Understanding the Power of Emotional Analytics

The Topline

Marketers must evolve the way we approach — and measure — human motivation. Across the industry today, marketers primarily measure the logical side of the brain, what we call left-brained thinking. Day in and day out, consumers are asked what motivates them to buy a product, if they liked an ad, or how they’ll prioritize their spending.

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Yet we know that consumer behavior is not logical or rational. Sometimes, the biggest motivators are ones we can’t easily put into words. This is a gap that needs to be addressed. To survive and thrive in the future, marketers must find ways to measure the right-brained thinking that truly drives consumer actions: emotions. That’s where emotional analytics comes into play. ?

The Essential Truth

Close your eyes and picture your shopping cart from your last grocery store trip. In today’s value-focused economy, many people are checking prices or considering store brands, but there are likely some items you would never deviate from no matter the cost. Why? Are they that much more delicious than the alternative brand that offered a coupon that week? Or is there an emotional tie you aren’t even consciously aware of — memories of an afternoon snack with a grandparent or a favorite Friday night dinner?

?This is not just brand loyalty, while it might be one key driver, but quite beyond that.

Emotional analytics is a powerful field that has the potential to change the way we use and gather data, responsibly, to provide better insights to marketers, inform brand messaging, and improve the effectiveness of marketing strategies and efforts. It helps to unearth those emotional motivations that we don’t always think about — or even realize are there.

In fact, 95% of decision-making takes place in the subconscious and almost spontaneously.

Most of the analytics seen in the industry today are either behavioral (measuring actions) or perceptual (measuring affinity). Behavioral analytics can tell us what happened, but not necessarily and credibly what the motivations were behind the action. When you ask a consumer why they feel the way they do about a brand, you ultimately just get a forced rationalization of an emotion. That rationalization that may or may not be accurate — it is difficult to understand our own emotions well enough to be able to explain the reasoning behind our actions. We may think we chose option A because of the product ingredients, when in reality we subconsciously preferred it due to an entirely different and not so obvious reason.

Being able to effectively measure that spontaneous, subconscious decision-making can help marketers more precisely understand what is or isn’t working at the most base, emotional level. This insight can help optimize products, services, communication strategies and everything else in a way that truly appeals to consumers — and drives meaningful actions. The future of this space holds significant promise. Emotional analytics stands apart in that you gather data by observing people scientifically. For example, we can measure subconscious reactions by looking at people’s physical responses — their facial expressions, the dilation of their pupils, and so on. Neurological research measures brain wave activity to measure the signals fired off by different parts of the brain and analyze what it means. For example, when you show someone an advertisement and gather data on what moments neurons fire and which parts of the brain light up, marketers can know exactly which parts of the ad that consumers find most interesting, and with what varying levels of positivity or negativity! This has been around for quite some time now, but not widely used.

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The future is going beyond just assessing the points in time or moments in the ad that a consumer’s emotions are tracked, but you assess the intensity of the emotions too, leveraging AI tools.There is a big difference between someone who is upset and someone who is livid, as an example. And the extent of the emotion determines the speed of action or the extent of consumption of the product. Emotional analytics is a golden key in the years to come! But, it’s a key that needs to be used to unlock possibilities with a consumer first, privacy first mindset and responsibility. ?

The Tidbit

Emotions drive actions — in fact, digital ads which evoke strong emotions are four times more likely to drive brand equityas a result. Fortunately, advancements in fields like neuroscience and psychology layered on top of emerging technologies like AI allow us unprecedented insight and ability to understand the subconscious drivers of consumer behavior. There is no better time for marketers to experiment with the nascent field of emotional analytics.

My Take

One of the tenets of Quantum Marketing is to integrate the power of art and science to get into consumers’ hearts and heads. The goal is to learn how and why consumers think, feel, and act in any given way. Understanding these reactions can help us understand consumers and allow us to craft significantly more effective campaigns. This is more than theoretical — companies are collecting data and starting to utilize emotional analytics today across industries. Imagine a customer service agent responding based on an analysis of customer emotions to improve the service experience. AI can play a major role here too. In fact, new AI tools are being developed that apply emotional analytics to text responses, giving marketers better data around consumer affinity based on their word choice. It will be exciting to see more of these tools come to market and start to make an impact. In fact, this AI-driven emotion detection market is expected to surpass $40 billion by the end of the decade. Marketers who have a better understanding of emotional analytics also stand to benefit in the long-run relative to their peers, as emotional intelligence is expected to be a critical skill needed to work alongside powerful AI tools. And this is not isolated to business-to-consumer marketing: B2B marketing is generations behind when it comes to tapping into emotions, incentives, and the ‘softer’ side of marketing. But people run businesses, just the same. ?

Long Story Short

Emotional analytics is a nascent field, with brands just beginning to experiment in this space. But the science and technology are improving — and soon we will be able to measure the intensity of an emotion. It is where the industry is headed. Companies that can get an early edge will have a significant competitive advantage over their competitors. Emotional analytics will help us unlock a connection to the consumer’s mind in a way we have never been able to before. That, in turn, will help us meet people where they are amidst the hyper-saturated world of brand messaging. Studying people holistically and marketing to them as people, rather than consumers, is the Quantum Marketing way.

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