Why Emotional Triggers are Important in Today’s Data Driven Marketing

A few years ago, at the Stanford Graduate Business School, I spent an entire afternoon in a class focused on the impact of neuroscience in marketing and what it told us about getting the best out of organizations, people and decision making. Most recently, at the Gartner Marketing conference, one of the keynotes touched upon the Hidden Forces that Shape Behavior. While consumer pricing and related areas have always delved into psychological dimensions, its only in the recent years we have come to see the growing implications of emotional and psychological triggers in customer experience.

Customers are human beings, and complex to say the least. To understand buying today, and therefore accordingly be able to map the experience requires not only knowledge of interactions they are looking for, but how that is wrapped with their motivations, aspirations and judgements, among a myriad of other things.

And to top that, we are in the attention economy. Attention is a scarce commodity today. Is it really true that our average attention span has fallen less than that of a goldfish? So how do we then capture a prospect or customer’s attention? Send more emails? Publish more on social media? Hold more roundtables and webinars?

If we take into account some of the emotional persuasions that drive customer decision making along with data, we stand a much better chance at a successful buying journey and meaningful lifetime customer engagement. 

Why We Should Tell Stories. Big and Small.

In building customer relationships and experiences, we often talk about creating an engagement model. Simply put, these are the best possible ways to engage and interest a prospect or customer in what we have to offer. What we have to offer is obviously a product, but is that what we engage our customers right way with?

Airbnb founder story is one of the most inspiring tales in tech. Over the years, they have continued their storytelling. Most recently, they responded to discrimination allegations at their locations with this powerful We Accept campaign. While accommodations are their focus, their storytelling heralds beyond - telling the story through a hero, a protagonist, a single person is so much more powerful. And then there is Marnie, the Dog boosting awareness of its pet friendly listings.

Stories are the biggest levers in marketing products today. In this video, Google shows how Adwords contributed to a local restaurant become a $14 million, national mail-order business - in a compelling, heartwarming way.

For every company, there are multiple stories to tell. Some are overarching at the brand level, while others resonate at the deeper engagement level, informed by data & insights and segmentation with different audiences and verticals (sports, education etc.). What is clear is everything connects in the minds of the customers. Deloitte’s Global Impact Report championing A new mindset for action has considerable impact even when they tout their professional services capabilities. Qualcomm, prides on the stories of their innovation and makes it a clear differentiator for all of their products - whether mobile computing, wireless automotive technology, or application processors.

Telling stories is not easy. But every product and technology undoubtedly have a story to tell. We must tell them with authenticity & integrity and display character & DNA. In the aftermath of Hurricane Florence, Oracle posted a video of employees providing aid to those affected and urged its followers to join. Microsoft’s stories’ platform showcases employees from researchers to artists to video game developers – giving face to unique and gifted individuals. These are not brand building exercises only, but factor in actively in the minds of the customers when they are taking action.

Why Deliver Emotional Connections, Not Just Value

Actual buying comes much later, both in B2B and B2C. Unless customers feel connected and see value during their research & ongoing evaluations, there is little reason for them to engage. In order to build value, we must know their emotional makeup, their motivations, their preferences, their decision criteria, etc. And we must not forget, it’s a continuum where we need to generate emotion at multiple steps as they make their way.

It’s not new for brands to want to stay on top of mind. Customers should be able to think of us when they are in the middle of it, when they are in need. A nuance to that is to pose the question - when do we want them to think of us? I am not even a beer drinker, but If I am at the beach and thirsty, Corona comes to mind. Why? Because the sun-drenched, white sand Find your Beach campaign and its variations over the years have worked remarkably well Not surprisingly, profits have soared.

Consider Frequency. Technologies have made it significantly easy to manage and manipulate frequency of when we want them to see us. But seeing is not equivalent to desired action. To convert to desired action needs deliberate plotting of big and small moments. For a big moment such as International Women's Day, the, "Overlooked" project from New York times covered the contributions of overlooked investigative reporter Ida B. Wells, poet Qiu Jin and photographer Diane Arbus, and ran that alongside their ongoing campaign The Truth Is Hard. It helped drive conversion along with acquiring more subscribers in just 24 hours than the Times had in the six weeks prior to launch.

