What will motivate 2021 consumers in the aftermath of Covid?
Emotions aren’t ‘just a feeling’. Far from it.
Instead, they are more of an appraisal tool, with as much as 95% of our cognition happening in our emotional brain (Zaltman 2016). And having helped us to assess something and make a decision, those same emotions can help shortcut processing time to repeat an action – like making a purchase, or conversely identifying a level of reassurance to not require doing something (like switching to a competitor).
After an incredible year of turbulence, 2021 is already acting as something of a reset button for consumers. Long-established habits, attitudes and behaviours have been forced into reassessment by state lockdowns and other restrictions.
Many firms will become obsolete, rather than simply insolvent.
A recent representative consumer survey in five EU countries indicates that many consumers simply do not miss certain goods and services they have cut down on since the COVID-19 outbreak. It concludes that many firms will become obsolete, rather than simply insolvent. So how can businesses, brands and other organisations connect with their customers’ emotions in 2021 to stay relevant, valued and meaningful in their lives?
A key starting point will be to align their brand messaging with high-impact consumer motivators. Back in November 2015, consumer intelligence firm Motista published a paper in the Harvard Business Review defining a set of 10 such motivators, illustrating how firms could leverage their brand values and product benefits directly against a consumer emotion. It suggests that marketing and advertising initiatives using these emotional motivators can create competitor advantage and growth.
It’s easy enough to see some motivators in this list that would have high potential to ride the wave of a recovering post-Covid economy. For instance, “feeling a sense of freedom” has been directly curtailed in so many ways, whilst for some, coming out of Covid life may be the ideal time to reassess how to “be the person I want to be”.
A four-point plan for rekindling an emotional connection with your customers:
- Check in with what your customers have always felt about your product or service – at Customer Faithful, we use our Lifelines? AI Emotion Analytics tool to explore user feedback and comments in social media, forums and focus groups to pinpoint specific emotions in their language.
- From this baseline, we’d recommend conducting a pulse survey, to bring such feelings into direct context with how your customers are feeling about Covid-19 and their expectations throughout 2021.
- If you have a large number of customers, consider segmenting them into groups based on loyalty. (See our article here for how to do this). For instance, your survey responses may be quite different amongst a top group of ‘die-hard fans’, least likely to want to shift away from their familiar pattern of buying, compared to ‘lifestyle migrators’ who have shifted their consumption perhaps only through Covid constraints but who have now fallen into a new routine.
- Once you have distilled key customer emotions from different loyalty segments, you’ll be able to create targeted marketing messages, which draw upon motivators that fit well with your brand and their feelings. This might also include developing initiatives that demonstrate your company values in a time of Covid – perhaps aspects of supporting community, environment or social identity. Whatever communication or activity you undertake, it needs to be authentic with your company’s purpose – after all, that’s the glue that unites your brand, its employees and customers, as well as wider stakeholders too.
Most of all, organisations are going to have to transition from reassuring their customers in 2020, towards inspiring them in 2021. Even in a still unstable world where general confidence has been damaged and the outlook remains uncertain, trust remains as valuable as ever. That can be as simple as doing things in a friendly, uncomplicated and humble way – behaviours that inspire and connect with your customers, and make them feel that they’re understood and supported.
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About Customer Faithful
Customer Faithful is a multi-disciplinary research consultancy, dedicated to highlighting unmet need in customer, patient and employee experience.
With team backgrounds in customer experience, clinical psychology and data analysis, we all bring the same level of focus - making qualitative research as accessible as possible and delivering valuable research findings that are easy to apply. Our market research helps businesses to really understand what their customers want and need from organisations. We identify their experiences (great and not so great) to help our clients develop ideas that can drive sales, profit and retain their best people. We think that’s what all research providers should care about, but from what our clients tell us, most simply don’t!