When you hear the term ‘customer emotion’, it’s easy to turn a blind eye and cast it aside as idealistic or unnecessary. After all, you don’t need to make your customers laugh, cry or shout - you just need to sell them your product or service.
The word ‘emotion’ is tied to an idea of feelings, instincts, and impulses, far from the business world of logic and numbers, right? Actually no, not at all.
Whilst it’s undeniable that business success is built on facts and figures, achieving such success is often an entirely different story. Perhaps in order to start understanding and truly maximising on business achievements, you need to start thinking with your heart instead of your head.
It’s all about trying to understand why your customers act the way that they do, and what drives action? Emotion.
As humans, our actions are based on how we feel, and our consumer habits are no different. So in order to best predict customer behaviour and encourage customer loyalty, which often stems from an emotional connection with a brand, you have to try and understand how they’re feeling.
Creating connections between your customers and your brand without seeming insincere or cheesy, can be a tough ask, but all you have to do is look at some of the brands that have smashed this concept, to see not only that it can be done, but that it can have excellent consequences for a company. Big names like Coca Cola and Disney know exactly how to make their customers really feel something, and as a result their customers love them.
Brands that succeed in creating services and products as a lifestyle, rather than a single thing are usually the ones who excel in maximising on the emotion of their customers.
By understanding how customers see themselves, or even better, who they want to be, is crucial in understanding how to best connect with them emotionally and how you, as a brand, can fit into their lives. Understanding emotional motivators can be vital in everything from product creation to the way you communicate with your customers. Make your emotional standpoint part of your brand identity and you build customer trust, customer loyalty and achieve great business results.
Emotions are an incredibly personal thing, and by evoking an emotion in your customer you are instantly creating a connection with them. It’s proven that connected customers are better customers - they spend more, they care more and most importantly of all, they love the brand. It’s our head that works out how to spend money, but all too often it’s our heart that decides where to do it, so it’s probably about time we started engaging in the same way!
If you're on the look out for more inspiration on how to improve your customer experience, check out our presentation summarising 25 inspiring CX stories from around the world in 2015:
