Getting emotional

Editor’s note: Gerry Katz is executive vice president, and Elizabeth Lajoie is a former project director, at Applied Marketing Science, Inc., a Waltham, Mass., research firm.

A major consumer products company was launching an effort to revitalize a weakening brand in the female health and beauty aids category. For this particular case, our client wanted to better understand customers’ wants and needs for the category as a whole, and specifically, it hoped to uncover both performance needs (i.e., functional needs) and emotional needs related to its product. The key was not only to elicit customers’ functional and emotional needs, but also to understand how the two types of needs were linked in customers’ minds.

An adaptation of our firm’s VOCALYST methodology was used to draw out and refine this information. The three-month study produced a host of data, including a detailed needs hierarchy, linkages, and individual brand “emotional profiles.” Our client finished the project with a clear roadmap for the specific product, positioning and advertising changes necessary to revitalize the brand.

While we are unable to cite actual project data for confidentiality reasons and we have disguised the data using body wash as a substitute female health and beauty aid product, the case study that follows is an accurate representation of the project objectives, approach and insights associated with the actual client study.

Consumers weren’t interested

Our client was faced with the challenge of revitalizing a stagnant brand and differentiating its product within the increasingly crowded body wash market. Store shelves displayed a dizzying array of products, each of which was offered in multiple scents, varieties and packages.

Our client’s brand had a long-standing presence in the body wash category but had experienced a gradual drop in market share. The brand was positioned towards women and had recently been redesigned with more feminine scents, updated packaging and a new advertising campaign. Despite these efforts, however, the brand remained stagnant. Female consumers just didn’t seem interested. What was the problem?

Executives suspected the issue might lay not with the functional aspects of the product - e.g., its performance, scent and packaging - but rather with its emotional component. Put another way, no matter how well-formulated or packaged a product might be, if it wasn’t positioned to push the right emotional buttons, then customers were likely to pass it by on their trip down the store aisle.

To help uncover the root of the problem, our client decided to launch a modified VOCALYST study. The VOCALYST method, which was developed at the MIT Sloan School of Management, was selected to provide a compendium of customers’ wants and needs regarding the entire product category. Additionally, since the method was designed to express those wants and needs in the customers’ own words, it would provide a common language for our client’s R&D, advertising and product management functions to use in their discussions. And perhaps most important, the process would help uncover the linkages between customers’ emotional and functional product needs.

Why emotional needs?

Market research has long confirmed that customers buy the products and services that best meet their needs. Thus, a detailed understanding of those needs is critical to a product’s success. For example, a deodorant needs to “stop sweat” and “eliminate odor,” just as a shampoo needs to “make lots of rich lather” and “leave hair shiny.” These are functional needs that, in many ways, define both the product category itself and the must-have features of any successful product offering within that category.

For many products, however, marketplace success requires more than just delivering on functional needs. In order to be successful, products often need to meet customers’ emotional needs as well.

Emotional needs describe how a particular product makes a customer feel, and are often the basis for product positioning, advertising and other kinds of marketing messaging. For example, “makes me feel comfortable around other people” and “helps me feel confident” are two basic emotional needs that a beauty aid may have to meet. For many consumer products, customers’ emotional needs - and how the product is positioned to deliver on those needs - can be just as important as what the product actually does functionally. Equally important, understanding the connections and linkages between customers’ emotional needs and the product’s functional characteristics can help marketers create a compelling product and effective marketing and advertising strategies.

While personal care products like soap, shampoo and cosmetics are a natural fit for emotional messages, food, cleaning agents, health and wellness aids and a host of other consumer products and services can also benefit from identifying and meeting customers’ emotional needs. And while emotional messaging is arguably most important for consumer products and other categories where there is little product differentiation, many commercial and B2B categories are also strongly influenced by emotional needs. For instance, in one medical supply category we investigated, we learned that “maintaining a professional appearance” was a strong motivator among physicians. Rare is the product to which customers do not have some emotional, albeit possibly hidden, connection.

