Emotion detector           

While starting and running a business involves countless rational decisions - choosing a banker, developing marketing and business plans - there is also a lot of emotion involved. One moment you’re celebrating landing a new client and the next you’re stressing about cash flow.

With so many things to worry about, it’s comforting to have resources to fall back on. That’s one of the ideas behind the many services - from credit and charge cards to a variety of other programs - offered by New York-based American Express.

These services appeal to a customer’s rational side but American Express is mindful of the importance of addressing the emotional aspects of business in its marketing and advertising, as a way to attract new customers and to cement the bond with current ones.

For help in finding ways to do that, American Express turned to Brain Surgery Worldwide, Inc., an Atlanta-based market research firm. Brain Surgery uses a 30-minute online survey to uncover the emotions and the emotional drivers behind a particular topic. Respondents, who remain anonymous during the survey process, first identify the emotions they experience when they consider the topic, and then express the reasons for those emotions. The survey elicits the intensities of the emotions and also assesses and corrects for the emotional states of the respondent at the time of the survey, as well as their general emotionality. It determines the importance of the issues surrounding the purchase process by aggregating emotion intensity scores for a statistically significant number of respondents.

Amy Marcus, vice president of global marketplace insights at American Express, says that while American Express has used a host of qualitative approaches (depth interviews, ethnography) to plumb respondents’ emotional depths, qualitative doesn’t allow for projectability. The Brain Surgery approach, which aims to quantify feelings and emotions, takes a step toward that aim. “It’s important to get information on respondents’ rational mindset during research but choices are often made on an emotional comfort level and we wanted to get beneath the surface and be able to explore the feelings. [The Brain Surgery technique] does that and also gives us the language that consumers use,” Marcus says.

The role of emotions

The Brain Surgery survey uses a number of questions and question types to learn more about the role that emotions play in decision-making about specific products. “We use emotions to prioritize reasons for making decisions, and studying emotions allows us to uncover what is motivating or inhibiting to any audience,” says Steve Blaising, vice chairman, Brain Surgery Worldwide, Inc.

“Rather than asking them questions with agree or disagree scales and things of that nature, we pose topical statements to them, such as ‘If I had the ideal or best imaginable ________ for use in my business I would feel ________.’ We start broad and as the instrument takes the respondent through the exercise, we narrow down to more aided types of questions in the end. A tremendous amount of information is gathered, both aided and unaided, about a client’s messages, their features, functions, attributes and benefit statements. We ask the respondents to tell us why they feel this way, how strongly they feel that way and how positive and negative they are about their feelings,” says John Carr, Brain Surgery Worldwide chairman and CEO.

A typical study will generate over 10,000 lines of verbatim data and 150,000 words, which are coded and analyzed by a psychologist team led by Brain Surgery’s Dr. Stephen Curtis. “The cognitive statements allow Dr. Curtis, who invented the tool, to decode the brains of the respondent base. When you do this with 300 to 500 respondents, that is a lot of information, and it allows us to attach a mathematical algorithm and scores to the power of the emotion behind why a respondent is going to do something or not do something. We can project this into a client’s market to give them an understanding of who is loyal and how many of them are there, how reliable is that base, who is ready to defect and how many of them are there,” Carr says.

“We also uncover the gap between what the market is giving them and what they want - in other words, unmet needs,” says Blaising.

After Curtis and his team finish the coding, the information is passed to the Brain Surgery business analysis group, which produces a perceptual positioning as one of its deliverables. “The positioning says, here is where the market perceives the brand’s strengths and weaknesses versus competitors. When we look at this compared to the set of unmet emotional needs we get higher-order, more emotional benefits that historically most brands are not connecting to their basic features and benefits. You can leap ahead of your competitors by quite a large margin if you begin to talk about your brand wrapped with these higher-order benefits, versus the ones you have been presenting,” Carr says.

In their own words

One of the key aspects for American Express was being able to capture the respondents’ feelings in their own words. “More and more people are recognizing and starting to quantify how important emotion is. I think there is a real missed opportunity there for businesses to be aware of and make better use of the power that emotion has,” Marcus says.

“The verbatims from respondents give the client the language of the customer,” Carr says. “You can take messages and benefit statements written by the marketing department and test them, but those are in the marketing people’s language. Instead, we get the respondents’ language, which allows us to say to the client, ‘Look, you used this word in your benefit statement but when you get it into creative you really ought to use these other kinds of words.’”

Level of reassurance

Armed with the customers’ language, rather than focusing on making bold claims in advertising, Carr says firms can use something called factual reassurance. “Using the findings from the research, clients can create advertising that provides what we call factual reassurance. Instead of getting an over-the-top promise of the type that has been the hallmark of a lot of advertising and marketing, consumers want a level of reassurance. It could be playing off of a fear in a nice way, it could be humor, or it could just be their own language played back to them in a way that lets them connect it to a benefit that they hadn’t really thought about before.”

“We are able to prioritize what we need to deliver and communicate and differentiate what is really important versus what is nice to provide,” Marcus says. “With this technique, you don’t just get numbers and charts, but a particular segment speaking in their own words. And [the Brain Surgery] analysis gives you a perspective on what those words mean and how important they are and how emotionally weighted they are, because the more emotion the language has the more you need to listen to it.”

“We unlocked the truly emotionally gripping parts of the brand and the higher-order benefits that are connected to what the brand is about from a feature-and-function standpoint,” Carr says. “We looked at questions like, what did the market really want and how close were they to giving them that? We found there was a certain profile about what makes somebody loyal and excited and we also found out about what made people disappointed and what makes them feel bad, and we were able to determine how those feelings led to choosing one product over another in a parity battle.”

There may be eight to 15 reasons why a customer wants to buy or doesn’t, Carr says. “Usually four of those reasons make the key driver list and those are the four that require the most work and they also include the brand’s strengths, because you never want to leave the strengths behind. But we find clients are so over-focused on the features and the functions that they end up not really speaking to the personal self-interest of the customers.”

“It’s the balance of those drivers in a message that will make that message optimal,” Blaising says.

“Even if we have a market with a lot of anxiety about a product - this happens in pharma a lot - we are able to say, there is some anxiety, here is how much there is, here is why it is there, and here are words you can use that are reassuring to this segment of the market. You aren’t going to make your product instantly attractive, but you can move their minds to a neutral state, and once they are there, you can then begin to use language to move them toward a more positive feeling toward your brand,” Carr says.

Priority of messages

Marcus says the information gleaned from the research has been helpful on a number of different levels. “We wanted to have a priority of messages to different targets. We have to do different things for different targets and we were able to differentiate what one group needs to hear versus another. And not only what they need to hear but what we need to deliver on. We are protecting our brand and we have a lot of integrity with our brand and we never want to promise something that we aren’t going to be delivering.”

For American Express, the Brain Surgery approach hasn’t replaced other types of research. Rather, it’s another valuable tool in the toolbox, Marcus says. “It has helped us get an important framework. We were intrigued by the opportunity to get a more organized and quantified understanding from a greater number of people. When you do qualitative you can get this stuff but it’s not projectable and here was a way to do it on the Internet. In a traditional research setting respondents might be private about a lot of the feelings they have, so the online method is a good medium. It’s on their terms and might enable them to reveal more than they would on certain subjects in a focus group.”