Why emotion?
Why not just provide a good product and/or service for a reasonable price and be done with it?
A: Because emotions drive all human decision making. Our brains are hardwired this way.
The way the human brain thinks is like a reverse funnel. A thought starts with a core emotion then expands upward, adding layers and layers of secondary emotion, logic and reasoning until it completes.
This is why we love to post-rationalise a decision, especially if we feel it was ‘impulsive.’
It wasn’t impulsive. It was just driven by emotion like all other decisions. Say Gary buys a motorcycle because he’s loved motorcycles since he was a boy. He might post-rationalise: “I made a logical choice! My commute will be faster. I’ll save on fuel. It’s better for the environment than my car!” While all of these statements might be true, it’s not what drove Gary’s decision. He just loved it, and love is a very strong emotion. That’s it.
Without an emotional trigger, customers won’t engage with a business even if it provides good logical value. Without emotion, customers won’t consider logic at all. They will ignore the business completely.
But what about price? It’s logical someone will buy if it’s a low price! This is a common argument businesses tell themselves to avoid dealing with emotion: we’re logical and rational and so are our customers! Low price is still an emotional trigger: fear. Specifically the fear of not having money, which has an immense impact on many people. Fear drives the decision to buy cheap. Value for money is an example of post-rationalisation.
Fear is a negative emotion and for better or worse, our strongest. Alleviating fear is not a positive emotion. Customers buying from you because you’re cheap is not a positive emotional experience. This is often visible in high customer churn: once a competitor offers a better deal, fear driven customers bail. Fear is toxic to so many positive emotions, especially emotions that drive connection, loyalty and indeed, love.
To succeed, businesses not only have to connect to customer emotions, they have to connect to the right emotions. If you rely on customers for revenue, and on them sticking around for consistent, stable revenue, they need a reason to stay. Their decision to stay will always be driven by emotion, and if they’re the right emotions: love, joy, trust, mutual respect and so on, they’ll stay a long time. It’s wrong to say fear doesn’t work – it does, but like a ticking bomb, the whole relationship will detonate the moment a competitor offers the safety of a better price.
Gary didn’t buy his motorcycle out of fear, and it certainly wasn’t cheap!