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…

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.

In response, I often hear something like this:  “Oh, no!  People are very rational when they buy our product.  Emotions really don’t apply.”

This response represents the most important challenge I face when marketing experiEmotive® analytics.  That’s why I am addressing it as my first blog topic.

Although I admit that this brand emotion cartoon is very funny, the woman who thinks that tile grout is not emotional has it all wrong.

The fact is that ALL products are emotional – even tile grout!.  By this I mean that when people consider buying a product or not, their emotions ARE involved.  And because emotions ARE involved, they should be studied.

What do I mean when I say that emotions are INVOLVED in consumer buying?  At the very least, I mean that the physiological (or biological, or neurological, or insert any other “body process” synonym) processes of emotion are “consulted” for their input.  When someone considers purchasing a product, thinking about this triggers neurochemical activity in the “thinking” areas of the brain (involving various areas of the cortex), which automatically triggers activity in the “feeling” areas of the brain (involving a wide variety of areas also within the cortex, but mostly deeper within the brain often collectively referred to as the limbic system).  (Sometimes when we encounter a product, thinking is even bypassed and the feeling system kicks in without much, if any, thinking!)

But this involvement is somewhat understated.  I tend to believe (along with many neuroscientists and psychologists who are much smarter about this than me) that emotions are not only INVOLVED in our decision-making, they are virtually REQUIRED.  Emotions represent the mechanism by which VALUE is given to our ‘reasoned’ behavioral options.  They are the force, the energy, the spark that is necessary for our thoughts to become our consumer decisions and behavior.

Two of my favorite quotes that support this come from Nico Frijda (and colleagues) and from John O’Shaughnessy and Nicholas Jackson O’Shaughnessy.

Frijda is a psychologist well-known for his study of emotion.  In the article ‘The Influence of Emotions on Beliefs’ (Frijda, Manstead, and Bem in Emotions and Beliefs: How Feelings Influence Thoughts, 2000) they say, “Although beliefs may guide our actions, they are not sufficient to initiate action.  …Emotions are prime candidates for turning a thinking being into an actor.”

O’Shaughnessy and O’Shaughnessy wrote The Marketing Power of Emotion (2003), a compelling book about emotional marketing.  In this book they say, “Emotion is not an aberrant element when making buying decisions, but a necessary condition if decisions are not to be continually postponed.” A NECESSARY condition – quite compelling, don’t you think?

Even more compelling support comes from neuroscientists who study the physiological processes of decision-making.  One of the foremost neuroscientists on this subject is Antonio Damasio.  In his book, The Feeling of What Happens (1999), Damasio says, “These findings suggest that selective reduction of emotion is at least as prejudicial for rationality as excessive emotion.  It certainly does not seem true that reason stands to gain from operating without the leverage of emotion. …Emotion and the biological machinery underlying it are the obligate accompaniment of behavior, conscious or not.”

More recent and stronger support for emotions’ “neurological rule” comes from Jonah Lehrer in How We Decide (2009).  After extensive study of the most recent neuroscience research, Lehrer boldly states, “There’s only one problem with this assumption of human rationality: it’s wrong.  …Whenever someone makes a decision, the brain is awash in feeling, driven by its inexplicable passions.  Even when a person tries to be reasonable and restrained, these emotional impulses secretly influence judgment.”

So this is a start.  If you think that emotion is not involved with your product, add the neuroscientific evidence to your thinking.  Chances are you’ll come away with a different feeling.  Your product IS emotional!

[Future blogs will discuss more about how emotion impacts consumer buying decisions and behavior as well as ways marketers can effectively assess emotions' impact.]