously aware of it.

Why is this important? Besides showing that our behavior can be influenced by our emotional state (no big revelation) unconsciously (a bigger revelation), it speaks indirectly to potential misgivings in direct emotional self-report research.  Specifically, it warns us not to fully trust what people say when we ask them how they are or were feeling about something or why they would do or did something.  Aside from sometimes deliberate attempts to look good to the reseacher or others that might be in a (focus) group discussion, people often don’t know how they are feeling at present or did feel in the past, which speaks to what drives or drove a certain behavior.

If you need more proof, search for and read the works of Dan Ariely, Gerald Clore, or Elizabeth Cowley, just to name a few of many researchers who have found that we are not always in touch later with how we felt (and what caused our behavior) in the past.

In what I think is a classic piece of work (Belief and Feeling: Evidence for an Accessibility Model of Emotional Self-Report, Psychological Bulletin, 2002), Michael Robinson and Gerald Clore point out that self-reports of past emotional experiences can inherently only be estimates of emotional truths.  Instead they are one or more of a variety of reconstructions which include episodic memory, situation-specific beliefs, or identity-specific beliefs.  The point is that when we ask someone “how did you feel about…,” their answer cannot be an “online emotion” (i.e., the emotion associated with the actual experience).  It must be an estimated (and therefore, flawed) reconstruction of it in our memory.

In her article “Remembering an Affective Reaction to a Previous Consumption Experience” (Journal of Consumer Research, 2007), Elizabeth Cowley shows how inaccurate respondents’ emotional memories can be when asked how they felt when engaged in an activity only about 30 minutes prior to being asked.

In work I am currently conducting, I’m seeing that certain implicit feelings (i.e., those measured by indirect non-self report means) are more predictive of past purchases of a certain brand of food product than any of the explicit feelings the respondents said they have toward the brand.

So the next time you think about conducting emotional consumer research that explores how people say they are feeling or did feel, strongly consider supplementing their direct self-report with techniques that, at least to some degree, circumvent changed memories, subconsciously filtered defenses, or, in some cases, consciously deliberate efforts to “put on a good face.”  Techniques can include unobtrusive observation (commonly called ethnography), projective techniques, psychodrama, hypnosis-interviewing, misattribution, or psychophysiological techniques to name a few.  Yes, it will likely cost a little more.  But more effectively surfacing the truth, or truths that you were not aware of, may well be worth a little extra cost.

If you’ve followed any of my work or articles, you’ll know the company line — emotions drive consumer behavior.  Emotions serve as buying motives.  People buy what they buy to feel a certain way.  That’s true and critical to truly effective marketing.

However, it’s not like people’s emotions emerge from nothing.  No.  They are reactions.  They have to be activated by “emotionally competent” stimuli.

I generally categorize these stimuli as experiences (i.e., things that happen to people) and cognitions (i.e., awarenesses, thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, values, etc. that people have).  (Maybe experiences isn’t the best word because cognitions and emotions are experiences, too.  But I trust you understand what I mean.)

Focusing on cognitions, one type of cognition is a belief about what should or should not be.  For the sake of this article, we’ll call these beliefs “laws” or “shoulds.”  When people hold these beliefs, experiences are examined against them to trigger emotions.  If something happens that is consistent with a law one believes in, positive emotions are triggered.  If something happens that is inconsistent with a law one believes in, negative emotions are triggered.

It’s useful for marketers to understand these laws.  So, based on customer service studies we’ve conducted, I’ve put together “21 Laws of Excellent Customer Service” that continually affect emotional buying.  Here they are:

You may say that these are pretty fundamental and common sense.  OK, I agree.  However, isn’t it important to know common sense fundamentals in any discipline?  Don’t baseball players have to continually be reminded to keep their eye on the ball?  Don’t mathematicians have to always remember that 1 + 1 = 2?  Likewise, marketers should be reminded of fundamentals in their work.  Furthermore, laying them out like this can serve as a guide or checklist as marketers work to optimize their customer service efforts.

Perhaps more importantly for EmoBlog, when these laws are met, positive feelings emerge.  When they are violated, negative feelings emerge.  And analyzing the emotions that drive consumer behavior – in essence, conducting emotional consumer research — is fundamental and essential to improving sales.

So take a look.  Which of these laws are you abiding and/or violating in delivering your product or service?

Marketers who don’t believe this most often say that logic or practicality or rationality or reason or deliberation or thinking or some other synonym that represents “the left brain” is the primary reason why consumers buy their product.  (Or, speaking from their personal experience, they say, ”I don’t buy things for emotional reasons.  I think it out!”)

