Are You Trying To Be Different? Start Selling Emotions!

Being different, the notion goes, is the route to success in today’s market. As most of you easily remember, “Think different” was even the Apple’s motto for a period. Conventional wisdom suggests that products like the iPhone and Macintosh succeeded because they were different from the rest. Steve Jobs was a visionary because he thought different from everyone else.

There’s only one problem with this advice. It’s wrong.

As remarkably reported by Jonah Berger in his latest book - Invisible Influence - while the success of companies like Apple and Google is often attributed to their “thinking differently”, different ideas just as often fail miserably. Apple and Google’s biggest successes actually came in areas where they were followers rather than leaders. Apple didn’t introduce the first smartphone, IBM did. Yahoo and AltaVista were doing search long before Google was. Research finds that almost 50 percent of market pioneers fail, and later entrants that don’t enter a market first often end up being more successful.

So if being different doesn’t explain market success, what does?

As Berger explains, in the 1800s a new innovation was introduced that had the potential to radically change transportation. At the time, most people traveled via horse and buggy. This was fine for shorter distances, but as cities grew, the method proved restrictive. It was slow, expensive and even dangerous. The engine - that is, the horse - had a mind of its own, and fatality rates in large cities were much higher - even 7-8 times higher - what they are for cars today.

Gasoline powered vehicles promised a solution. These early automobiles could go faster and safer and even cut down on manure, which at the time was threatening to suffocate many major cities.

But getting people of that time to adopt what we now think of as cars required a huge mind shift. Horses - and donkeys - had been the primary transportation method human beings had used for thousands of years. While there were many drawbacks to this method, people were comfortable with it. They knew what to expect. On the other side, automobiles were completely new. They required different “food” to run and different skills to drive.

The first time people saw a carriage roll down the street without a horse in front, they were shocked. It was viewed as the “Devil’s Wagon”. Horses were spooked by these loud, rambling horseless carriages and prone to run away, taking their passengers with them.

In 1899, Uriah Smith came up with a solution. Smith proposed something to make horses, and people, more comfortable. Named the Horsey Horseless, it involved taking a life-size replica of a horse head, down to the shoulders, and attaching it to the front of a carriage.

The buggy had the appearance of a horse-drawn vehicle, and thus horses, and their human riders, would be less likely to be scared when it passed by.

It’s easy to laugh at a fake horse head glued to the front of a car. It seems silly, almost comical. But while it might seem ridiculous today, it’s hard to imagine how daunting and unconventional cars were when they were first introduced.

So rather than highlighting what made the automobile new and different, Smith did the opposite. He made the novel innovation seem more familiar. Similar rather than different.

Let’s take another - more recent - example as reported by Clayton Christensen recently on Harvard Business Review: American Girl dolls.

Americans who don’t have a preteen daughter do not understand how a couple of parents could pay more than a hundred dollars for a doll and shell out hundreds more for clothing, books, and accessories. Yet to date the business has sold almost 30 million dolls, and it racks up more than $500 million in sales annually. What’s so special about American Girls? Well, it’s not the dolls themselves. They come in a variety of styles and ethnicities and are lovely, sturdy dolls. There are dozens of American Girl dolls representing a broad cross section of profiles.

The company thought through every aspect of the “consumer experience”. The dolls were never sold in traditional toy stores. They were available only through mail order or at American Girl stores, which were initially located in just a few major metropolitan areas.

The stores have doll hospitals that can repair tangled hair or fix broken parts. Some have restaurants in which parents, children, and their dolls can enjoy a kid-friendly menu - or where parents can host birthday parties. A trip to the American Girl store becomes a special day out for most American families, making the dolls a catalyst for family experiences that will be remembered forever.

In recent years Toys “R” Us, Walmart, and even Disney have all tried to challenge American Girl’s success with different dolls - at a small fraction of the price. Though American Girl, which was acquired by Mattel, has experienced some sales declines in the past two years, to date no competitor has managed to make a dent in its market dominance. Why? Pleasant Rowland - the founder of American Girl - thinks that competitors saw themselves in the “doll business,” whereas she never lost sight of why the dolls were cherished: the experiences and stories and connections that they enable.

