EmoBlog

This is my first in a series of five blog articles that address how specific aspects of emotion impact consumer behavior.  I start with one of the more basic aspects, and one that I’ve written about, spoken about, and work to address in my research.  For some of you, this will be a redundant review (so forgive me).  For others, it may be a refreshing new insight.  Mostly for the latter group, please know that…

What does this mean, really?  It’s pretty simple.  Much “emotional processing” occurs without our awareness.  By emotional processing I mean how the neurochemical systems devoted to emotion in our bodies – most importantly our brains’ – react to stimuli in our external and internal environment.  I don’t want to turn this into a neuroscience review, but I’m talking about what happens in…

• Sensory components (e.g., seeing, hearing, and touching);
• Brain components in what’s referred to as the limbic system (e.g., the amygdala, hippocampus, and hypothalamus) and various cortical areas (e.g., the orbito frontal and insular cortices); and…
• Peripheral “biometric” components (e.g., breathing, heart rate, and skin conductance).   

(If you’re interested in this area, you can search for authors such as Antonio Damasio, Michael Gazzaniga, Jaak Panksepp, Mark Solms, or Joseph LeDoux.) 

When these systems react, they do so with the goal of guiding our decisions and behavior toward solutions that will optimize our well-being, be it at the most basic level of survival or just making sure we ultimately “feel” as good as we can.  The point of this article is that this “emotional influence” can and does happen without us even knowing it.  And that’s important because in order to fully understand why people do what they do, why they buy what they buy, we should use methods to assess these unconscious emotional influences.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not saying we’re never aware of what our true feelings are and how they’re affecting our decisions and behavior.  We can be and are.  However, often we’re fooled about what’s influencing us or we don’t want to admit emotional truths.  So to get the full picture, we need comprehensive (i.e., implicit and explicit) emotional assessment.

Many studies demonstrate that emotions can and do operate unconsciously to affect our behavior.  I’m sure the numbers are in the hundreds, if not the thousands.  I’ll cite three.

Supporting Study 1: Subliminal Priming Drives Beverage Choice.  In a research setting, Winkielman, Berridge, and Wilbarger (2005) measured how much of a certain beverage thirsty respondents drank and how much they said they were willing to pay for that beverage.  However, before they took these measurements, they subliminally (i.e., below levels of awareness) exposed half of these respondents to pictures of happy faces and the other half to pictures of angry faces.  In pre-tests, these faces were proven to evoke positive (the happy faces) or negative (the angry faces) feelings.  These researchers found that respondents that had been exposed to happy faces drank more of the beverage and said they would pay more for it than respondents who had been exposed to angry faces.  This was consistent with much other research showing that “goal-directed” people (in this study operationally defined as “thirsty”) more readily engage in, and are more positive toward, action that fulfills their goal when they are in good moods vs. bad moods.  Since the only difference between these two groups of respondents was their subliminal exposure to the happy or angry faces, and since explicit self-reports of how they were feeling were no different between the two groups, the research showed that the unconscious emotional manipulation was what caused the differences in the amount drunk and how much they would be willing to pay for the beverage.

Supporting Study 2: Choosing Dasani Bottled Water.  Drawing upon Robert Zajonc’s classic work demonstrating that mere exposure to (vs. conscious deliberation of) a previously neutral stimulus is all that’s needed to develop an increased liking for it (liking being a positive feeling), Ferraro, Bettman, and Chartrand (2005) investigated whether increasing incidental exposure of a brand of water (Dasani) could unconsciously increase choice of that brand.  Showing respondents photos of people engaged in everyday activities, the researchers varied the number of photos that contained Dasani bottled water embedded within the photos.  (Note: The respondents did not know that choosing bottled water was the purpose of the research.)  Allowing respondents to choose different bottles of water as a ‘thank you’ for participating, they found that Dasani was chosen more than the other brands as the number of Dasani exposures were included in the photos.  However – and here’s the unconscious connection – this effect only happened for respondents who were not explicitly aware that Dasani was in the photos!  The research showed that additional exposures to Dasani led to greater unconscious liking for it and increased choice of it.

Supporting Study 3: Implicit “Loving” for a Frozen Food Brand.  Using the Emotional Profiling technique we developed, I and my colleague, Keith Payne, recently investigated the Emotional Profile of a frozen food brand.  Based on well-founded social/cognitive psychology methods, the technique measures how targeted respondents feel both ‘implicitly’ (i.e., without deliberate reflection) and ‘explicitly’ (i.e. with deliberate reflection) about the targeted object, in this case a frozen food brand.  When we examined which of the emotions (both implicit and explicit) in the brand’s profile most predicted share of purchase for that brand, we found that only feeling implicitly loving toward the brand significantly predicted this important outcome measure.  None of the emotions explicitly “felt” toward the brand had a significant impact on its share of purchase.

Most people, including marketers and marketing researchers, have a hard time believing that unless a consumer feels a certain feeling and can tell us about it, then it must not be affecting his or her behavior.  But the truth is that this isn’t always the case.  Emotions work “surreptitiously” to affect their behavior.  So, as I always do, I recommend always building ways to assess emotions’ ‘implicit’ (as well as explicit) impact on targeted consumer behavior.

So much for the first in this series.  Subsequent articles will discuss…

• How stronger emotional associations improve sensory processes.
• How emotional associations affect cognitive strategies – ways in which we think about things.
• How cognitive load affects emotions’ impact on behavior.
• How different methods of “emotional conditioning” affect preference for a brand or product.

Until next time…

This installment of Ask the Emotional Expert features Patricia Sunderland, Ph.D., anthropologist & founding partner of Practica Group, and co-author (with Rita Denny) of Doing Anthropology in Consumer Research (2007, Left Coast Press, Inc.).

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 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…