The sea change that occurred in marketing over the past decade, that is the movement from push to pull, has been profound. \u00a0\u00a0The consumer now has access to both formal and informal (online and offline word of mouth and other socially-based) information; and consumers are actively generating their own content; \u00a0and this shift in decision-making control has forced concomitant change among corporations and researchers.<\/p>\n
And, to parallel this, academics were actively studying the impact of emotions on various types of perception and decision-making. \u00a0There has been a great deal of this, on subjects ranging from metaphor elicitation to emotional and personalized weight processing. \u00a0Kahneman\u2019s book, Thinking Fast and Slow<\/b>, has been especially important for researchers as they endeavor to understand how human behavior<\/a> impacts customer decision-making.<\/p>\n Perhaps the most seminal impact of the new focus on emotions is that they play a role not only in trust and relationship elements of the customer experience, but on the more basic components of value delivery as well. \u00a0Things that, as researchers, we always considered to be the functional and rational elements of experience \u2013 price, accuracy, completeness, consistency, reliability, ease of use, etc. \u2013 have an emotional base that must be considered. \u00a0Newer emotional measurement techniques actively incorporate valence, i.e. sentiment, which clusters emotions into the positive, negative and neutral. \u00a0We see a lot of this in current applications of text analytics.<\/p>\n Specifically, researchers are keying in on the eight basic emotions \u2013 fear, trust, joy, anticipation, anger, disgust, sadness, and surprise \u2013and organizing them to identify impact, individually and collectively, on decision-making. \u00a0And, for each basic emotion, there are shadings of greater or lesser intensity \u2013 serenity (lesser) and ecstacy (greater) for joy, grief (greater) and pensiveness (lesser) for sadness, etc. \u2013 and quasi-emotional and relationship states that fall in between the basics, such as awe and disapproval, which fall on either side of surprise. \u00a0\u00a0Love falls in between joy and trust. \u00a0It\u2019s emotional, of course, but it makes sense in application.<\/p>\n For example, psychologically we know that human fear is unpleasant, can range from terror (greater) to apprehension (lesser), creates very direct (and negative) impression, and causes people to retreat or withdraw. \u00a0All of the remaining seven core emotions have similar relationships.. This can be applied to a lot of what we need to understand about customer experiences and the overall customer journey<\/p>\n Trust, however, may be the most important emotion, flanked by acceptance (lesser) and admiration (greater). \u00a0It has much to do with brand image and reputation, which, along with core functional elements of the experience, is a key driver of customer decision-making. \u00a0Trust is also the most fragile, and can easily compromise a relationship..<\/p>\n What is clear in all of this is that consumers behave with a broad range of emotions, usually complex, in their brand and product journeys. \u00a0At each stage of a customer\u2019s life, the researcher needs tools that will help interpret the meaning of emotions like anticipation, at the prospect and initial purchase phase of the customer life cycle, and joy or anger, once the purchase or service experience has been completed.<\/p>\n For everyone involved with customers, understanding and endeavoring to manage their behavior will never be the same. \u00a0It\u2019s a brave, somewhat scary, new, emotionally-driven world for experience researchers. \u00a0Everyone, especially those involved in interpreting decision behavior drivers, should strap in and get used to it.<\/p>\n Republished with permission from CustomerThink.com<\/a><\/p>\n
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