American Girl has prevailed for so long because it’s not really selling dolls, it’s selling emotions. American Girls’ competitors developed different dolls than American Girls’ ones, instead of providing similar or even better emotions

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Today most companies competing in consumer markets are trying to innovate their products and services applying diligently the theory of disruptive innovation developed by Clayton Christensen. They use the so called “job to be done” concept, usually investing in digital technologies.

Most companies competing in consumer markets are investing in digital technology to provide some functional benefits to consumers. In most cases they provide something which is “less time consuming” or “easier to be used” or “cheaper”. Nothing wrong with these kind of functional benefits. But what’s about emotions? Are they selling emotions? According to my experience - even as consumer - they are not, at all ??

So the question is, how to sell emotions?

Here are the guidelines I have developed based on my research and professional activities in consumer industries.

Identify critical emotions and touchpoints

A few positive emotions - like to be stimulated, pleased, enthusiasm and joy - “drive” purchase intention, loyalty and positive recommendation. On the other side, a few negative emotions reduce loyalty and stimulate negative recommendations. No doubt about it. I have plenty of data to confirm that.

Using consumer emotional experience data analytics - a sort of predictive intelligence I have developed - it’s possible to measure the effect on actual sales and customer lifetime value, derived from a certain increase of positive - or negative - consumer emotional experience. It’s also possible to set target of emotional experience measured through a metric of service emotional performance and compare the actual value with those of best in class brands in similar touch points.

Stimulate emotions during the consumer journey

First of all a clarification. Here I do not refer to so called nostalgia marketing nor to brand’s emotional attachment, that is using old brands, simbols, images, logos, slogans or jingles to recover past emotional experiences in consumers’ mind. This is quite an established and well known discipline - see one of my posts here.

So I assume you are wondering what I’m refering to. I’m refering to any kind of service behavior that is happening during the consumer journey - a behaviour acted by a frontline person, a store assistant, an after-sales technician, a behaviour acted by the consumer himself, an “in store” event involving several consumers, etc. In a few posts (see here or here) I already mentioned different ways to stimulate positive emotions through service behaviors in retail environments.

But, what’s about rituals?

Rituals actually are biologically significant events for humans. Several researches with ritual participants engaged in meditation and trance demonstrate changes in brain wave patterns, heart and pulse rate, skin conductance, and other body functions. Experiments suggest that some of these neurophysiological changes may be associated with the “rhythmic drivers” that characterize rituals. Human rituals share basic structural components of formality, pattern, sequence and repetition.

Recent researches from Harvard University have shown how ritualistic behavior potentiates and enhances the enjoyment of ensuing consumption. Researchers measured an increase of enjoyment of the consumption experience of more than 15 percent and increase of the price consumers were willing to pay of more than 70 percent (just for a simple sequence of human gestures: breaking in half a chocolate bar, unwrapping half of the chocolate and then unwrapping another half. Not bad!). If you are interested in the detail of the experiments go here.

and what’s about eye contact? Do I have to explain it to you?

Do you remember your mom’s eyes? Take a breath, close your eyes and think about it. Your are moving your mom from long term memory to short term one!

It’s quite well known that during eye contact, our axons (the neuron terminals) release a neurotransmitter called oxytocin, improperly labeled as “love hormon”. Longer the eye contact, longer the effect…that’s the power of eye contact.

If eye contact is then accompanied by hands contact, the neurotransmission becomes…an explosion??

Measure the value of emotions

Research on consumers’ emotional reactions due to different service behaviors, are still challenging researchers. For instance, rituals have been studied almost exclusively with qualitative design, making it difficult to draw causal inferences about rituals’ power to change consumer behavior.

For this reason, companies operating in consumer markets have to implement robust consumer emotional experience data analytics through which measure the effect on consumer purchasing behavior triggered by different kinds of service behaviour experienced during a consumer journey.

The chart reported below shows some data drawn from my consulting experience and research activity. It shows how different business metrics grow across a variety of consumer industries when the emotional experience becomes more positive due to some pre-defined service behaviors - in most cases, very simple ones.

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Companies that are competing in consumer markets which want to innovate through new products or services normally start with analyzing features and benefits and conduct consumer researches to find matching needs and motivations. However, in almost all cases, they do not consider the effect of consumer emotional experience on the consumer purchasing behavior.

A real understanding of the consumer purchasing behavior must be based on a deep knowledge of the paramount influence that consumer emotional experience has on consumer purchasing behavior.