I ran across an audio interview I had saved a few months ago that was incredibly interesting. Kim Albee, president of Genoo, interviewed author Dan Hill,
founder and president of Sensory Logic, a scientific, research-based consultancy that specializes in enhancing companies’ sensory-emotional connectivity. His book is called Emotionomics – Leveraging Emotions for Business Success, and they discussed how the concepts in the book can be applied to marketing.
Here’s what I learned:
If your company cannot connect emotionally with your customers, you’re in trouble.
Emotionomics is based on scientific research of brain activity; the researchers conclusively found that people make decisions with the heart, not with the head. People feel before they think, so in reality, there really is no such thing as objectivity.
So, how can companies understand whether or not they’re hitting someone emotionally? Half the brain is devoted to processing visuals, so you have to engage in 3 seconds or less. You need to make a connection quickly, or you probably won’t make it at all.
Making that connection boils down to visuals. For example, don’t grab some clip art and put it on your website. It is not authentic, and authenticity builds trust. To emotionally engage with your audience using visuals, you must include 3 things: a dominant visual; implied change or motion in the visual; and faces. Yes, faces. People are attracted to and respond to faces, and in fact they find faces more engaging.
All this great scientific research also concluded that we understand other people through emotions, of which there are 7: true smile (the muscles around your eyes relax); social smile (only the muscles around your mouth relax), anger, sadness, fear, disgust, and contempt. Because we feel before think, someone’s true emotion appears for a split second before thinking kicks in and hides it.
The range of emotions people display is also important: You will make more money from a true smile. Contempt, on the other hand, is almost like a moral judgment in which they don’t trust you. Disgust means they can’t get away from something fast enough. Boredom means there’s no zest or interest to whatever it is you’re presenting or selling.
There is also a range of secondary emotions, and it is important to fine tune marketing to speak to pride, which is a combination of happiness and anger (yes, anger – anger has to do with wanting to make progress). The reason you want to tap into pride is because you want people to feel good about buying from you. Definitely avoid frustration, which happens when people don’t feel like they’re in control or making progress.
You have 3 ways to tap into customer emotions: Through the visual; the value system of company, which should spark something in your target audience; and personality, which many companies are lacking, at least on their website.
Image Courtesy: Sensory Logic
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