Menu
In Chapter 1 of the Manifesto Volume 2, the book outlines the complexity and cultural context of emotions. The chapter highlights how it is essential to be aware of the emotional range and differences across cultures – be that in signals, facial expressions or language.
In this article, we summarise the five ways to apply this knowledge to create opportunities in brand, communications, customer experience, behaviour change and innovation – as outlined in the book.
Emotions are often associated with categories. The fast-food restaurant category, for example, is likely to have pleasurable states. By knowing your brand’s emotions, you can establish distinctiveness within the category. By communicating the weight and potency of different emotions that are relevant to your brand, you can better tailor your brand narrative.
To decide what works best for your brand, identify what emotions are the biggest drivers of consideration and what’s most likely to influence the move from consideration to decision-making.
Memory is powerful. So, when it comes to communications, tapping into emotions is a springboard for creatively triggering a response.
Our senses, for instance, are foundational to memory. So, communications that trigger strong sensory responses have a head start. Visual stimulus is high on the list (most people are visually dominant), but don’t ignore the power of sound or even smell.
Get communications right and they’ll be more memorable. The trick is promoting an emotional response that taps into the unconscious feelings associated with your category – or into the motivations your category addresses. Memories of negative emotions, however, are stronger than positive emotions. And it’s also common for people to experience mixed emotions, which means that you need to tactfully hook into the dominant positive emotion and be wary of triggering the negative aspects of emotions – unless you intend to offer a solution.
CX is loaded with emotion. When approaching any experience, our emotional default is often uncertainty and customer experience is no exception to this. Not only is it uncertain, but there’s also the reality that the customer experience will have an added dose of pain.
Customer experience is a journey, it’s fluid. This means there’ll be moments that peak our emotions and, if we deliver well at those peaks, the overall experience will be remembered well. To understand the overall emotion associated with an experience, we need to be able to deconstruct the emotional journey. Specifically, we need to log the emotion going into the experience, changes during the experience and at the end of the experience.
Instead of seeing the end of a customer experience in pragmatic terms, consider the emotional reward. How might you design an emotional reward in more than simple or single-dimensional terms – and how might you measure its effectiveness? What will give you a competitive advantage over similar brands?
If there’s one thing we’ve learned in the last decade, it’s that behaviour is not driven by rational arguments. If that were the case, then no one would smoke, everyone would wear a helmet, and we’d all be better at saving money!
Emotions influence how people receive information, instructions or any form of communication. Take, for example, someone who is angry and stressed. In this context, this person is more likely to interpret a non-authoritarian or neutral message as threatening or critical. So, to truly understand messaging effectiveness, we need to understand the dynamics of a scenario and the nature of an emotional response. In practical terms, this could look like a benchmark related to physiological measures i.e. a sense of agitation.
In online scams for instance, scammers endear themselves to a victim and positive feelings toward the scammer leads people to overlook the obvious signs of a scam. To help combat this, agencies could find ways to increase the potency of feelings that result in more wariness and safer behaviour.
Emotions aren’t just outcomes of innovation – they should be the inputs guiding the process. How people feel about the category or new related trends sets the context for how people react to new ideas.
Recognising the emotional drivers behind unmet needs can reveal opportunities for innovation. For example, frustration with a cumbersome or boring process surfaces the need to be innovative to achieve simplicity for the customer, but stepping back and noticing a part of the experience that evokes joy may point us to elements that are worth amplifying.
To deliver ideas that connect meaningfully and create solutions that deliver emotional rewards, don’t just address surface-level sentiments. Instead, explore the mixed emotions, potency, and sensory associations. Take, for instance, a tech product designed to alleviate stress. This must address not just functional elements aimed at making the process easy and therefore less stressful, but also the nuances of emotion i.e. calm, confidence or reassurance.
Finally, sensory cues, such as design aesthetics, touch, sound and smell, play an essential role in innovation. Products and services that trigger positive sensory and emotional responses are more likely to be adopted and remembered.
.jpg)
.png)
%20(1).jpg)
.jpg)
.png)