Convincing disbelievers is a critical hurdle to selling emotional research.  So let’s “think” through this for a moment…logically.  And in thinking through this, let’s not even refer to the countless studies in neuroscience and psychology confirming that decisions are really emotional.  (For some good references, see Educational Resources on this website.)

When people say that their buying decisions are “logical” and not emotional, what are they saying, really?  (Admittedly, there are many definitions of “logic,” and I will be representing my interpretation of one of them here.  But stay with me.)

One notion of logic relevant to consumer decision making refers to the process of mentally determining the likelihood that certain features of a product or buying situation will lead to a particular goal.  After engaging in this rational, deliberative, logical process, the “logical” choice is the product with features that will most likely produce the goal.  For instance, being “logical” in determining which air conditioner to buy would involve bringing to mind several features of several air conditioners and determining which of these features will most likely lead to the goals of staying the coolest for the least amount of money.  No emotion there, right.  It’s all pretty much “probability-math,” isn’t it?  “Probably” the air conditioner with the highest energy rating will save the most money.  “Probably” the air conditioner with the least number of repair calls will stay the coolest and save the most money.

But to really address the reason for the decision, we have to question the goals, don’t we?  Logic helps us determine likelihoods of obtaining particular goals.  But how and why do we determine particular goals? In the air conditioner example, why are staying cool and saving money chosen as the goals?

Laddering is an effective technique researchers use to get at the reasons why people do things, including why people buy things.  So let’s do some laddering.  What is so important about staying cool?  Staying cool feels good (to those who want to stay cool).  What is so important about saving money?  Saving money helps us have more money which helps us buy more things which help us have more things that ultimately make us feel good.

So if we “logically” go through the process of assessing why we make certain decisions (by some form of laddering), don’t we logically arrive at an emotional benefit? Try it out.  Keep asking yourself why you bought the last thing you bought.  Where do you end up?

(Sometimes at the end of the laddering process, people just throw up their hands and say “because I wanted to” [buy that thing]!  Well, isn’t “want” emotionally-based?)

Again, I could certainly approach the question of why people decide to buy certain products (either logically or emotionally) by looking at neuroscientific evidence.  Maybe a future blog will do this.  But for now, I hope I have at least provided a “logical” argument for the truth of emotional decision-making!

Some marketers have a good idea of what they want their targets to feel or not feel about their product or brand.  But some do not.  In fact, believe it or not, many marketers simply stop at “I want my customers to feel good about my product and/or bad about my competitors’ products.”  (I’m not kidding.  I hear this a lot.  That’s a start, but not enough.)

This article presents some ideas to consider.

Besides just “good” or “bad,” the most fundamental set of discrete emotions I have seen is a set of four rather vernacular, poetic feelings — mad, glad, sad, or “afrad” (i.e., afraid).

Stepping it up a bit, getting into what prominent scientists think, Ekman’s set of primary emotions consists of happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, contempt, and surprise.  (See Ekman, P. (2003) Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life, Times Books.)    Plutchik’s primary list includes joy, acceptance, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger, and anticipation.  (See Plutchik, R. (1980), Emotion: Theory, research, and experience: Vol. 1. Theories of emotion, 1, New York: Academic.)

(More lists are summarized at http://www.personalityresearch.org/basicemotions/plutchik.html.)

Getting into consumer emotions, Richins found the following to be psychometrically reliable: excitement, joy, pride, contentment, optimism, relief, peacefulness, love, romantic love, loneliness, envy, guilt, fear, shame, sadness, worry, discontent, anger, surprise, and eagerness.  (See Richins, M.L. (1997) Measuring Emotions in the Consumption Experience, Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 24, No. 2., pp. 127-146.)

At this point, I hope you have a few emotions to consider for your product or brand.  However, I’d like to share another set with you — a set I’ve developed over the past several years of hearing consumers talk about how they feel.

My set, which you can download, appears within this website at Categories of Emotions and Feelings.  Let me summarize the main “factors” — Positive and Negative – within this taxonomy.

Within each of these factors exist more discrete emotions.  For instance, DESIRE includes feeling curious, interested, eager, and envious to name a few.  SADNESS includes feeling disappointed, sad, unfulfilled, and lonely to name a few.

The point here is that once you’ve come to believe that emotions are important in creating the behavior you want, you will need to investigate and choose specific emotions to include in your strategies.  I hope I’ve given you some ideas for your particular application.

If you want to discuss this more, please post a comment or contact me at pconner@experiemotive.com or 314-752-0564.  I’d be interested to hear just how you want your targets to feel.