By Crispin Reed, Managing Director of Brandhouse Emotion. The most important seven letters in business. But business doesn’t like talking about emotion. Rarely discussed, it’s locked away while rationality reigns supreme. But in this age of oversupply, product parity and commoditisation, business is forced to forge deeper emotional connections with its consumers.

Emotion has now moved centre stage. Breakthroughs in science have proved that people are primarily emotional decision makers. Most businesses have yet to grasp this, let alone act on it. Yet business success depends on understanding and harnessing the central role emotion plays in how people decide which brands meet their needs.

Emotion is critical to marketing success in three areas: emotion drives all decision making, plays a vital role in which brands come to mind at the point of decision and causes the motivations that drive our behaviour.

Emotions and Decision-making Understanding emotion is a relatively new science. New insights have emerged in the areas of psychology, neuroscience and social anthropology that point to a growing consensus that human decision-making is emotionally driven. Our brains are primarily wired for emotion.

Signals that run from the emotional brain to the rational brain outnumber signals running in the opposite direction by a factor of 10 to one. Developments in neuroscience have also confirmed that people are primarily emotional decision-makers. For example, leading neuroscientist Antonio Damasio studied people with brain injuries that had damaged the part of the brain where emotions are generated.

He found that because the emotional centres were damaged, these people could no longer make decisions. Damasio found that ultimately, all decisions are emotionally-based. We decide with our hearts and then rationalize our decision with our heads. At the root of why we do this, lies what French psychologist G Clotaire Rapaille calls the ‘Intellectual Alibi’ – the ‘good reason’. This has profound implications for marketing. Consumers tell researchers the reasons they prefer one brand to another, but businesses are actually building growth strategies around their ‘Intellectual Alibis’. The real reason people make brand choices – the emotional truth – is being largely overlooked. To truly influence people’s purchase intent you need to put emotion at the heart of your strategy.

The Role of Memory Memory, and therefore brand recall, is also emotion-based. The memory centre of the brain and the emotion centre are next to each other. We remember something when a connection is made between the two. Aristotle likened the brain to a wax tablet – memories make an impression in the wax. Everything we remember is only remembered because it has made an emotional impression in our brain.

Emotional memories are vital in the context of what we pay attention to and how we choose. Damasio’s research highlighted the presence of what he calls ‘Somatic Markers’ to describe how we assign (mark) our experiences as either good or bad3. Familiar sights, sounds, smells and sensations easily activate these markers and creating these kinds of markers is key to brand success; without them a brand won’t even enter the field of consideration. As Elizabeth Loftus, an American psychologist and expert on human memory, says: “Memory is malleable and it is relatively easy to change it.” Our Emotions Emotions determine the quality of our lives. However, when defining the emotional benefits of brands, true emotions become clouded with business jargon and category values. ‘Warm’ isn’t an emotion, neither is ‘trust’, nor is ‘friendliness’. There are many definitions of what an emotion is.

A good benchmark is professor of psychology at California Medical School, Dr Paul Ekman’s definition: “An emotion is a set of sensations experienced… briefly … about something that matters.” Our emotions happen to us – we do not choose them. They are positive or negative – never neutral. Positive emotions awaken in response to anything (real, imagined or potential) that brings us closer to realising our goals in life. Negative emotions awaken in response to anything that takes us further from our goals. Brands can be built around either – the desire for positive emotional outcomes or the desire to avoid negative feelings. There are many ways to categorise the emotions, but the most common is to group them as primary and secondary emotions. The primary emotions are usually agreed as being: Love, Joy, Anger, Sadness, Fear. Emotions can also blend to become other emotions. For example nostalgia is a blend of happiness and sadness; naches (pride in the achievements of your kids) is a blend of pride and love. Emotional Competitive Advantage Of course it’s vital to give people a rational reason for choosing one brand over others (the ‘Intellectual Alibi’ which will justify our decision) but ultimately brands are about the anticipation of emotional outcomes.

Brand equity can, in effect, be boiled down to ‘emotional anticipation’ and the stronger this is, the bigger the competitive advantage.

At Brandhouse we call this Emotional Competitive Advantage. A brand has an Emotional Competitive Advantage when people are driven to seek it out because they perceive a better emotional outcome than competitors deliver. In our 2009 study, The Brandhouse Emotion 100™, we set out to measure the Emotional Competitive Advantage of 100 leading brands in the UK. In developing a methodology for measuring Emotional Competitive Advantage we now have an approach for managing it for the benefit and growth of brands. The intangible has now become tangible.