4: Emotions in Branding
The trend of emotional branding in marketing is a relatively recent development. Traditionally, marketers presented a rational message describing the product and suggesting its functional benefits, often in reference to competing products. It's only recently that marketers seek to engage prospects on the emotional level - but from the literature and practices, it's apparent that few of them understand what emotions are.
This is likely because research into emotions is also relatively new. Psychology previously treated emotions as aberrations of the mind that prevent calm, deliberate thinking. A person motivated by emotion was considered to be mentally compromised, an attitude that remains pervasive in culture: serious people should be stoic, and to show excessive emotion is childish, self-indulgent, and weak. It's only recently that emotions are recognized as valid functions that can at times be beneficial.
The author returns to his earlier statement - that the function of the brain is to help us move, and that only creatures that move need brains (remember the sea squirt, which digests its own brain once it attaches itself for the reminder of its life). Emotion facilitates motion - they "move" us to movement. Darwin's study of emotions in man and animals proposed the thesis that emotion poises us to take action - the instantaneous, twitchy motions we take when an emotion occurs set our bodies in the starting position to take a specific action - to attack or to flee - which was once necessary to our survival (to escape danger or to seize prey).
(EN: A significant point is that emotions poise us to take action, but we consciously decide whether to take that action. There is an immediate "twitch" that cocks a fist to punch or tenses the legs to jump, but there is the moment when we decide to carry out the action for which emotions have poised us. Neurologists suggest that the emotional trigger fires three milliseconds before the conscious mind engages and validates or overrides the action suggested by emotion.)
It is only in the last few hundred years that man has been largely safe from immediate threats to our survival that we routinely faced in the wild, so emotions seem a vestigial capability that is no longer necessary in modern life, save for the rare instances when we face a physical threat. But at the same time, we often speak of intuition and social skills as being key contributors to success in the modern world of business, both of which are based on our emotions, and it is undeniable that emotions play a significant part in our thinking process - when we "somehow sense" that a rational decision doesn't "feel right," this is an emotional reaction.
(EN: This has been disputed as the nature of thought has been explored. That is, we express our thoughts as words, but thoughts are not verbal - we must think something, then figure out how to describe it in words before we can communicate our thoughts to others. It's been suggested that instincts are actually thoughts that don't make it to the verbal stage - we lack the words to describe those thoughts and cannot verbalize them, but that does not mean the origins are emotional. It's largely a theoretical debate, but worth considering when someone suggests that emotion is the [sole] source of intuition.)
The author considers the way in which emotions work: we catch a glimpse of something at the edge of our vision and before we know what it is or whether it is a threat, we recoil, twitch, or even jump. Adrenaline courses into our systems, increasing or pulse and respiration, tensing the muscles, dilating the pupils, and otherwise preparing the body for flight. All of this happens in a fraction of a second. And then we recognize it was just a twig. This example shows that emotions precede logic - they happen very fast and we cannot control them, nor can we control the immediate actions that we take when an emotion is felt. It also demonstrates that emotions have an instantaneous effect on the body that we cannot control, any more than we can control a physical reflex action. But it also shows how quickly the rational mind is capable of regaining control, performing a more sober analysis, and cancelling the action for which the emotional response poised us.
While it's clear that emotions in the mind influence the action of the body, there is also growing evidence that the actions of the body create emotions in the mind. People who force themselves to smile feel more light-hearted afterward, a person who pretends to be angry actually feels anger, and a person who fakes being sick begins to feel sick.
Similarly, there was once considered to be a schism between thought and feeling, but it is also speculated that the two are interdependent: what we feel influences what we think, and what we think influences what we feel. Consider that some people fear things that others do not, or feel no fear when they encounter something that scares others terribly. It's generally accepted that knowledge and experience influence our emotions, and if these elements of the rational mind can have a dramatic effect on the most primal emotion of fear, then it can scarce be denied that thought and emotion are strongly linked.
