We all deal with the emotional baggage of guilt and disappointment differently–some eat ice cream, others go for a run. As a kid growing up in a first-generation Korean household, tragedy struck when I came home with a disappointing grade like an “A-.” Instead of food or exercise, in times of trouble I turned my energy on the clarinet. Fast forward a few (many) years, and as my clarinet collects dust, a more dangerous victim has emerged–my credit card.
It turns out, I’m not alone. Recent studies have found strong links between sadness and impulsive financial decisions. Jennifer Lerner, Professor of Public Policy and Management at Harvard Kennedy School and Co-Founder of Harvard Decision Science Laboratory, has focused much of her career on the science of decision making. In a recent article and interview published to the WGBH blog, Lerner discusses the effects that sadness has on the choices that we make. Sadness, Lerner argues, triggers a desire in humans to change our circumstances. Lerner found that when subjects were sad or angry, they were significantly less responsible with their sales and purchases. Lerner found that this behavior was in large part due to the fact that strong emotions trigger an optimism that makes people more inclined to take risks.
…So that explains my boat.
As a marketer, the correlation between expressed emotion and decision-making is particularly interesting. Our industry has evolved such that bespoke messaging based on consumer interests, life stages and intent is the expectation of the consumer. Provided the tools to understand unique consumer emotions, in addition to purchase behavior and psychographics, industry folks would be better positioned to communicate products and services to the right people when they are most inclined to purchase.
Big data has unlocked powerful new opportunities in the marketing world. Research published in the last few years has cracked the door for marketers by combining hard data science with the nuances of good communications to understand how digitally expressed emotion translates to offline experiences. Last year, the team at Facebook made a splash with details of their Emotional Contagion experiment. The research explored transferable emotion and resulted in data that suggested that people were indeed affected by what they saw online.
It is no secret that digital media and social platforms are used frequently to express unique feelings and opinions. The increase in the volume of shared content has unlocked opportunities for researchers to study the correlation of symbols and emotions with increasing accuracy. In a study published in the Open Scientific Digital Library in May 2014, authors Maryam Hasan, Elke Rundensteiner and Emmanuel Aguand of the Computer Science Department at Worcester Polytechnic Institute proposed that symbols could be automatically classified and assigned to specific states. In the study, titled “EMOTEX: Detecting Emotions in Twitter Messages,” researchers explored the use of emoticons, unigrams, negations and punctuations in Twitter posts in order to infer users’ emotions. By the end of the experiment, the authors concluded that messages could indeed be classified by user emotion with 90% confidence. Armed with the power to predict emotion at such high accuracy, the marketer’s bag of tricks just got a little better.
Emotions have a remarkably powerful effect on human judgment and decision-making. Given the right tools, marketers have the ability to predict consumer action with a good deal of certainty based on what they know about the subjects’ emotional states. Looking back on my own history, I can connect my digital expressions and behaviors to offline decisions and purchases–back to that boat. With deeper audience intelligence, marketers can deliver the right message to unique segments within a larger audience at the point at which those consumers feel most inclined to purchase.
Social networks and digital media have created a space for all types of people to share information about themselves with the world. With the right tools to understand the unique emotions, desires and needs of these folks, marketers can connect in a way that best suits the needs and interest of the customer.
The author captaining his boat: “Two weeks later my wife made me return it.”
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