How Emotion Drives Behaviour: Making Your Marketing More Human and Effective

At Source Nine, we’ve learned that much of business, campaigning, and behaviour change boils down to this:

Creating emotional value.

It’s no secret that people aren’t just buying products; they’re buying states of being, feelings, and identities. Every offer we make is really the offering of an emotional transformation—an attempt to evoke a feeling that drives action.

If you work in marketing communications, then whether you realise it or not, you are in the business of creating emotional states that lead to specific behaviours.

This has long been the art of the skilled creative, the innovative product developer, and the impactful campaign. It’s the ad that resonates, the message that moves, the campaign that changes lives—or even the world. Ultimately, it’s all about creating emotional value and communicating it in a way that stirs and drives effectiveness.

The Empathy Framework? is designed to do just that. Whether you’re aiming to create emotional value for your brand, align a product with your audience’s emotional motivators, inform your media strategy, or develop creative strategies to evoke specific emotions and behaviours, The Empathy Framework? offers actionable insights.

Every Offer is an Emotional Transformation

Emotions are not hardwired, universal responses; they are constructed by our brains based on deeply held beliefs, past experiences, and expectations. When your audience encounters your brand, product, or campaign, they are filtering it through these personal lenses—lenses that shape their emotional responses.

By understanding your audience’s beliefs and the narratives they use to make sense of the world, you can predict and influence these emotional responses - this is what all MarComms have been doing for decades. What the Empathy Framework provides is the clarity and consistency needed to align your strategy with the emotional motivations driving your audiences without any guesswork. The framework has been designed with the latest neuroscience of emotion in mind, enabling the unlocking of a hidden logic to emotion that makes achieving your goals and those of your audiences, feel like pushing on an open door.

The logic is very simple - if people perceive their emotional needs as unmet, they feel negative emotions; if met, they feel positive emotions. These need states then drive behaviour. From this point of view, all behaviours are attempts to meet unmet needs and instead of it being an objective assessment, it is in fact a subjective perception of our needs being met that is essential to understand. These perceptions are subjective and are constructed by the individual’s interpretation of the world.

If you can understand how perceptions of emotional needs states are constructed, you can understand behaviour - not only well enough to explain behaviours but to predict them as well.

What are the Emotional Needs?

Drawing from the work of Manfred Max-Neef, Marshall Rosenberg, and Lisa Feldman Barrett, we’ve identified 10 essential emotional needs that shape human experience:

1. Physical Well-being
2. Security
3. Connection
4. Autonomy
5. Meaning & Purpose
6. Esteem
7. Honesty & Authenticity
8. Comprehension
9. Peace & Beauty
10. Play

Everything we do in some way comes back to the fulfilment of one of these core needs.

Everything else is merely a strategy for meeting them.

Take for example money. We may think we emotionally need money, but money itself is merely a construct that is used for the exchange of value.?To paraphrase Bruce Lee, it is the finger pointing at the Moon, not the Moon itself.

Money is not an emotional need, it is a strategy for meeting emotional needs such as Autonomy (think freedom, agency and power to act as you intend) from which we then have greater ability to access more effective strategies for meeting our other emotional needs.?

Money then provides Security and depending on the lenses of different groups and cultures it may also play a part in the construction of met need states for Esteem and many others.

Just as with money, your brand is not the Moon, it is a finger pointing to it. That pointing and the efficacy of it, will differ in different contexts with different people, which is why you need empathetic insight in order to adapt your strategies accordingly.

The point here is that these emotional needs drive us and we all too often mistake strategies for meeting our needs with the needs themselves. But once we can a) start to see our product or service as a strategy for meeting emotional needs, b) we know what those needs are and c) we know how our audiences are constructing their perceptions of their needs in relation to our product or service, we can then engage in the direct creation of emotional value for our audiences.?

And as noted above, money can then be exchanged in direct proportion to that value because the better able we are to create emotional value for our audiences, the more valuable our work is.?

Emotional needs are universal, but the way we perceive the world—through our unique combination of beliefs and narratives—creates individual “lenses” through which we view life.?

Understanding these lenses is crucial to understanding how people make sense of the world and what drives their behaviour. By placing our focus on emotional needs and not just strategies for meeting them, we’re able to reach back to the source of why people do what they do and what it is that we can do to serve them better than anybody else.

Believability and Emotional Transformation

Believability is key. The closer you are to addressing unmet needs, the more credible and effective your message will be. If you only highlight the pain without offering a way out, there’s no transformation. Conversely, if the message is too aspirational, it may seem unbelievable.

When mapping before-and-after states, consider the context—the beliefs, objections, and obstacles related to the problem you’re addressing. The goal is to weave narratives that are believable and lead to the creation of emotional value (as perceived by your audience, not you) by meeting these emotional needs.

The more texture and nuance you bring to these narratives, the more your audience will feel heard and seen. Authenticity and empathy are crucial—when people feel understood, they are more likely to feel emotionally safe enough to act.

Application of The Empathy Framework?

The Empathy Framework? helps you create emotional value by understanding three key factors:

1. People’s beliefs
2. The narratives at play
3. The resulting emotional responses in relation to the 10 emotional needs

By aligning your strategy with these insights, you can craft communications that resonate deeply with your audience, leading to more effective campaigns and stronger emotional connections.

Case Study: Housing Development

For a client in the housing development sector, we discovered that Autonomy was a significant emotional driver for families buying new homes (so too were Meaning & Purpose and Peace & Beauty). Despite concerns about affordability due to the cost of living, these customers were motivated by life triggers and a strong belief in their personal agency. The main emotional need being met for them through a new build house purchase was Autonomy.

By focusing on this need, we created personas and empathy maps that illustrated the desired emotional transformation and therefore what the key Emotional Job to Be Done was for the target audience that would better enable purchase behaviours. This allowed us to shift the campaign into emotional territory, rather than relying on price-led messaging like their competitors. Understanding and using the customer’s language and context made our messaging more believable and impactful.

Creating Emotional Value in Media and Creative Strategies

It’s important to note that this approach is about invitation, not coercion. It requires respect for the audience and a willingness to listen and empathise. The Empathy Framework? accommodates diversity and uniqueness, revolving around creating the feeling that different combinations of these 10 essential needs are being met in the context of the lived experiences of specific audiences.

You can also use this framework for media strategy, identifying the moments when these emotional needs are most likely to be felt and satisfied in your audiences day to day lives - the instances in which they are already constructing these states. By aligning your media buying with these times and places, you can ensure your brand shows up when your audience is most receptive, adding extra emotional value to your messaging.

As the name suggests, at the heart of this approach is empathy. The framework is designed to enable more of it in a consistent and reliable way so that we can more easily understand why our audiences feel the way that they do and therefore why they do what they do.

In a world overwhelmingly full of descriptive data about who, when, where and what, there’s never been more of a need for reconnecting with what really drives us, with what explains the why behind our behaviours and that shows us what makes us human - emotion.

If you’d like to know more about The Empathy Framework?, our model for understanding beliefs and narratives, and how it aligns you with your audiences to drive behaviour, get in touch.