The Role of Emotion in Consumer Behavior
EVERY INDUSTRY IS LIKE THIS.
Every couple of months a new influx of words, phrases, and #hashtags infiltrates our work conversations; monopolizing every conference call, Zoom meeting, and mandatory virtual happy hour we required to attend from this point forward.
Seemingly out of nowhere, our conversations become cluttered with talk of new studies to syndicate, insights to divulge, and data to dissect. While we’re over here discussing Big Data, bricks to clicks, and the evolution of CX…AI, automation, and influencer marketing are chomping at the bit waiting for their turn to occupy our headspace and impact our future business decision-making.
Not to mention, this often occurs before management even gives the Green Light to last quarter’s trend-driven strategic initiatives...Even so, we tell ourselves that this time around we’re going to be practical. We’re going to stay rational, focused. Grounded. We won’t be swayed by new and shiny just for the sake of new and shiny. We refuse to settle into a reactive state of mind because we are responsible, proactive leaders.
But the world moves fast, and a revolution has occurred! The next, next. This one’s gunna be big – we can feel it. Smart people told us so. This is the disruption of all disruptions! The future of everything. So, we shift our resources. Put special teams together and sign up for think tanks. We let old ideas – good ideas – fall to the wayside in favor getting new ones started. As quickly as we had begun to decipher and understand what one set of jargon-infested trends meant, more emerge.
That’s showbiz, ya’ll. It’s also retail. But is it, right?
The retail industry has undergone multiple headline-making transitions throughout the last decade, most notably in how retail relates to technology. Since 2011, we’ve gone from having to seek out (and even pay for!) public Wifi, to now having 5G+, interconnected everything. The way we become aware of, research, compare, demo, purchase, unbox, rate, review, return, and share our favorite products is completely non-linear and totally unpredictable.
We as consumers demand cohesive, seamless, integrated, personalized, omnichannel shopping experiences that are immersive, experiential, efficient, safe, and social-share worthy. We demand control, convenience, choice, and catered, concierge-style customer service.
(How many jargonistic terms can you pick out in that paragraph alone?)
The thing is, however, all of this is relevant. All of these “trends” are important and should be talked about. Frequently. In the retail industry, we can’t afford to be idle. We can never assume that we are somehow immune to making the necessary changes and pivots required to keep up with the world at large. These buzzy, sensationalized, often subjective topics and themes? They’re just a part of the job.
Trends aren’t the problem; they never are. How we are responding to them is.
TRENDS > BEHAVIOR > MOTIVE > EMOTION
Here’s the thing: Customers don’t care about trends. Customers care about having good experiences, but “good” is a relative term.
“Cohesive, seamless, integrated, personalized, omni-channel, immersive, experiential, efficient, safe shopping experiences that provide a sense of choice, convenience, control, and catered, concierge-style customer service” means something different to everyone.
Shoppers don’t demand these deliverables because they are animals. They don’t intentionally set the bar so high that they inadvertently put legacy brands and retailers out of business and contribute to the dismantling of entire industries. They’re just people, who happen to have needs, in a very public, very connected, very intelligent society.
The more time retail professionals spend innovating to the trend, the less time they have to attend to the customer.
Trends are influenced by behavior. And at risk of inciting a ‘which comes first, the chicken or the egg’ conversation, trends are ultimately the natural consequence of human desire - of human emotion.
HUMAN EMOTION IS DIFFERENT FROM CUSTOMER SENTIMENT.
Usually when we hear about customers and their emotions, we think about how they feel in the moments leading up to, during, and after they engage with a brand. Did they find what they needed? Are they satisfied? Impressed? Will they purchase again? Will they share their brand experience on social media or with friends and family? Could we have done something better to make them convert quicker or more frequently?
Today, we have even more tools to measure customer sentiment through use of retail analytics services like social media monitoring, store traffic monitoring, heat mapping, facial scanning, emotion AI technology, and other technology-driven sentient marketing techniques to better understand how customers feel when involved in a brand experience – in-person or online.
This is great information. Absolutely necessary. But there is another aspect of human emotion that is relevant to the shopping experience. This is the piece that you or some pioneering entrepreneur 150+ years ago focused on when he/she/you built the company you are a part of now: emotional motivators.
