Reading People’s Minds Is Our Superpower

by Derek Johnson , Head of Marketing at Prxy AI

Why “Why” is Important

I remember helping create and develop an important digital tool that was supposed to roll out at CES years ago (spoiler alert: it never happened). We spent thousands upon thousands of dollars conducting qualitative testing in markets across the U.S. and Europe. From that investment, we were overjoyed to have a mere 10 participants in each market helping us understand what they responded well to, what wasn’t appealing, and most importantly?—?why.

Whether you’re trying to accelerate growth for your business, better support your clients’ needs, or pursue data-informed social justice, a new dimension of data is here: data with feelings.

For decades, we’ve relied on an abundance of structured data to understand what people are doing at scale. Even today, this fuels media, advertising, content creation, and every facet of marketing and sales. And yet, this data is incomplete?—?lacking emotion and an understanding of why people are doing what they’re doing. We can correlate that people who take one action are more likely to take another, and dissect those people into cohorts based on demographic or behavioral variables ad nauseam. But we still outsource qualitative research that is often expensive, anecdotal, and siloed.

Fortunately, my path has crossed with like-minded people who are determined to deliver data on what was previously intangible: mindsets, feelings, and thoughts. The why.

But why is the why important?

1. Meeting Future Needs

Understanding why someone takes action provides better insight into how to meet their future needs. We often seek audiences with an affinity for a product or brand. When we understand the why behind that affinity, we can create provocative briefs, resonant campaigns, and magnetic personalization. Without the why, we’re still casting a wide and inexact net?—?albeit a better one than we had 10 years ago.

2. Solving Dissatisfaction

Understanding why someone is dissatisfied empowers us to solve their problem more effectively. It’s well known that customer problems present moments of great opportunity. Digging into dissatisfied sentiments at scale enables companies to address the issues with the strongest or most worrisome semantics attached to them.

3. Moving Beyond Anecdotes

Understanding why at scale helps us move beyond anecdotes to social or cultural sentiment. For example, while anecdotal opinions about the quality of Spotify Wrapped are easy to find, analyzing sentiment at scale helps us grasp the gravity of the issue. At first blush, we see that there was large scale dissatisfaction with 2024’s Spotify Wrapped, a sentiment felt more widely by younger users and female users. Digging deeper, we see that the volume of negative sentiment around podcast exclusions was considerably higher than negative sentiment around the music summary. People complained about the music summary on social channels, while the podcast complaints were on official channels and forums, therefore harder to discern and act on. If Spotify was analyzing the semantic data at scale, would Wrapped 2024 been different and better?

4. Turning Emotion Into Action

Finally, the most poignant case for understanding why is that it helps turn emotion into action. In my personal life, our daughters often bring home big, emotionally loaded, important questions. We have spirited conversations that often end with them wanting to know what to do with their sense of frustration, passion, or injustice. My suggestion is always to take action?—?to make a difference in their world. They may not be able to change the world, but they can impact their part of it.

Businesses, nonprofits, political parties, and nearly every type of organization can now understand the most potent emotions felt by their patrons and take meaningful action. We can also hold these institutions accountable by exposing the mass data behind the anecdotes. It’s not just a social media post with a million likes?—?it’s millions of thoughts, feelings, and mindsets distilled into key sentiments.

Whether you’re trying to accelerate growth for your business, better support your clients’ needs, or pursue data-informed social justice, a new dimension of data is here: data with feelings. ?

PRXY AI At Prxy AI, we deliver data on what was previously intangible: emotion–mindsets, feelings, and thoughts. We connect these thoughts and feelings to behaviors and actions, making semantic data addressable. It’s a new approach to intelligence?—?emotion included.

Tell us who your customers are and we’ll tell you what they’re thinking– PrxyAI.com