emotion

Are you customers emotional about your brand? your products?

... or are they emotionally unavailable?

Every year, consumers spend more time using digital devices. Every year, more media is consumed digitally. Naturally, advertising dollars are increasingly flowing to digital as well. But, don’t pull the plug on that direct mail campaign just yet. New research has again shown that content on paper affects our brains in different and more powerful ways.

I’m intrigued by the reaction that has unfolded around the Facebook “emotion contagion” study. (If you aren’t familiar with this, read this primer.) As others have pointed out, the practice of A/B testing content is quite common. And Facebook has a long history of experimenting on how it can influence people’s attitudes and practices, even in the realm of research. An earlier study showed that Facebook decisions could shape voters’ practices. But why is it that *this* study has sparked a firestorm?

In two articles on HBR the role of branding in the digital economy is discussed.
(Unfortunately behind the HBR paywall)

In this first article Itamar Simonson and Emanuel Rosen argue that in many categories customers now acquire knowledge and competence about a product before purchase. This diminishes the effect of traditional advertising and marketing, where the brand is largely communicated as a function of emotion and preference (“the story”).

The optimal service experience delivers not only on functional customer needs such as getting things done quickly and without errors, but also on their emotional needs such as feeling confident and in control. The challenge, of course, lies in understanding which emotions are significant to customers and designing services that deliver against these emotional needs.

When people ask the question "Do you know the correct answer?", I don't like that question at all. It is not a smart question as a start. The biggest problem with our formal education systems is our over-emphasis on finding the correct answer to a particular problem. While the quest for correct answers helps us function at work, it also impedes us when it comes to making the bigger, more important decisions, largely because many bigger, real-life business issues are ambiguous, complex and dynamic.

Emotional ads are processed quite differently by the brain than those that appeal to logic, according to a new study published in the Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology and Economics shows that . That might seem like old news to Neuromarketing readers, but the experimental approach was somewhat different than past efforts in this area.

America's collective grief over the death of Steve Jobs is entering the next phase of what has become a somewhat common experience of fantasy community that I'm calling a Diana Moment, which goes something like this:

Does your brand or business have an emotional connection with at least some of its customers? If so, that’s a very good thing. A new study of retail chains showed that while just one in five consumers felt they had an emotional connection to a retailer, those that did were far more valuable as customers and as brand evangelists.