“Emotional motivators,” describe the hundreds of emotions that drive the motives behind consumer behavior - drivers that borrow directly from consumer psychology and ask us retail professionals to examine what our customers are inspired to do, be, achieve, and experience.
Aspirations drive decisions. For example, “I am inspired to…”
Stand out from the crowd
Have confidence in the future
Protect my family
Follow the rules
Break the rules
Feel in control of my surroundings
Be kind
Succeed
Do the most efficient thing in any situation
Leave a legacy
Feel creative and inspired
And so on
An article in the Harvard Business Review titled “The New Science of Customer Emotions” by researchers Scott Magids, Alan Zorfas, and Daniel Leemon notes:
“Although brands may be liked or trusted, most fail to align themselves with the emotions that drive their customers’ most profitable behaviors… [Emotional motivators] provide a better gauge of customers’ future value to a firm than any other metric, including brand awareness and customer satisfaction, and can be an important new source of growth and profitability.”
Having a true grasp of the emotional motivations of target customers enables those responsible for defining and delivering “innovative” retail to do so in a way that is original, memorable, natural, and authentic. The Harvard article goes on to describe how implementing a strategy based on customer emotion paid off for one national retailer:
“The company was struggling with common industry challenges. Although it had a well-known brand and a strong market presence, same-store sales were stagnating, and promotional pricing was shrinking margins. So it focused on cost management, logistical efficiency, and streamlining the merchandise and store mix—with limited success.”
The retailer decided it needed to shift its focus and implement a company-wide, emotion-first business strategy that allowed the organization to:
Target connected customers
Quantify key motivators
Optimize investments across functions
Systemize, measure, and learn
Specifically in point three, the team focused on maximizing opportunities from emotional connection beyond the typical marketing department. In order to be successful, it knew this strategy needed to breach all areas of its company objectives - including how it managed retail and store operations.
“The retailer examined every function and customer touchpoint to find ways to enhance high-ROI emotional motivators. This brought four major investment areas into focus: stores, online and omnichannel experiences, merchandising, and message targeting.”
After working this system, the retailer noted a few highlights:
Same store growth of 3.5% annually (normally 1%)
Inventory turns up 25%
Market share and customer advocacy up 20%
Impressive.
PUTTING IT TOGETHER
Using customer sentiment markers along with the “Emotional motivator” business model is key to extracting more useful information out of generic, overly- generalized, buzzworthy industry trends.
Considerations such as those in the above graphic make it possible for us to ask less questions like, “how are we going to make our next display a tech-enabled fantasyland of wonderment,” and more questions like, “do my customer even want a tech-enabled fantasyland of wonderment?”
If the answer is “Yes! They absolutely do!” - then wonderful. You have a solid starting point to begin creative dreaming - one that you confidently know will resonate with the emotional motivations of your shoppers. But if the answer is “I don’t know,” or a big, flat out “No way! They’re way too chill for that nonsense,” then it doesn’t make sense to put resources into that line of thinking. Try on the next trend. See how you could work with it to cater to your people.
Remember: The more time retail professionals spend innovating to the trend, the less time they have to attend to the customer.
The future of the real industry will be driven by human emotion.
DON’T GO IT ALONE
Whether discussions about emotional motivators are brand new to you, or whether you and your teams are seasoned pros at navigating the intricacies of human emotion, considering the implementation of an emotion-first retail strategy safeguards your retail against the status quo.
It demands that you do it differently than everyone else because your company is as original and unique as the customers you serve. It pushes you to get very clear on your mission and vision, and provides a lens through which you can filter out noise and distractions that ultimately do not serve the highest good of your customers.
Trends are not the problem. How we respond to them is.
If something doesn’t make sense for your audience, don’t do it. There are other ways to innovate. If something is going to overextend your time, budget, and people, let it go. Trust that you know how to navigate your customers’ needs. Trust that you know what to focus on.
When you run into a situation where you need an outside perspective to help distill all of this information into an actionable, intentional retail program - you know who to call. As design manufacturers, we’re able to build bada$$ displays and retail programs because we understand the significance of shopper motivations.