Outlined goals

Before starting the study, the project team outlined the study’s goals, which included:

  • Helping our client better understand customers’ functional and emotional needs surrounding the product category.
  • Determining the relative strengths and weaknesses of our client’s product in relation to these needs
  • Identifying the distinct linkages between emotional and functional needs (for example, which functional benefits were connected to which emotional needs).
  • Creating an emotional “profile” for our client’s product versus competitive brands.
  • Recommending specific product, positioning, packaging and advertising changes, as necessary.

With the goals clearly defined, work was ready to start. As with any voice-of-the-customer study, the project began with collecting and identifying customer wants and needs. Interviews were conducted with female respondents in various geographic locations who had used, or were at least familiar with, our client’s product. In addition to probing for product likes, dislikes and benefits, the interviews focused on identifying feelings associated with the product and its use. Actual product samples and a selection of advertisements were used throughout the interviews as a conversation aid.

Prior to the start of each interview, respondents were asked to fill out a brief survey designed to start them thinking about emotions, feelings and the related emotional vocabulary. Interview dialog included projective techniques to identify the complete set of emotional needs associated with the product category. For example, respondents were asked to imagine certain work, social or personal situations and to describe how they would feel in each.

Additionally, the interviews incorporated extensive probing to uncover the underlying emotions driving respondents’ functional product needs. For example, probing beyond a simple “I want to be clean” statement illustrated that respondents had a need to feel comfortable around and be accepted by others. Finally, respondents were asked to describe different brands’ typical users, or to equate different brands to car models or animals. This information helped develop personality profiles for each brand.

Interviews were conducted in focus group facilities with one-way mirrors so that others would be able to watch the proceedings. Each interview was audiotaped, transcribed verbatim, and then carefully read in order to identify and extract specific wants and needs. Emerging needs were classified as functional or emotional, and the original collection of needs was analyzed to eliminate duplicates and other statements that were not true underlying needs but rather target values or solutions to needs. The result was a list of 31 emotional and 53 functional needs that formed the basis for the card-sorting process.

In the card-sorting process, each respondent was given two decks of cards, with one need statement on each card. White cards were printed with functional needs statements and pink cards were printed with emotional needs statements. Respondents first sorted the white cards containing functional needs into piles or bundles that “went together in their minds.” Once this affinitization exercise was complete, respondents indicated the importance of each bundle and evaluated how well various product brands met the needs represented in each. Finally, they matched each pink card, containing an emotional need, to the pile of functional needs that, in their mind, had the strongest connection to that emotional need.

Clear picture

Subsequent cluster analysis of the card-sorting data painted a clear picture of the needs hierarchy and the linkages between customers’ functional and emotional needs. Equally important, the analysis identified the respective strengths and weaknesses of existing products across a broad range of parameters. We successfully illustrated which features and emotional needs were important to customers and mapped how well different product brands performed on each dimension of customer needs. Finally, customer perceptions of a brand’s functional performance were matched with the emotional needs most closely related to that brand’s functional strengths to create individual emotional profiles for each brand.

In those cases where our client’s product performed relatively well on a functional need, our recommendations focused on changing related emotional messaging, since functional product changes were unlikely to have a strong effect. Conversely, for functional needs areas with a large performance gap, our recommendations focused on both product and emotional message changes.

Armed with this information, the company’s product team clearly identified those areas where actual product changes were needed. In addition, the team pinpointed areas where its product was emotionally lacking, and where it could develop new advertising and positioning strategies that addressed the product’s particular weaknesses. With the VOCALYST study results in hand, our client was in a strong position to revitalize its product.

A better understanding

Some key lessons from this project:

  • Customers clearly link specific emotional needs to concrete product functions. Understanding these linkages can lead to better-positioned, stronger brands.
  • A product can be a functional performance “superstar,” but still lack the right emotional messaging. Both pieces are important for long-term product success.
  • Finally, understanding how customers see your product or brand’s emotional profile is critical. In this particular case, emotional mapping of individual brands allowed our client to gain a better understanding of how customers perceived the product space. Sometimes, what companies think customers perceive is quite different from what customers actually perceive in the marketplace.