Are You Tapping into Emotions in the Buying Process?

In a recent post, I attempted to debunk the notion that we’re rational consumers, citing research showing how emotions are important for guiding decisions and how advertisers create content that taps into emotions in the buying process. Today, let’s expand on the practical tools marketers can use to engage emotions in the buying process and focus on emotional intelligence as a means of segmenting your market to improve performance.

Emotions in the buying process

Take a look at the innocent little waif featured in the image above. Doesn’t her pitiful look make you want to reach out and envelop her in your arms, take care of her, give her whatever she wants? Emotions are hardwired into our brains as a tool that sustains the species. Nonprofits use images like this to get you to open your wallet because they work.

In for-profit marketing, using such emotional manipulations can easily backfire as consumers easily pierce your heavy-handed efforts to engage their emotions for profit. However, there are other, more subtle ways to use emotions in the buying process to increase sales without appearing inauthentic. For instance, generating feelings of joy, fear, excitement, anxiety, and urgency works very well as tools for improving performance, much better than appealing to rational motivations. In fact, one Harvard researcher contends that emotions drive up to 95% of purchase decisions. Let’s discuss just a few ways you can use emotions to improve performance.

Liking

Some brands create an emotional connection with consumers that generates brand loyalty. Brands like Apple and Nike have used this emotional connection to support not only high growth but a price premium over their competitors, which goes against every theory offered by those who promote buying as a logical process. Even in B2B buying situations that are commonly seen as more rational than consumer buying, emotional elements have a significant impact on purchase decisions.

Remember that consumers and buyers in a business setting are people. Their decisions are influenced by their emotions, with fear being one of the strongest motivators. More on that later.

Consumers are also social creatures and want to fit into their social network. That’s the power of influencers over our behavior. When we like someone in real life or on a social media platform, we give them the power to influence our purchase decisions. Of course, the same goes for hating influencers, which negatively impacts our purchase decisions.

Fear of missing out (FOMO)

As I mentioned earlier, fear is a strong motivator of human behaviors, although its impact may be short-lived, as it causes stress over time. Fear drives the purchase of specific products we have no genuine desire to buy, such as insurance. FOMO is also an excellent tool used by marketers to stimulate immediate purchase intentions, which consumers might otherwise delay (and forget over time). For instance, displaying the number of tickets or time remaining stimulates a purchase decision when a consumer is on the fence about making the purchase. You can use this by using a countdown clock showing that time or supply is running out (you can later increase the time or supply as it gets too close to running out).

Another way to use FOMO is to send a message when visitors leave a product in their shopping carts, reminding them of the product and offering a small discount if purchased within 24 hours, for instance.

Social proof and belonging

Reviews and recommendations work because they offer social proof and give us a sense of belonging that encourages us to make a purchase. When we see others we like and respect using a product, it influences us to buy the same product.

Happiness and aspirational buying

We’re inundated with product advertising showing happy people who look and feel great. Even if the ad doesn’t explicitly promise that purchasing the product will immediately make you happier and more attractive, engaging the emotion of happiness encourages us to buy.

You can do the same thing by making your physical environment fun, entertaining, and full of people having a good time. This encourages not only more people to visit your business but also to make larger purchases.

Nostalgia marketing

Nostalgia marketing is another powerful emotional tool used by marketers. Nostalgia marketing evokes positive memories of an imagined past that are tied to a product. Coke uses this type of marketing very effectively by showing Norman Rockwell-like images of the idealized family sitting down to dinner with a bottle of Coke displayed prominently on the table. The image evokes feelings of warmth, safety, and love that might never have existed in your past but that you imagine you can create with a bottle of Coke. The ad was so effective that it was translated into other languages and reproduced using actors reflecting various cultures, like the one below shown in Asia.

The nostalgia effect on the emotional connection to Coke was so strong that when the company attempted to modify its formula to match consumer research, the new version was soundly rejected, and consumers began hoarding the remaining product. This caused Coke to return to the old formula but garnered over a million dollars in free advertising as news programs showed consumers scrambling for the remaining product.

Emotional intelligence

If you accept the research that consumers use emotions in the buying process, the pressing question is how you detect emotions.

In the old general stores, you detected emotions because you were face to face with the customer and could judge her emotions. That’s still true in service situations — just think of the old bartender who listened as patrons poured out their problems. Of course, using the emotions detected within the service encounter requires a certain emotional intelligence.

