New Research: Emotional experience beats Celebrity endorsements

Emotional celebrity

When you see an ad with a celebrity like Leonardo DiCaprio holding a watch or an ad with someone showing emotion like proposing to their girlfriend on their knees, what is more effective?

New research to be launched in June shows that advertisements that align to a specific emotion are more effective than celebrity endorsements. The research states:

In one study, athletes chose to listen to “angry” music and indicated they would pay more to see “angry” bands in concert, while volunteers chose to listen to “sad” music and were willing to pay more to attend “sad” concerts. In another study, athletes found an advertisement more persuasive when the model’s face in the ad expressed anger, while volunteers were more persuaded by a model with a sad face, and environmentalists by a model expressing disgust.

Consumers can benefit from matching their emotional experiences to their identity. For example, turning up some angry head banging music on the way to the gym might make you a better athlete, or listening to sad love songs on the way to the soup kitchen might make you a better volunteer.

Over 50% of your Customer Experience is about how a Customer feels and yet this is typically ignored by organizations and this is more evidence of the importance of looking at the emotional experience that your Customers have. But don’t just take my word for it. According to Forrester:

Emotional insights will take center stage. The idea that happy customers are more likely to remain loyal, try new products and services, and spread good news about their experiences has started to catch on. Over the past several months, we’ve seen a rise in the number of companies pondering the connection between enjoyment and metrics like satisfaction and Net Promoter Score® (NPS®). In fact, one global company statistically demonstrated that several emotional factors trump NPS® in predicting customer loyalty, effectively dethroning “would you recommend?” as the ultimate question. As firms start to emphasize customer emotion in 2013, we expect to see more vendors developing offerings like Beyond Philosophy’s Emotional Signature, which examines the rational, subconscious, and emotional elements of an experience.

So if you want to start looking at this wave of change then you need to view our webinar on Emotional Signature®

But given there are many emotions out there what emotions drive and destroy most value, in other words generate $$$?

We discussed this in my blog post, How emotions generate value. The danger is that organizations spend millions on advertisements that create an expectation with their Customers which is then destroyed when they have the experience with the company. For example, the ad may show happy people in the call center dealing with happy Customers, but then when they actually interact with the call center the experience is poor. Therefore, it’s all about alignment.

Defining the emotions you wish to evoke in ad and as part of your general Customer Experience is critical. Then designing these emotions into your Customer Experience is critical. We conducted a webinar on this subject a couple of weeks ago on Moment Mapping®.

Customer emotions are starting to rise in importance, this is more evidence that organisations need to get to grip with this concept. How well is your organization moving into the new world of Customer emotions?