Getting all emotional can work wonders

13 May 2010 | By Jo Roberts

“The first time I saw the new John Lewis ad, I blubbed,” says a consumer with the web name “TootingJo” on the Mumsnet community forum. The John Lewis “Never knowingly undersold” ad, created by communications agency Adam & Eve, depicts a woman moving through different stages of life to show that the retailer is relevant for people of every age. Accompanied by a cover version of Billy Joel’s tune Always a Woman, the ad has seen consumers expressing some very un-British emotional responses.

But predicting this sort of reaction to an ad campaign is extremely difficult. Getting consumers to articulate their feelings at all when researching what their brand means to their target audience is a challenge for marketers. Connecting with consumers on an emotional - rather than purely functional - level is very difficult to pull off.

To tackle this, the market research industry is finding innovative methods to tap into human feelings, including using images rather than direct questions and specially developed “emotion tools”. The challenge that both brand marketers and agencies face is that consumers themselves can’t often say how they really feel.

Understanding a real emotional response to a product and service can boost the bottom line, and is not just a nice-to-have piece of information, according to Guy Kemplay, brand strategy director at market research firm TNS.

“Emotion is very much hardwired into the human brain. Some people talk about emotion in marketing and branding as the ’soft side’. But actually, I think it’s the hard side. Increasingly, when there’s very little to choose from between products on the rational side, emotion simplifies choice and gives that connection to the consumer,” he says.

Daniel Keller, global brand director of telecoms brand Orange, says that it’s important to understand what emotive needs the company must deliver against. Orange has been working with TNS using its Needscope tool to find out consumers’ emotional response to the brand.

The method uses projective techniques to coax people into talking about the way they are feeling. Pictures of abstract paintings might be used, for example, to help people to talk about brand personality.

Keller explains, “The challenge in understanding customer emotions is that no one really talks about them. If you go about conventional market research methods, then you don’t really get the right answers or you will get a rational answer. Using projective techniques helps you to get a better understanding of emotional needs.

“Orange has been exploring what kind of emotions its own brand and competitors raise better than anyone else.” He claims that Orange has discovered that emotional perception of its brand is currently consistent across Europe, whereas other mobile brands have more fragmented images.

The challenge in understanding customer emotions is that no one really talks about them. Using projective techniques helps you to get a better understanding of emotional needs.

Daniel Keller, Orange

Needing to understand the emotional side of the brand “comes from the dilemma of commoditisation in the market. The more you are, the more these [emotional] dimensions play a role,” he adds.

Using pictures rather than direct questioning to help consumers to articulate emotions is something that market research agency GfK also advocates. GfK measures 22 emotions and uses scenario pictures to help consumers articulate their feelings.

“It’s trying to get around the difficulties that people face in expressing how they feel,” says Nick Nathanail, a consumer products and retail director at GfK, about the tool the firm has devised to reveal consumers’ emotional reactions to marketing campaigns, called the EMO Sensor.

Understanding emotions is not just about how people believe, he adds, but how consumers behave. This ultimately drives a healthier bottom line.

While Nathanail believes in the importance of understanding emotions, Anna Cremin head of research and consumer insight at cinema advertising business Pearl & Dean, says that brands must not get carried away with soft emotional measures. She says: “When it comes down to our clients, the cold hard numbers are what are important. Emotion becomes something nice to have, rather than an essential.”

Roger Sant, vice-president at market research firm Maritz Research Europe, isn’t convinced that some of the non-direct methods of understanding emotions are better than direct questioning. Sant says he is still personally sceptical about using pictures in research rather than asking questions.

“Showing someone an angry picture or a big smile doesn’t necessarily provoke a different reaction compared with asking a question,” he argues.

But David Penn, managing director at market research agency Conquest, counters that “direct questions can be misleading”. Orlando Wood, innovation director at online market research company BrainJuicer, agrees. He says that asking people directly about their emotions is likely to be a blunter tool than other pre-cognitive measures, because people tend to post-rationalise what they feel.

BrainJuicer’s research looking at emotions in marketing, revealed at this spring’s Market Research Society conference, indicates that ads which perform well on an emotional response measure have high levels of business effectiveness in the marketplace. Those that perform poorly on emotion do poorly in the business marketplace.

“Advertising is not just about persuading people or providing people with information and delivering a message,” notes BrainJuicer’s Wood. “You have ads like the Cadbury ’gorilla’ ad that don’t work by communicating a message or by trying to persuade people about something in a direct fashion. When ads work like that, the traditional research measures fall flat, because they are trying to measure something that isn’t there.”

The agency is applying its pre-cognitive methods in the banking industry with HSBC. It aims to find out in real time how customers are feeling on the shop floor by using touchscreens with faces to ascertain an instant reaction to the service levels they receive in branches. (See client viewpoint, page 29).

Spending time with consumers can be a useful way of finding out their real emotions about a product or service, argues Simon Braier, insight director at market research giant Kadence International’s UK office. He says that while he doesn’t dismiss focus groups, he prefers an approach whereby respondents are quizzed in their natural setting so researchers can get a better understanding of how they might use a product or service is more effective in some circumstances. The agency sets up a series of experiments with different groups to determine how people might act in the real world. Braier says: “Scientists set up experiments as a fundamental basis of what they do and we are simply transposing that into the research world.”

Chris Arnold, creative partner at advertising and marketing agency Creative Orchestra, is critical of many approaches to market research. He believes that emotion is not central to enough researchers’ methods. “Research companies are run by number crunchers and they tend to want to go down the rational route,” he says.

He has tried to find a more emotionally led approach to assess how the public feels about his client Total Greek Yoghurt. The brand is looking to reposition itself in the market later this year. It’s important to find the emotional cut-through to become the first-choice brand in any given category, he says, because “people buy on emotion first and reason second.”

The agency is working with market research consultancy Spring Research testing the brand’s ad campaign using Spring’s in-house created research tool, the Emotimeter. This tool’s methodolgy involves asking people questions and then asking them to adjust a heart frequency, dialling it up or down to demonstrate how strongly they feel.

“It’s a much more intuitive way of researching the potential response to an ad campaign,” Stephen Phillips, founder of Spring Research says. “It allows us to assess instinct, rather than asking people to rationalise the effect of a campaign.”

Creative Orchestra’s Arnold believes that brands’ growing interest in understanding the importance of researching emotion is set to continue. That said, he notes that many well-established companies are not using standard kind of research in the most effective way possible, and so may remain hostile to something that requires a different approach altogether.

“I once told someone that the research they were doing was rubbish and they replied: ’That’s not the point, it’s there to protect my arse.’ People need to stop just looking at numbers,” he warns.

But even the most statistic-loving market researchers might find that using more emotion-based research could pay dividends. As the John Lewis advert shows, getting the tone of an advert right cannot only cause women across the country to reach for a handkerchief, but it may wel translate into sales too.