Data and analytics can reveal crucial information about consumer preferences and pain points, but it is the ability to tap into the customers’ feelings, triggers and desires that set a successful brand apart. And building this connection with customers is not an easy task. As per a survey by Capgemini, 80 percent of executives felt that their brand understands the emotional needs of consumers, but only 15 percent of consumers thought that brands do a good job of emotionally connecting with them.
Using emotional intelligence in marketing goes beyond the traditional route of selling products and services. The prime focus is building experiences that can appeal to the audience on a deeper emotional level. Understanding and tracking emotions of the audience helps a brand to build a meaningful connection with customers. This, over time, translates to better engagement, long-term loyalty and ultimately improved sales.
Building Emotional Connection To Decode Consumer Behavior
Consumers do not make purchase decisions solely based on logical reasoning. Often, how a product or service evokes emotion in a consumer can be a deciding factor. Decoding this emotional aspect of consumer behavior forms the essence of emotionally intelligent marketing. By recognizing the emotions that drive the audience, brands can tailor their products and services accordingly. Such insights help brands to build authentic connections that are not just transactional but those which can grow into long-term associations.
How Do You Track Emotions?
Emotional intelligence in marketing relies on emotional tracking to get accurate insights about consumers. It is important to measure if the brand or product marketing strategies are working well. The emotion detection and recognition market size is projected to reach $136.2 billion by 2031, growing at a CAGR of 20.5% from 2022 to 2031.
Brands can use tools like emotions tracking to see how well their brand messaging is working across the mainstream media as well as on the internet. This happens in real-time and in the right context, which can help them make informed choices.
Emotional Tracking Technologies For Brand Insights
There are various tools and technologies for brands to perform emotional tracking. Such technologies not only provide brands with information on how their target audience feels while interacting with their products but also their emotional responses during the entire buying journey.
- Facial Recognition-Computer vision enables brands to analyze facial expressions to decode emotions and consumer reactions to external stimuli. Common emotional states like anger, happiness, sadness and fear can be detected through facial recognition technology. It can be very useful in ad testing, store display evaluation, package evaluation, user experience research etc.
- Eye-tracking- By studying eye movements, eye-tracking technology can monitor where a person is looking and how long they are interacting with a brand’s products, services, advertisements or content. It is useful to measure the effectiveness of ad campaigns, gauging reactions to package design, improving store layouts, product placements and enhancing user experience for digital brands.
- Heat Maps – They show where users click, move and spend time interacting with a website, advertisement or any other digital platform. Such data helps brands determine user preferences and emotional engagement with their online presence.
- Media campaign evaluation – It is convenient to measure the effectiveness of video and audio advertisements. The emotion recognition tools makes it possible for emotion trackers to recognize up to eight emotions in a video and create a report. The tool helps brands know whether their advertisements are receiving good, bad or neutral feedback.
- Voice Analysis: Voice recognition software can analyze tone, pitch, and speech patterns to decode the emotions conveyed while speaking. Brands can use this information to understand the emotional responses of their target audience. This data can be utilized to create more personalized marketing campaigns, improve brand value ( by working on feedback by tracking real-time conversations) and forge stronger bonds with customers.
- Social Media Sentiment Analysis: For any brand, in today’s digital age, tracking mentions and discussions about their products and services on social media platforms is essential. Brands depend on various tools and capabilities such as natural language processing (NLP) and sentiment analysis to gain insights into public opinion about their brands and measure their emotional impact.
Though emotion tracking can be of great help to brands for understanding the inner workings of the consumer’s mind, privacy concerns can be the biggest hurdle while deploying such technology. Consumers may not be comfortable knowing that their emotions are being tracked to make business decisions. Emotion-tracking technology may not be fully accurate either, making it difficult to interpret such information with full confidence.
Conclusion
With time, emotion tracking will become central to brand strategy as it helps to build authentic connections with customers. Brands that can realign their strategy to focus on building an emotional connection with consumers will have an edge over competition to sustain in the digital and non-digital marketplace.