In another experiment related to intuition in which subjects were given two decks of cards to draw from, one rigged to win and another rigged to lose, participants' showed an involuntary response (sweating palms) when drawing cards from the bad deck even before they were able to consciously identify their suspicion that the deck was rigged against them. A separate group of subjects who had damage to the orbitofrontal cortex was never able to recognize that one of the decks was rigged - no sweat response, no sense that something was off, and no ability to tell that drawing from that deck was a bad decision. This is evidence that our emotions (EN: again, if emotions are given sole credit for intuition) are beneficial to us even in the modern world.
He speculates that the conscious mind is faster at recognizing threats/opportunities is because it is able to account for more data. The conscious mind only pays attention to a few things on which attention is focused, but the unconscious mind receives sense-data that is on the periphery, and has more data to work with than the conscious mind. Further, this may suggest that when we have a feeling or a hunch, it is the subconscious mind "trying to send us a message" to pay better attention to something we are failing to recognize as significant.
It's also suggested that we have an emotional reaction when we make a conscious decision that contradicts the message that our subconscious is sending us. When we opt to have a cheeseburger rather than a salad, we feel a bit anxious about the decision and a bit guilty afterward. In common parlance, we refer to this as acting against our conscience or ignoring our intuition. In terms of psychology, this is cognitive dissonance - the subconscious mind is priming us to make one choice and we are struggling to rationalize a different one. And going back to the value of subconscious processing, it's a common belief that it's always best to follow your conscience.
Returning to brand, the emotional reaction we have to a brand is often the deciding factor in whether we purchase it. We "feel" comfortable or uncomfortable about a brand, and those feelings poise us to make purchasing behaviors. Where the emotional connection between customer and brand is strong, it may cause them to ignore all other options and to feel uncomfortable at the prospect of being "forced" to purchase an unfamiliar brand even when their preferred brand is not available.
There are generally very few brands that earn the highest level of devotion - at which the customer refuses to consider an alternate brand and will undertake inconvenience or even hardship to get the very brand they desire. If brand loyalty is true love, most brands are in the friend zone - the customer enjoys being engaged with them, but has no qualms about engaging with a competing brand if it is inconvenient to obtain their preferred brand.
There's a brief mention of habituation - repurchasing a brand saves us the time and effort of deciding which brand to purchase. It does not mean we are devoted to the brand, simply that we have a slightly positive impression of it and feel that it would be acceptable (though not delightful) to have the same experience with it that we had before. It is generally believed that we are indifferent only to low-involvement products, but research shows that it is also influential in high-involvement ones: people gravitate to a given brand of automobile, a given retailer of jewelry, and the like. Also, the "involvement" here is the emotional consequences of the decision as well as the financial consequences, so even relatively inexpensive items may be a high-involvement purchase. (EN: This case was well made in some market research from the fragrance industry - some subjects are highly devoted to a cheap brand of perfume because it is their scent, which is highly personal.)
The topic of customer loyalty has been greatly overemphasized - it is not something every brand can achieve, and it is not something every brand really needs to achieve. Many brands can be profitable in the friend-zone and need not undertake the effort to win the love and devotion of the market. Consider the perspective of the customer who uses hundreds of brands (maybe a few thousand) and has many others constantly demanding his attention: he can't feel strongly about every brand he buys and engage with them deeply and daily.
Another common problem with brands is attempting to be everything to everyone in order to win the undying affection of the market. It can't be done, and in trying to do so many brands are inconsistent in their messaging. This inconsistency confuses the market and alienates current loyalists. A brand must have integrity in order to be valued, and consistency is important to integrity. There's a mention of operant conditioning: Pavlov's dogs would made the connection between the sound of a metronome and food because the metronome was the only sound that was used. If his team used a bell one day, a buzzer the next, then a whistle, than something else then the dogs never would have become conditioned. And while the human mind is considerably more sophisticated than the canine, human learning and association is still is based on consistency.