EmoBlog

This article will be most revealing and valuable if you first know and/or believe the following about emotions:

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…

About buying motives, I often say to marketers: “Emotions strongly, if not exclusively, drive people’s behavior – they tell us what to do, including what to buy.”

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.]