Customers have emotions too

Perhaps there are a few marketeers out there who still believe that customers only ever make rational decisions but for most of us perhaps a little late, we are finally asking the question, how do our clients and customers feel about us?

Whether its aggravation at the late running train or a general sense of happiness with the mood music playing in the grocery store, emotions are a great lever, determining what we remember from an experience and influencing how we behave in the future.

The evidence from psychology seems clear, you cannot separate emotion from rationality and you cannot deny its importance in consumer decision-making. For instance, through the Neuroscience work of Antonio Damasio emotions are seen to be ‘in the loop of reason’; in other words without emotion you cannot have rationality. In economics Professor Daniel Kahneman has really put emotions to the fore; indeed, to quote, ‘the rational model is one in which the beliefs and the desires are supposed to be determined. We were real believers in decision analysis 30 years ago, and now we must admit that decision analysis hasn’t held up.’ Shocking stuff to those who always thought clients and consumers were automatic robots juggling various combinations of price and product quality.

What are emotions for anyway but as a means of learning, to tell us what is good for our well-being.

So isn’t it time for market research to step up to the plate and measure those emotions? Is it right to build models of satisfaction, recommendation and spend and not include at least some understanding of emotional effect. What is the return on emotion anyway and can we design for a specific emotional response? It seems that for many companies we might well have run out of choices in terms of manipulating and competitively differentiating on the basis of the standard 4Ps so perhaps embedding a little emotion might go a long way.