Emotional marketing, neuroscience and the evolving art of sentiment analysis

Putting the entire article in the sidebar. What a bold move.

I love where this conversation is going on mumbrella.

I would suggest that neuroscience is still at the point of measuring and demonstrating ‘internal response’ as opposed to ‘consequential external behaviour’, albeit more accurately than ever before. While it is possible to track behaviour from prompt through to online purchase in a controlled but relatively artificial EEG testing environment, I’m still not convinced it is necessarily applicable to real world location-based purchasing occasions – whether at home or in a shop.

With regards sentiment analysis and its confinement (at this stage) to measuring valence. What we could possibly surmise from Kahneman and Tversky’s Prospect Theory is that loss aversion (i.e a negatively-valenced framing: ‘Drink this milk or your bones will be brittle’) may be more motivating than its positive counterpart (‘Drink this milk for strong bones’). So any assumption (which is not implied by the author of this piece) that the optimum emotion-type is a positive one might not necessarily point to the most efficacious prompt to purchase.

But, most crucially, this doesn’t account for how well the communication might have been represented; the ‘right emotion’ conveyed poorly would likely be trumped by the ‘not as right but still relevant emotion’ conveyed masterfully.

I would argue that the dominant factor in the purchasing decision outside of habituation resides in the interplay between state and trait at the moment of action. Can a dominant ‘state’ be induced by the right prompt? Maybe. Is this prompt emotional or rational? Probably both, but again I stress that it is just as dependent upon the quality of the communication.

Furthermore, what the emotional component might be comes down to the individual; one person’s cute kitten is another person’s allergy trigger. But then we’ll have individual-centric predictives to account for that soon enough. Unless we already do.

Thank you Catalina for this informative and thought-provoking article.

One hopes that not too many snakes were harmed getting the oil to lubricate this theory.

I’m more interested in measuring how people who spend their lives intentionally manipulating the emotional states of people with the sole aim of generating corporate profits – to the direct and explicit detriment of our planet’s ecological health and the mental health of its inhabitants (especially its children) – manage to sleep at night?

I feel the main point has been missed: it is not just a matter of assessing emotional involvement and the quality of the emotions (positive, negative), but the marketer needs to know if these emotions are aligned with the brand positioning and, most importantly, if the emotions are linked to the brand or the context within which the brand is being presented.
Take a well known example from the past: Pepsi Refresh offered to spend some $20 million to support good causes and invited the public to list – and vote for – causes. More than 80 million votes were registered and the social media universe was so rapidly expanding with positive comments that it nearly burst. Yet, Pepsi’s market share declined. The emotions were linked to the initiative, not the brand. An assessment of the concept and the ad would have suggested high emotional involvement – but how useful is this?
I think it would have been more useful to at least monitor progress by using a reaction time test that can tell us about the connection between the brand and relevant qualities – and if these connections in the consumer’s mind have been strengthened by the campaign or not…
Anyway, I believe the real issue is not to measure emotional involvement but to understand the specifics of this involvement and the impact of this involvement on the brand. I am not convinced sentiment analysis or AI will address this challenge as the focus remains on the emotions we can deduct from what people say and share, rather than how their brand memory has been impacted by the exposure to the marketing initiative. But I am very happy to be proven wrong! Peter

Guess common sense wasn’t so common after all.

Here’s another shiny toy for planners to justify their existence with. Anything to avoid having to come up with some actual solutions to client’s problems using your own mind.

Disney markets values, like all great brands. Emotions come as a result. For brands to try and elicit emotions directly is a huge mistake. People don’t shop for emotions. Our actions, including purchasing behaviour, are motivated by our beliefs and attitudes.

@Harmed Snake. Yes it is common sense and it’s something the best creatives and suits have probably understood intuitively anyway, but when this stuff becomes more measurable it makes the sell-in easier. The biggest danger is then relying upon the science too much, however, and using it to determine the solution.

I would also suggest emotion does play a role in our purchasing behaviour – for a random example; chocolate as comfort food for someone experiencing a relationship breakup.

I’m interested to know how these research technologies manage to cope with measuring the faint feeling of indifference in which most consumers hold most brands and most advertising.

How do you interpret the slight flicker on the EEG, or the faint glimmer on the MRI?

Must be very subtle gauges they use. Not so much “these go up to 11” as “these are highly sensitive between zero and 1”

Then again, the research business has been strapping consumers to electric appliances since the 1920s. Plus ca change …

@Anthony G

Ok, so let’s run with your cliche: chocolate is comfort food for breakups. The question is “so what?” How does that help a marketer trying to differentiate a brand, when:

It’s a category generic, and true of all chocolate?
It’s far from the only comfort food. What about ice cream? Or fast-food?
What’s the relevance to emotions? This is predominantly a cultural insight (even if it does have chemicals that produce dopamin or whatever)

And we don’t need advanced technical equipment to measure these things. If we couldn’t tell that chocolate is comfort food using common sense and experience, it wouldn’t be common enough to have any value.

@ Harmed Snake. That chocolate example was my response to the statement ‘People don’t shop for emotions’.

Let me try another with regards emotion and brand preference. Air New Zealand.

My exposure: Never flown them. Never been referred to them by a friend. Can’t remember any conventionally placed tvcs or ads. I’ve seen a couple of funny in-flight safety videos courtesy of articles within news.com.au or theage.com.au, and more recently the sweet ‘Santa Stop Here’ Xmas video courtesy of mumbrella.com.au.

By necessity the in-flight videos have to be rational, yet elicited enough joy to make a positive and long-lasting impression on me. The Santa piece made me sad, in a bittersweet sort of way if know what I mean, but the mumbrella piece also featured a commenter who had used the service and compared it very positively against their experience with other airlines.

As a result of my exposure to this accumulation of emotive (of both valences) and rational prompts, Air New Zealand is now on my shopping list.

We’ve recently had some really interesting articles around psychology and marketing; Alex Vishney on the place of rationality and Catalina on emotions in this context. I am not convinced either is exclusively correct, however I appreciate their viewpoints; cogently considered and well written.

I am already a convert to the idea that improved methodologies can be derived from a deeper understanding of psychology; whether through smart use of data or white hat application of the loosely-defined ‘behavioural economics’. I also understand psychology to be an inexact science, so I do not believe there are certifiably failsafe methodologies.

But in many ways the science is getting ahead of us:

http://wordplay.blogs.nytimes......t-go/?_r=0

https://automatedinsights.com/company/

https://staging.mumbrella.com.au/making-a-murderer-and-good-design-344343

so it’s not a matter of whether we need the advanced technical equipment, it’s becoming more a matter of whether the advanced technical equipment will need us.

My primary concern for the future of marketing is that automation is becoming increasingly compelling to businesses and I still believe in the primacy of human intervention; a fantastic idea by a creative or a brilliant insight by a suit – perhaps derived from the data or perhaps from their own common sense. Or hopefully my understanding of the data as well as my own common sense.

Not sure if that answers all your questions, but doing my bit to progress the conversation.