Consumers are both emotional and rational - we need one metric to measure both behaviors
By Joe Sauer, EVP marketing, Songtradr
The best marketing and advertising efforts don’t just sell products; they use the power of emotion to strengthen connections between brands and people. Accomplishing this means communicating on more than just a rational level. Sure, factors like price, features, and product reviews influence our decisions. They’re just not the only things that do.
Emotion is a powerful tool in marketing. More compelling than dry facts and figures, emotions ensure that experiences — and the brands that provide them — are more deeply encoded in long-term memory, which is a more valuable outcome for brands than conventionally-measured short-term brand recall or brand association.
Unfortunately, this idea entered the marketing mainstream without a real understanding of how to capitalize on its implications. This led to the emergence of “sadvertising” in the 2010s, when seemingly every brand tried to create tear-jerking stories that would go viral in a new world of social media.
To be sure, this era gave us some brilliant and effective spots like the ASPCA’s 'Angel' or John Lewis’s 'The Long Wait.' But the road to Cannes was littered with all too many misguided efforts that came off as catastrophically inauthentic or manipulative, destroying billions of dollars of hard-won brand equity in the process.
John Lewis's 'The Long Wait' (above) nailed emotional marketing - but for many brands, their attempts seem inauthentic or manipulative
Emotional v rational decisions
Legions of consultants and strategists have spent the better part of a decade trying to convince marketers to go all-in on emotion. They proudly misquote Dr. Jerry Zaltman’s now-infamous assertion in his book How Customers Think: Essential Insights Into The Mind of the Markets that “Probably 95% of all cognition, all the thinking that drives our decisions and behaviors, occurs unconsciously.”
They accept the 95% as gospel and conveniently drop the “probably” that belies the statement’s roots in social rather than cognitive psychology. Good copy, but hardly good science.
The reality is that no decision — including which brands we buy — is shaped by purely rational or emotional factors, but by a unique mixture of both. If marketers are really going to influence consumer behavior, we need to better understand how consumers make the decisions they do.
Each decision has its own context and its own blend of rational and emotional drivers. Understanding both is crucial. They exist together, not separately, and need to be analyzed as a single source of truth.
Competing KPIs
For those brands that do embrace the role of both rationality and emotion in decision-making, the KPIs they focus on tend to follow a balanced scorecard approach. They list rational metrics under one heading and emotional metrics under another.
Frequently, however, those two sets of KPIs contradict each other. When this happens, managers are forced to choose which metric they believe (or want to believe) more. And since our Western bias leans towards logic and rationality, the familiarly rational KPIs tend to win out.
A better approach requires a change of thinking and a deeper understanding of the science behind decision-making. The only marketing KPI that brands should really care about is “forecasted behavioral response,” meaning the measurable lift (in sales, price premium, loyalty, or other brand-beneficial behavior) attributable to exposure to marketing and advertising.
This KPI can only be the result of integrating both rational and emotional thinking — taking the rational preferences between competing brands and weighting them with the emotional factor after exposure to some sort of marketing creative.
If you think about it, that's the way our brains work. We form preferences and make decisions based on both rational considerations and emotional influences. And so a single KPI has to be a metric that integrates both of these.
Behavioral prediction
At Songtradr, we use a research-based metric called Emotional Brand Preference, which we’ve applied to the music space quite successfully. We use that as the core metric against which we evaluate everything that we do, whether it's a sonic logo, a music track for a particular ad, or a brand activation campaign that includes sound and music in some way.
As a single integrated metric that takes emotional and rational responses into a single behavioral prediction model, it consistently generates the most accurate, empirically-validated forecasts of behavioral responses to the auditory elements of marketing communications and advertising.
This is a relatively new idea, and new ideas can be risky. But risk often pays off. When the majority of our clients understand and assess our approach, they feel empowered to make decisions more confidently, defensibly, and quickly.
It creates a powerful distinction for them in the marketplace, because we can demonstrate how they're taking the lead over competitors simply by better understanding the holistic drivers of consumer behavior in a more accurate and actionable way.