Mapping Emotion: The Missing Link in Consumer Journeys
Consumer journeys are not a new concept, and most Brand Owners have a comprehensive map of their consumer journeys and are very aware of their strengths and weaknesses from this viewpoint. They know where their product or service does well and where it is weak against the competition.
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However, when I dig into the detail with my clients, I generally discover that this is a very rational description of their consumers’ experience based upon their sensorial or conscious experience derived from explicit questions and quantitative surveys.
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While this view of the consumer journey does have considerable value and use, and while it does generally give a glimpse of the consumer reaction to the brand or products, it is, in fact, very weak on understanding the consumers’ emotional journey.
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As the consumer travels through the different stages of their journey with your brand – on a macro level through their lifecycle with the brand, or on a micro level on each usage occasion – they also experience an emotional journey.
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No consumer switches from frustrated to relief, stressed to calmed or tired to relaxed, without travelling through a series of reactions and emotions on the way. It is only when we understand this emotional journey with its ups and downs, its twists and turns, that we really understand our consumer journey or that we really understand our brand and its strengths and weaknesses.
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Let’s consider a literal journey to illustrate the point:
A commute home from the office. It would be perfectly reasonable to assume that our commuter (our consumer) would want the fastest route to get home, and we can use quantitative data to map a route that would normally be the quickest.
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Explicit questioning is likely to confirm our assumption that the commuter wants to get home quickly but may add a few additional data points such as their desire to avoid driving through a certain part of town or their hatred of sitting in a traffic queue even if it does get them onto a faster road. They prefer to keep moving.
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However, mapping the emotional journey over different routes home may reveal that the longer slower route across the park or through more open countryside relaxes the commuter, calms them after a stressful day and they arrive home in a better mood and are thus nicer to their kids and partner when they get there.
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Naturally they want to get home faster to spend more time with their family, but emotional mapping shows that the slower route means they arrive in a better state of mind and spend more valuable, higher quality, time with the family.
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Once you recognise this you can design your product – their route home – to deliver a better emotional result (a superior experience) and you can communicate it in a different way to show your consumers the unique benefits of your product over the competitors – the shorter route.
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Targeting emotional benefits rather that explicitly stated rational ones is not a new concept, but in my experience very few companies are actually very good at it. Those that are, are well known and leaders in their field.
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Part of the problem is that emotions are difficult to measure and thus, in a rationally based business, they feel woolly without quantitative numbers. There is no shortage of agencies and individuals who will tell you that they can quantify emotional responses, but invariably they end up distilling the panoply of human emotions down to a limited range of high-level emotions and asking consumers to make an explicit and rational choice between a limited set of words or images, or they are interpreting verbal or physical responses and coding them against a predetermined and relatively narrow set of high-level emotions.
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The only way to really understand the consumers’ emotional journey is to implicitly track it through their experience without the consumer ever really knowing what you are doing or why.
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In market research respondents (consumers) have a habit of trying their best to help and to please you. To give you the answers that they think you want to hear or that they want to communicate to whoever they think your client might be. Neither of which are very helpful when tracking the unconscious responses to a product journey.
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But, with an intelligent implicit methodology and experienced Consumer Psychologists to moderate, consumer emotional journeys can be tracked, and it is also possible to connect these emotional journeys back to the brand and product attributes that prompt the individual responses.
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So, it is possible to understand not only the detailed emotional journey of your consumers, but also how this journey is created by your brand and product features and how you can orchestrate the best emotional journey through careful management of comms. and product delivery.
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In short, you can deliver the shortest journey home for you consumers – that is after all what they are asking for – or you can improve their and their family’s lives by going one better (and leave your competitors wondering what happened!).
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Chris Lukehurst is a Consumer Psychologist and a Director at The Marketing Clinic:
Providing Clarity on the Psychological relationships between consumers and brands
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