The New Science of Customer Emotions
For 20 years I’ve been saying that loyalty is a science. And that it can be “architected” within every brand environment. It can be defined, measured, and ultimately built into any organization, big or small, for profit or not. And, anyone can learn how to do it. But, you don’t have to take my word for it. Right around the same time as my book was hitting the shelves, Harvard Business Review published The New Science of Customer Emotions: A better way to drive growth and profitability.
The challenge for any business is to provide real benefit and service, beyond the status quo function, that transcends the ‘mundane’ ways in which the competitive set typically think and act. The challenge is not just creating new innovative brand campaigns, but to organize a complex set of information that results in an intuitive use experience that becomes fundamental to how the consumer operates in relation to the brand on a daily basis, today and into the future. Certainly easier said than done. But, once done, it’s the unlock for building a great brand that garners great loyalty.
The 2015 Harvard study advises to leverage the brand’s core audience to understand how best to surface the totality of the brand’s substance and integrity that advances the emotional motivators that drive the brand/consumer relationship. Simply stated, understand what causes your best customers to become your best customers. Then, use that information to create the user experience that turns prospects into long-term brand advocates.
Here’s an excerpt from the study…
“When a company connects with customers’ emotions, the payoff can be huge. Yet building such connections is often more guesswork than science. To remedy that problem, firms can identify and leverage the particular motivators that will maximize their competitive advantage and growth. The process can be divided into three phases.
First, companies should inventory their existing market research and customer insight data, looking for qualitative descriptions of what motivates their customers—desires for freedom, security, success, and so on. Further research can add to their understanding of those motivators.
Second, companies should analyze their best customers to learn which of the motivators just identified are specific or more important to the high-value group. They should then find the two or three of these key motivators that have a strong association with their brand. This provides a guide to the emotions they need to connect with in order to grow their most valuable customer segment.
Third, companies need to make the organization’s commitment to emotional connection a key lever for growth—not just in the marketing department but across every function in the firm.
Given the enormous opportunity to create new value, companies should pursue emotional connections as a science—and a strategy.
Our research across hundreds of brands in dozens of categories shows that it’s possible to rigorously measure and strategically target the feelings that drive customers’ behavior. We call them “emotional motivators.” They provide a better gauge of customers’ future value to a firm than any other metric, including brand awareness and customer satisfaction, and can be an important new source of growth and profitability.
At the most basic level, any company can begin a structured process of learning about its customers’ emotional motivators and conducting experiments to leverage them, later scaling up from there. At the other end of the spectrum, firms can invest in deep research and big data analytics or engage consultancies with specific expertise.”
All that’s missing is a framework—aka the Brand Ecosystem Model—for the entire organization to operate from to create more “best customers,” and a means of measurement—aka the Brand Equity Index—of the efficacy of creation of those best customers.