How emotions govern our brand choices

 In our communications practice, we are often confronted with these questions: Why are some people unresponsive to our brand, while others can’t get enough of it? What makes our brand successful in one market but not in another? How can we exploit the weaknesses of our competition? What are the most effective leverage points for communications in the category where our brand is competing in?

Given this scenario, communicators agree on one thing —people don’t decide between brands, political candidates or which events to attend solely on a rational basis. Research tells us that 80 percent of the time, consumers agree that when making decisions about people, products and services, they usually go with their gut feelings. Neurologists corroborate this statement, believing that emotions and decision-making are linked in the brain, and both rely on the same neural network. Emotions trigger preference for taste, smell, visuals, sound and feel. Reason draws up the list to choose from, but emotion makes the final choice. Thus, the task of communicators is to figure out which emotions will trigger preference for anything they would like to communicate.

Author Dan Hill in his book Emotionomics gives us a look at the most recent scientific and psychological research on emotional behavior. His pioneering work provides a functional, practical and assessable tool that can be used in diverse customer and employee situations. It is based on the premise that customers and employees need an emotional buy-in for any purchase decision or successful project implementation.

Emotionomics revolves around the principles of emotional choice based on the hypothesis that there’s a logical foundation for the dominance of emotions in influencing our interests. It advocates a method of “facial coding,” a system that is dependable for understanding people at a deeper level, and measurable in terms of recurring observable information. In a marketplace where differentiation is critical for business success, discovering how to connect to the fundamental significance of emotions can reveal a large quantity of customer information.

Essentially, “facial coding” is the analysis of our expressions, which are often involuntary facial manifestations of our emotions. These expressions are momentary, but by prudent evaluation can be used to measure our authentic response to an advertisement, a product, an interview answer or a particular situation. Research on “facial coding” reveals that people’s facial expressions are often in conflict with what they articulate when they explain their reaction verbally. A flash of antipathy, for example, may be gleaned in a person’s face as he screens a TV ad, but that same person may say, “I liked it,” when asked to respond verbally.

In the tome, Hill identifies and visualizes seven core emotions exposed by facial expressions, namely surprise, fear, anger, disgust, sadness, contempt and happiness.

SURPRISE. General George S. Patton stated, “Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.” Our ability to express surprise appears at birth. It is neither innately upbeat nor innately downbeat. In the basic “surprise story,” we’re confronting a “mystery” we haven’t faced before, and one that’s yet to be solved. We demonstrate surprise when our eyes go big, our eyebrows fly high and our mouth falls open.

FEAR. It is considered the single most important emotion, and is relentlessly scrutinized by consumers in the marketplace. After all, the safety of a proposal is the first item on people’s intuitive checklist, the equivalent of looking both ways before crossing the street. It’s no wonder that fear circulates through companies when employees get wind of the latest reorganization rumor. In fear’s “basic story,” we find a way to escape some apparent threat in order to defend ourselves. Nelson Mandela declared, “We learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.” We show fear when our eyebrows lift up and lift in, our eyes widen, our chin pulls wider, our lips stretch back horizontally and our jaws drops open.

Your “facial coding” runs the spectrum from surprise and disgust to fear and happiness.

ANGER. It’s the fight part of our “fight or flight” instinct, and arises whenever our beliefs are infringed. In anger’s “basic story,” we look for ways to take away or otherwise assault a stumbling block, which we believe is wrongly jamming growth or chipping away our personal identity and sense of self-worth. But as Aristotle warned, “Anybody can become angry — that’s easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way — that’s not within everybody’s power and is not easy.” When we become red-faced or “boiling mad,” our eyebrows lower and knit together, our eyes narrow into “snake eyes,” and our lips tighten or form a funnel.

SADNESS. “Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word ‘happy’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better to take things as they come along with patience and equanimity,” Carl Jung pronounced. When we’re sad, we slow way, way down. The tendency to pull out, experience apathy and broad evasive behavior are be typical. “Always sell hope” becomes a compelling motivational mantra, because sadness means helplessness. In an organizational setting, companies can defuse the employees’ feelings of rejection and irrevocable loss by offering them feasible rewards instead of dangling threats of further reprimand. Sadness is manifested when wrinkles form a mid-forehead puddle, our eyebrows drop, but inner corners rise slightly, the corners of our eyes crease in a wince, the trench running between the corners of the nostrils and the upper mouth corners deepen, and our lip’s corners sag or form an “upside-down smile.”

DISGUST. British actor Laurence Olivier articulated, “The purpose of drama is to exercise, possibly to exhaust, human emotions. The purpose of comedy is to tickle those emotions into an expression of light relief, of tragedy, to wound them and bring relief of tears. Disgust and terror are other points of the compass.” Disgust is an adverse reaction, and is shown when we attempt to distance ourselves from an offensive source. It’s our way of showing that an object, a person, a place or an idea “stinks.” Boredom, a mild form of disgust, signifies dislike for what is being offered. We are disgusted if our nose turns up and wrinkles, our upper lip rises, sometimes as part of an “upside-down smile,” and our lower lip pulls down and away.

CONTEMPT. This emotion mirrors our profound disregard, coming from a belief that the other party in the transaction is beneath us. It’s an emotion that’s hard to recover from. Watch out for contempt in others, because it means one’s pitch, promotional effort or managerial style has turned repulsive to our audience. “Contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people’s happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race,” Bertrand Russell opined. When feeling this emotion, the left side of our face is generally more expressive than the right side, with one upper corner of the mouth curling into a sneer. The skin beyond the lip corner also pulls inward towards the lip corners, tightening and narrowing the lip corners.

HAPPINESS. “Happiness is not something ready-made. It comes from your own actions,” the Dalai Lama averred. We are willing to pay more for our “dream-like” wants than our needs. If we are able to make happiness possible, we can be generously rewarded. The happiness script is reasonably secure. It says that we’ve attained success and are now making what we consider to be sensible progress toward a goal. We attain it when what we believe in, what we communicate and what we do are in agreement. As Robert Frost said, “Happiness makes up in height what it lacks in length.” It reveals itself in a true smile where our skin near the outer corner of the eye pinches together into “crow’s feet,” the upper eyelid slightly droops and the skin under the eye may gather upward, deepening the eyelid furrow, and the corners of the mouth move up and out, and the cheeks lift upwards.

A key learning we take from Emotionomics is that people’s focus can be captured effortlessly if our communication is “on-emotion” rather than “on-message.” If a message, a positioning statement or a proposition doesn’t activate an emotionally hot button, it will be sifted out as past as we deliver it. Thus, if companies want to create the groundwork of a formidable workforce, they must not overlook the role of emotions in the hiring process. They should be conscious of people’s interactive skills and emotional intelligence, vital requirements in building a great team.

Mark Twain said, “Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary.” Organizational and brand success can indeed be shifty, but knowing the power of heartfelt emotions and how to harness them to our advantage can spell the difference.

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E-mail bongosorio@yahoo.com or bong_osorio@abs-cbn.com for comments, questions or suggestions. Thank you for communicating.