Think About the Goldfish.

At a time, when we touch our phones oh only about 2,617 times a day (per dscout research), how do we keep our customers engaged? Overwhelming them with more messages will likely fracture that attention further. To grab attention and engagement as customers snake through non-linear journeys means delivering something novel, something unique. When SpaceX took a Tesla roadster into space, it drew millions of views and thousands of news articles and nearly half a million conversations.

Not all of us would be able to do that, or need to do that, but something closer to the ground maybe is the campaign by MailChimp, which is a marketing automation platform and targets marketers. First, the monkey is everywhere, and that has its own appeal. A few years back they did short films and projects to open the door to new potential customers that rhymed - such as MailShrimp, KaleLimp and JailBlimp etc. Funny & memorable, they made me curious to check out their value propositions, even if I was not searching.

Take Slack. Their naming itself is a hit. Who thinks about calling a productivity & communications tool this? It draws a chuckle and that’s novel by itself. Their video series, “So Yeah, we tried Slack..,” got into messaging in an easy and light hearted manner, full of humor, which made it remarkably different from the rest of the pack of densely packaged product level marketing jargon used by most companies in that space.

Capitalizing on the fear of losing out can also be fairly credible if done right. Apple of course used the “secret” formula famously. But at a more practical level, crafting meaningful roundtable and events, bringing together companies & people in way that is novel can lift short term & long-term conversions. Last year, I chose to attend a marketing seminar, out of the innumerable invites that come my way, based on their unique idea of bringing together a marketing agenda along with partnering with a non-profit to provide them a platform and whose cause they were committed to.

Build Social Currency that Matters

We all know social carries a huge influence. Scratch the surface and we find this landscape is largely hinged on emotional and psychological triggers. This sentence sums it for me: “When we care, we share.” ― Jonah Berger, Contagious: Why Things Catch On.

Research shows - to belong is to matter. Sense of belonging enhances meaning in life. That’s a powerful trigger to tap into. And perhaps validates why brands with large communities on their social tend to contribute and influence purchase decisions actively. A few years back, American Express did this brilliantly with Small Business Saturday campaign @shopsmall. Similarly, Adobe is known to post amazing content on their social, most of which is user-generated and comes from the community. And that belonging often converts to loyalty & retention and overall LTV.

Another aspect of social now lies in its exclusivity or insider status. Does having exclusive information about a brand, feature or a highlight bestow insider status? Of course, it does. But don’t forget it is not valuable until it is shared, and a wider audience comes to view it as such and thereby also seek to get into that insider status. And that is when they are likely to take action. It’s what ground swells are built on. This notion with its emotional underpinning is a wonderful tool for us marketers to capitalize in creating circumstances or situations that are deemed special. If we think about a launch campaign from this point of view, then the traditional tactics truly deserve rethinking This is also why influencer marketing is on the rise, both in B2B and B2C alike.

“Knowing about cool things—like a blender that can tear through an iPhone—makes people seem sharp and in the know. So, to get people talking we need to craft messages that help them achieve these desired impressions. We need to find our inner remarkability and make people feel like insiders.” ― Jonah Berger, Contagious: Why Things Catch On

Seth Godin’s quote may appear a bit too lofty, but there is enough evidence to suggest that rationality needs to be mixed with the emotional to capture the customer experience and the purchase journey. 

I say, understanding customer psychology as an underpinning of core marketing activities should be an ongoing endeavor for all businesses, with as much deliberation and exploration as we do towards data and technology.

Of course, then there is AI. In the future, it may very well be that AI will help us marketers to capture and respond to human moods & emotions and enable a higher, richer degree of personalization. Irrespective, human emotions will still be at the center of marketing lifecycle.

What do you think?

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