Emotional data: why how your customers feel is now more important than ever before
Three years ago at Dubai Lynx Festival I spoke about the need for creative and analytics to come together to produce more effective and impactful work. The talk was well-received as many were starting to see that in order to gain customer trust it was imperative to analyse what mattered to them and to create experiences and stories that resonated and were highly relevant.
Now we are facing these unprecedented times I strongly believe that as marketers and communicators we have to leverage insights about our customers to create better experiences, stories and products. How can we do things differently? What should we focus on in the age of COVID-19? To answer those questions, let me take you on a journey where we all close our eyes and imagine a scenario….
Imagine that you had a bad night’s sleep and your alarm clock knew and chose your favourite song or podcast to start your day in the right way? Maybe you’d wake up to #PEWITHJOE. Or imagine if your fridge knew you were feeling a bit under the weather had to self isolate and automatically ordered you some additional fruit and vegetables to be delivered to your house? Or what if your tone of voice on a call to your bank detects high levels of stress and the customer service rep was able to work with you on bespoke solutions to help you?
Does this probably seem like a scene from Blade Runner or Her? Well, what I’ve just described is actually already happening in markets like Asia and will coming very soon to markets globally. How? Through the convergence of technologies that can analyse emotion, Big Data, and the Internet of Things (IoT).
Of course data doesn’t have feelings. But people do have them. We leave a trace or fingerprint of those emotions in the form of data. Without an emotional connection to consumers, a brand is nothing more than a label. The world’s greatest brands elicit raw emotional responses: desire, aspiration, love, joy, passion. Emotions create conversations — we talk about the things we care about. We share stories that make us laugh or cry. It is emotion that connects us to each other, the world around us and makes us social creatures. It is the most important element of what differentiates a brand from a product. It’s what makes us buy with our hearts, not our heads. It’s how movements are created.
Let’s take a look at what we are seeing from some brands during this pandemic that have inspired and brought people together. This includes: Pret A Manger who pioneered the free coffee and discounted food for NHS workers. Zara who are turning their factories from making ‘fast fashion’ to scrubs for nurses and doctors.
The digital footprint every one of us leaves in our everyday behaviour is increasing because more than ever before there are smart devices around us recording our behaviour.
We have a clock that measures our heartbeats — a phone that listens to our tone of voice, a GPS system that knows where we are going; cars that know if we’re driving aggressively or slower than normal; and mobile cameras on TVs, tablets and more. All of these connected devices can observe us and try to understand how we feel — if we allow them to do so!
So what’s the benefit to brands?
Applying big data analysis to all of this data leads to lots of information. The software has an increasingly complete picture of how we feel and what we are longing for. And thus helps us or help businesses to give us better services based on our customers’ individual emotional situations.
Some envisioned scenarios during COVID-19 lockdown could include:
The refrigerator, that suggests you that today is a day to skip the diet and offers you sweets instead.
Your laptop or computer realises whether you are stressed or tired or and then suggests you think twice if you really want to send that email you just wrote in a rush.
Your alarm clock, that knows that you have not slept well and wakes you up to your favourite meditation.
The TV, that automatically tunes to the channel most appropriate to your mood.
Thinking a bit more from the business point of view, consider for example this future scenario for a call centre supervisor: emotions of both client and operator are tracked in real-time for all calls. When a specific threshold of anger or stress is reached, the supervisor is flagged to listen to the conversation and help the operator. Or perhaps the supervisor even takes care of the call himself to solve the conflict before it gets out of hand. The emotion level of all operators is also measured and averaged over time. Therefore, the manager can detect patterns indicating problematic behaviours and help those operators to improve. How useful is this for the call centre manager and for the quality of the service? I certainly wish I’d had this when talking to my bank this week!
Social media has evolved from being a place where brands could talk to their customers to being one where they can both connect with and understand them at an emotional level. Brands’ social-media marketing strategies should focus on two main areas: proactive customer service or product marketing; and creating emotional connections with consumers.
As a result social-media content broadly falls into two categories. The first is functional content that fulfils the important purpose of answering common questions, helping a customer with an issue or providing information to a wide audience. This is vital for all consumers as guidelines and customer touchpoints are changing across the globe as nations lockdown and close borders.
Functional content relies heavily on data and automation to inform its strategy. Some of the most basic content functions can eventually be automated through AI and are already answering common questions and acknowledging queries. In an earlier post, I mentioned that all brands should be regularly updating their FAQs and issuing regular EDM updates to keep information flowing. More complicated or urgent queries should be triaged and answered by humans who can apply intelligence to solve problems and serve customers. In this way, tools and technology support humans to enable them to do their jobs more effectively and spend more time resolving complex problems. I think the airline industry has done a great job of this during this crisis. What’s your experience been like with brands so far?
Emotional content requires emotional intelligence that can come only from humans. It takes human creativity to come up with the idea for a beautiful ad or produce great content that can inspire us and change the way we behave. Humans, not robots, create emotional bonds. But brands still need data to tell them whether what they’re doing works.
Measuring the impact of emotional content is more complicated than counting the numbers (where social-media analytics have been focused, traditionally). A new breed of sophisticated emotional analytics tools allows brands to focus on quality, not quantity; on behavioural change over a number of shares, likes, reach, followers or even sales (although they will help you increase them).
These tools measure emotions such as rage, joy, amazement or frustration, and understand how they affect success. They answer questions relevant to the brand’s high-level strategy. Has its content inspired action? Does it create desire or a deep emotional connection that lasts beyond a single sale? How has it changed consumer behaviour? And — importantly — how can insight be incorporated into the brand’s strategy to make it more effective?
Data needs human interpretation to help brands extract meaningful and actionable insight, and humans to act on it. Brands need a quick-thinking, quick-acting team that applies thought to data, to produce incredible ideas that disrupt and innovate. They need creative talent to write great copy and design compelling images and video. And people who will produce amazing content that changes behaviour and strengthens emotional connections with the brand. And great local teams who understand their markets and can make centralised content relevant locally.
Why do people the world over connect with Coca-Cola? Because the brand resonates emotionally not just at a global brand level, but at a local level. Once you understand consumers’ emotions toward the brand, relevance comes naturally. Who doesn’t remember the iconic ad where we all wanted to buy the world a coke?
Finally, the question that comes up when talking about these possibilities is: to what extent do these technologies invade our intimacy and privacy? It is clear that as technology advances, the same power that gives us advantages that until now were unimaginable becomes a threat if used without our permission. It is a problem we already face today and there is no doubt that it will have more and more important in the future. Legal protection and the responsibility of enterprises will play a key role in harnessing technological progress in the right direction.
However, I believe that passion should be at the heart of any brand’s marketing strategy. To create that passion, you need brilliant people. To measure that passion, you need emotional analytics. Welcome to the world of feelings! It’s a new frontier.
As always please share your thoughts and comments below!
The second is emotional content designed specifically to create an emotional connection to a brand.
