Defining Emotional Motivators
Our research stemmed from our frustration that companies we worked with knew customers’ emotions were important but couldn’t figure out a consistent way to define them, connect with them, and link them to results. We soon discovered that there was no standard lexicon of emotions, and so eight years ago we set out to create one, working with experts and surveying anthropological and social science research. We ultimately assembled a list of more than 300 emotional motivators. We consider customers to be emotionally connected with a brand when it aligns with their motivations and helps them fulfill deep, often unconscious, desires. Important emotional motivators include desires to “stand out from the crowd,” “have confidence in the future,” and “enjoy a sense of well-being,” to name just a few.
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, the authors have created a lexicon of nearly 300 “emotional motivators” and, using big data analytics, have linked them to specific profitable behaviors. They describe how 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. (Magids, Zorfas, & Leemon, 2015).
With one of my areas in interest about customer service being how it can be used to further deepen a customer’s relationship with a business, this article helps bring to light just that. When thinking about digging deeper, what better to research than emotions? I think it is pretty uncommon to see an online review of a place that states the customer is simply indifferent or neutral about the service of the business. Any reviews of a place will more often than not be very strong opinions about how the customer felt their experience was, either very positive or very negative. There’s just no in-between. So, why are people so passionate about their thoughts of the customer service they’ve received? The article calls them emotional motivators. Since every company will have different emotional motivators for their unique customer bases, the articles suggests a research process to follow to help indicate which ones actually resonate with their customers instead of listing any. Maybe I could use this process to help research more about Huntington’s customers and what emotional motivators they have.
References.
Magids, S., Zorfas, A., & Leemon, D. (2015, November). The new science of customer emotions. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2015/11/the-new-science-of-customer-emotions
