The emotional basis of decision making

My thanks to Lou Carbone for sharing the CEB Marketing Leadership Council white paper from Promotion to Emotion. I have used the analogy of the rider and the elephant before, but I had not attributed it to Harvard's Jonathan Haidt.

The rider represents rational thought, the elephant emotion. When it comes to decision making, especially purchase decisions, their sizes are in proportion to their relative importance. Unless you are a hedge fund manager using algorithms to determine your portfolio or a Vulcan, your feelings take primacy in purchases.

This holds true even in B2B environments, where we give intellectual rationales for the emotional choices we take. We choose brands based on what we feel; we support that choice by what we see as factual evidence. It's easier to point to product specs than to acknowledge the value of feeling like the smartest engineer in the room or to feel heroic for the work you do. But the 6-ton heart trumps the 150-pound head.