Even though emotions are not necessarily logical or rational, they can have a heavy influence on customer actions, with respect to the brands, products or services they choose. Positive emotions during different stages of the customer journey can impact future experiences with your brand, often improving loyalty, retention and advocacy.

Emotions are no joke, after all!

However, even if customers have distinct emotions around your products, solutions or your brand, capturing and analyzing emotions is often very difficult. To capture customer emotions, it’s essential to collaborate with a research partner who isn’t just skilled with research, but also has the technical know-how to provide you with accurate insights on your customers every time.

Read on to understand why emotions matter in market research, how they can be measured and the role emotive surveys play in the process!

Why emotions matter in market research

Have you ever wondered why brands focus on connecting emotionally with customers in ads or campaigns where they can reach a large audience? While brands provide rational details like product features, price, differentiators etc. when they wish to inform customers, they rely on more emotional connections when they wish to leave an impact on their audience’s minds or promote themselves.

That’s why you may see SUV commercials that focus on ruggedness, open roads and mountain terrains – they’re looking to appeal to their customers’ sense of adventure! Perfume ads, on the other hand, may focus on feelings of allure and mystery to appeal to customers. Each of these ads have different emotions they aim to tap into, to create a purchase desire in their customers.

Simply put, emotions have the ability to make customers believe in the magic of your offerings and brand. Thoughtfully measuring these emotions in market research, or otherwise, is of paramount importance.

How customer emotions can be captured

As we understand the important role emotions can play in business today, brands are funding research studies to capture emotions so that they can accurately assess important parameters like brand loyalty.

However, capturing customer emotions is not straightforward at all! While a customer’s emotions can be conscious sometimes, on other occasions, they are so unconsciously felt that customers don’t even realize they’re feeling it. Capturing these unconscious emotions, especially, is a very hard task. But not impossible.

To truly capture customer emotions (both conscious and unconscious), you need a twofold approach – employing emotive surveys and relying on technology. Let’s explore how we can use these tools to truly capture customer feelings accurately.

Using emotive surveys and technology in market research

Before we jump into how surveys and technology can be used, understanding the definition of emotive surveys can be helpful.

Emotive surveys delve into customers’ feelings when they first see a brand’s offering, ad, campaign etc. Instead of focusing on customer preference, these surveys focus on how a brand made them feel. For eg. An emotive survey question could be ‘When you think about <brand ad>, what emotions did you immediately feel?’; and then list emotions ranging from ‘happy’, ‘confident’, ‘relieved’, ‘angry’, ‘disappointed’, ‘confused’ etc. 

In order to capture conscious and unconscious customer emotions, the following steps may help:

1. Capturing conscious emotions

• Direct questioning – As the name indicates, your emotive survey can capture how customers felt about your ad/campaign/product/brand through a straightforward close-ended question (like in the example above) or an open-ended one. This technique can be used to capture what customers are consciously feeling and give them direct ways to document their emotions. 
• Metaphorical questioning – When you’re looking to capture conscious emotions by providing metaphorical or simile prompts such as images, stories, phrases etc., you can map your customer’s emotions without directly mentioning them. This allows your customers to provide honest responses regarding their emotions instead of worrying about how their responses come across.  

2. Capturing unconscious emotions

• Passive assessment – In both the above methods, you can capture emotions that your customers are aware of feeling. On the other hand, your customers may face emotions unconsciously (unconscious biases, personal experiences, traumas and triggers are some examples). In such an instance, an emotive survey will not work on its own. 
• In such instances, facial and voice coding software can be extremely beneficial. By using webcams, eye tracking technology and voice analyzing software, you can track changes in facial expressions, voice modulations, pupil size and more to assess unconscious emotions in detail.

At Philomath Research, we believe in the power of emotions. With our unique ability to combine research expertise with cutting-edge innovation, capturing customer emotions has never been smoother. If you’re looking to measure and analyze customer emotions in market research, we can help!

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