Why Focusing on Consumer Emotions Is the Next Big Market Research Trend

If you interview a successful salesperson, they’ll tell you that emotion trumps logic when it comes down to getting people to buy. Ultimately, identifying the benefits and features that matter most to your audience is important. Garnering a better understanding of what problem or need they’re hoping to solve frames marketing campaigns and messaging decisions. But understanding what the emotional drivers are behind decision making gives marketers an incredibly powerful lever to work with when selling.

Yet market research is often focused on the cognitive aspects of the buying process: Do buyers recognize a brand? What do they think about it? What information are they looking for during the research process? Brands that adapt their research agendas to get a better understanding of the role that emotions play have a powerful advantage. Here’s a closer look at why a big market research trend is deepening the exploration of consumer emotions.

How Emotions Impact Buying Decisions

Consider the process of buying a car. If someone has the lifestyle and financial flexibility to purchase any car, let’s assume he/she goes for a sports car. What’s driving that purchase? An expensive car could make someone feel edgy, like he/she could take off on an adventure anytime. Some may associate it with status, and it can reinforce self-esteem or perceptions of success. Finally, the purchase could be largely tied to the emotions that the buyer associates with the car: being attractive, powerful, joyful and so forth.

But measuring the role of emotions in the buying process starts with defining exactly what an emotion is. The tough part is getting researchers to agree on a common definition. As The Atlantic discussed in a recent piece on this very challenge, “Emotions are biologically innate, universal to all humans and displayed through facial expressions.” For purposes of this piece, let’s take that as a working definition.

One cautionary note: many marketers confuse sentiment with emotion. When it comes to brands, sentiment is a general feeling about a brand, whether its perception is positive or negative. Emotion, one could argue, goes far deeper and has a much more personal influence on the buying process.

Measuring Emotions and Consumer Behavior

There are multiple layers to understand the influence of emotion on consumer behavior. Some elements that can be understood, quantified and further examined through market research include:

• How customers experience your brand emotionally;
• How consumers react to your products or services on an emotional level;
• The consumer’s emotional state around the issue in question (e.g. health, their weight, family issues, home ownership, etc.);
• Perceptions of emotional change if the problem is addressed or the challenge is solved;
• What that emotional state influences the consumer to do in terms of behavior;
• Environmental factors that can positively or negatively impact or change emotional states.

One of the most important elements of measuring emotions is determining which framework of understanding emotions you’re going to build off of. There isn’t even agreement among researchers on how many core emotions human beings experience. One thing that’s useful is establishing which model you’re going to use, and how those emotions will be recognized. In 2001, a researcher and Georgetown psychology professor W. Gerrod Parrot classified six core emotions: fear, anger, sadness, surprise, joy and love. In addition, there are 25 sub-emotions and a tertiary layer of more nuanced breakdowns in his framework. Many research projects are based on this model, and it’s generally regarded as a helpful framework.

Once you’ve decided what you’re going to measure, it’s important to think about how you’re going to measure consumer emotions. Numerous market research approaches exist, including:

• Self-reporting via a survey, using scales to share how much X makes a respondent feel Y;
• Text analysis, using linguistic analysis to look for patterns in free-form text, social media updates and interview transcripts;
• Multimedia evidence, such as images, video and voice recordings, can be analyzed for facial recognition, audio clues and more;
• Next generation technologies include “Internet of Things” activities in which sensors in wearable devices may report back on consumers’ physiological changes related to emotional states.

Putting Emotional Data to Work in Your Market Research

Perhaps the most important question for brands is why: what benefits can they gather from understanding emotions? Once you define emotions as your brand will understand them, they become another element of the consumer experience that’s possible to measure and influence.

Clarity around your customers’ emotions—from what they feel to what influences them—allows you to weave their use into a brand’s marketing, sales and product development. Once emotions are quantified, it’s possible to tie them to behaviors and behavioral triggers. Creating positive emotional states and leveraging emotional triggers can lead to both satisfied customers and increased sales.