Time to Get Emotional

Eight out of ten new product introductions fail. Of the two that make it through, eight out of ten of those fail in year two. These are dismal statistics and point to an enormous amount of wasted effort and revenue. Perhaps it’s past time to better understand why the target isn’t being hit more often. Harvard professor Gerald Zaltman in his seminal book "How Consumers Think" 2003 suggests that 95% of why we buy something is motivated from our subconscious. He goes on to say that 95% of why marketers make what they make is also based on a subconscious response. And the book, a terrific read, goes on to strongly make that case. The subconscious of course is where emotions live. Understanding the emotional drivers behind a Brand purchase has gone from a nice to know to the only thing that really matters.

Ask Marc Gobe (Author of Brandjam2006) who coined the term "emotional branding" and who is an emotional powerhouse to watch in action. When he speaks about design you can see his whole being get excited by the conversation; he becomes very emotional in his delivery. It’s a lesson not lost on his listeners. His message, buoyed by the fact that emotions are the fuel of successful branding efforts, would be a lot less effective if delivered in a monotone.

So how do you wrap your business’s arms around an emotion? Below are some ideas:

1. Semiotics

If not familiar with the term, semiotics refers to… the decoding of codes. The understanding of what is being communicated to people (below the surface) by the words, pictures and shapes we have created. The late Rudolph Arnhiem (Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (1954), Visual Thinking (1969), provides a seminal discourse in his teachings (Harvard again) of why what we see, and how we feel about what we see, are linked below the surface by our emotions and physiology. "Semioticians" are professionals trained in the de-coding of language and symbols. Terms like "meaning dynamics", "visual semiotics and "consumer discourse analysis" are the vocabulary of these highly educated practitioners. Who knew there was an English school of semiotics that emphasizes emerging, dominant, and residual codes for specific segments and categories of goods? A PHD of semiotics might be just the ticket to either analyze or suggest an emotional response to a product offering.

2. Design Research

Often research is conducted to measure reactions to things already created. Very few protocols for research exist to measure a response to the future. That’s where Design Research comes into play. Certain traditional research methodologies such as focus groups are fairly ineffective when it comes to provocative ideas. They are a good way to shave down all the unusual bits and pointy edges that make things interesting.

New research methodologies often integrate designers into the process as active participants. The result is Designers visualizing ideas in response to real time user stimulus. Influencing the creative process by direct consumer interactions is a much more successful way to get to "ah ha" moments and possibly inspire solutions driven by emotional responses. A very different way of thinking about new ideas than the analysis of metrics. Design participates in and acts as a key influencer in the execution and creation of the research. Input is not filtered through a lens. Single insights that strike at emotions can matter as much as thick decks of sifted information.

3. Consumer Therapy/Gut Instinct

In certain cases, say where efforts have failed time and again or a market is stagnant or growth is stalled, two completely opposite approaches can yield amazing results. The first, I call it "deep tissue therapy" may be required in order to truly understand what emotional drivers and triggers are not being accessed. This can involve rich ethnography, the kind where designers and researchers live with test subjects for long periods of time and reach deep below the surface to understand the true want or need. Psychology and Psychoanalysis may play a role.

Interestingly the exact opposite can work as well. As profiled in Malcolm Gladwell’s brilliant book Blink (2005), the gut reaction of deeply qualified critics to whatever the problem or opportunity is can yield results hard to quantify but on target emotionally. Regardless of which approach is used, the chances of striking a nerve are much better than a typical approach of extending the analysis and using familiar techniques.