What is emotional intelligence?

According to the leading researchers in the area of emotional intelligence, Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer, emotional intelligence is:

the subset of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions.

These researchers theorized four steps involved in emotional intelligence:

1. Perceiving Emotions: The first step in understanding emotions is to perceive them accurately. In many cases, this might involve understanding nonverbal signals such as body language and facial expressions.
2. Reasoning With Emotions: The next step involves using emotions to promote thinking and cognitive activity. Emotions help us prioritize what we pay attention to and react to; we respond emotionally to things that garner our attention.
3. Understanding Emotions: The emotions that we perceive can carry a wide variety of meanings. If someone is expressing angry emotions, the observer must interpret the cause of their anger and what it might mean. For example, if your boss is acting angry, it might mean that he is dissatisfied with your work, or it could be because he got a speeding ticket on his way to work that morning or that he’s been fighting with his wife.
4. Managing Emotions: The ability to manage emotions effectively is a key part of emotional intelligence. Regulating emotions, responding appropriately, and responding to the feelings of others are all important aspects of emotional management.

Combining emotional intelligence and cognitive intelligence (IQ) yields personality, which is a topic for another day.

Emotional intelligence in the buying process

A recent scholarly study suggests marketers need to move beyond cognitive notions of consumer behavior- I think, therefore I do- to understand how emotions impact the buying process. Supporting their contention, the authors point to research showing a clear link between emotional intelligence and specific buyer behaviors, such as impulse buying, and emotions, such as self-esteem.

Research suggests consumers with a higher emotional intelligence use a heightened understanding of their emotional state to make product choices. Hence, the notion of emotional marketing was born.

Emotions in the buying process

Here’s what Neil Kukemuller of Demand Metric has to say about emotions in the buying process:

Key in emotional marketing is understanding the underlying reason why a customer enters the market. A customer shopping for high-end baby clothes isn’t necessarily looking for an outfit to cover up her little one to meet societal standards of wearing clothes. Instead, she is probably trying to satisfy her emotional desire to dress her baby attractively to project an image of fashion and sophistication. Knowing this underlying motive, which often results from effective market research, helps in developing highly impacting ad messages.

In my earlier post, I showed how brands manipulate (no negative connotation intended) consumers’ emotions through advertising and brand messaging. Indeed, recent Super Bowl ads hit the emotional nerve centers heavily, with positive results.

However, the marketing implications of emotions go beyond simple manipulation because, as discussed above, emotions and emotional intelligence affect buying decisions. Effective salespeople sense consumer emotions and modify their presentation to match the feelings of their prospects.

Can the same thing be done on a larger scale?

Can businesses detect emotions and match their messaging to these emotions?

Can this be done on a large scale?

Emotions in the buying process: detect, segment, match

Detecting emotions in the buying process:

Up until a few years ago, you’d need an expensive market research study to detect emotions in the buying process. Today, big data offers detection solutions by monitoring the digital footprint left by consumers on social networks and mobile devices. Data provide insights into how consumers feel about brands, highlighting deeper emotions than simple liking to show the range of emotions consumers feel when they evaluate your product.

Savvy companies use this emotional understanding to benefit their brands in several ways:

Segmentation

Different consumers feel different emotions in the buying process. In the example above, where the mother buys baby clothing based on feelings of status, another might feel emotions of security that drive the purchase of apparel touting its flame retardance or its natural fibers.

Segmenting the market based on these emotions allows marketers to position their brands to match emotions in the buying process and for targeting specific market segments with appropriate messages that push the right emotional buttons.

Matching emotions

Deep emotional understanding also suggests fruitful avenues for new product development and managing improvements to existing brands by matching products with the emotions prevalent in the buying process of their target market.

For instance, detecting frustration associated with the product offers opportunities for creating new products or modifying existing products that reduce frustration.

Final thoughts on emotions in the buying process

1. Emotions significantly impact buyer choice, likely more than cognitive evaluations of the brand’s features, including price.
2. Emotions critical in the buying process go beyond simple liking to deeper feelings such as fear, hope, anger, frustration, etc.
3. Detecting emotions is possible using the digital footprint left by consumers on social networks and mobile devices (such as instant messages).
4. Market segmentation based on consumer emotions is not only possible but likely has a more significant impact on market performance than other segmentation variables, such as income and lifestyle.
5. Matching products to consumer emotions offers enormous opportunities to create successful new products and make improvements to existing products.

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