KQ Article

Emotional engagement and preference drive business success. It’s as simple as that, as recognized a century ago by banker J.P. Morgan when he wrote, “A man makes a decision for two reasons: the good reason, and the real reason.”

As Morgan knew in penning those words, the “good” reason is the one we can all justify to ourselves and others. It’s a matter of rationalization, or what the French psychologist Claude Rapaille has called “the intellectual alibi.”

Meanwhile, the “real” reason is, of course, emotional — how something strikes us in our gut. Now-retired General Electric C.E.O. Jack Welch was brave and honest enough to title one of his books, Straight from the Gut, reflecting the reality of how we all truly behave.

FEELINGS HAPPEN FIRST
For a decade now, I have been helping blue-chip companies, some of which do business in the financial services sector, address and benefit from the reality that  consumers are primarily emotional decision-makers.

We’ve known this instinctively, and we’ve known it more consciously since shortly after World War II. That’s when the U.S. government funded brain research that led to the realization that human beings actually have three brains, of which the oldest and, frankly, most influential are the sensory and emotional brains. The rational brain came later — and neurologically, it surrenders first-mover advantage to the emotional brain.

In other words, everybody feels before they think. It might make us uncomfortable to recognize that we’re not nearly as rational as we imagine. But in addition to setting you free, the truth can enable you to get a whole lot closer to your consumer base, which thinks and decides matters in a manner much closer to Homer Simpson than Mr. Spock.

KEYS TO EMOTIONAL CONNECTIONS
The breakthroughs in understanding the human psyche, and how people “think” and how they make decisions, are highly complex subjects that require a book to explain. I know this because I’ve written two of them on how companies can take advantage of this greater understanding of people to make more money. To summarize, here are five quick principles to bear in mind:

1. Half the brain is devoted to processing visuals — so make sure your branding and retail settings have a reassuring dominant visual element. By reassuring, I mean a simplified version of Maslow’s famous Hierarchy of Needs. Most of ours reads this way, in ascending order: security, then comfort, then pleasure. You can’t get to the top rung, pleasure, without addressing the others first.
2. Remember that not only do people feel before they think, they assign value emotionally. Think about it. Any financial services company can make a lot of claims. And these claims are often quite difficult to independently assess on a rational basis. But we are all blessed with gut instincts, and we depend on them to decide whether something feels right. Want to achieve loyalty? Well, loyalty is a feeling, after all. As Jeffrey Gitomer writes, “Don’t give anybody any feelings you wouldn’t want to have yourself.”
3. Strive for elegant simplicity. Steve Jobs is no dummy when he advocates for this. The average reader of a consumer journal will notice a print ad for only two seconds. So don’t let your marketing get in the way of your key message. The brain takes in 11 million bytes of information a second, but we only consciously process about 25 to 40 per second. In other words, your financial institution’s best chance of connecting with consumers is intuitively, not rationally.
4. Keep in mind that it’s hard to hug a giant. Most companies address the public with a demeanor much like a gigantic robot. Resist this. Instead, use a more intimate, personal voice through the words and tone you select. Big, abstract words impress only yourself. As Marc Gobe warns, “American Airlines has an identity” — but so what? — whereas “Virgin Airlines has a personality.”
5. Appeal to reason as well as emotion. Make it easy for customers and members to rationalize doing business with you. Why mention this now, after all this preaching on the gospel of emotion? The answer is simple: the reasons you give people to feel smart and safe about doing business with you are emotional in nature. Here’s an analogy to clarify this idea: Although we lie in the bed of our decisions on an emotional basis, the blankets we use to keep warm at night are like the reasons a company gives us to make us feel snug and cozy about them.

The bottom line is that the emotional brain’s response comes first, very quickly and inevitably colors the rational response. There is no purely rational response. This is a fact you can bank on.