The Manifesto is published in two volumes, this is the second. Volume 1 considered the art of knowing people at an individual level, at a national level and finally a shared, cultural level. Volume 2 shares what we as TRA know about people – how they feel, think and do.
In the past decade, our collective understanding of how we resolve emotions has grown exponentially – we’ve seen some traditional beliefs and established theories on emotions upturned.
This chapter examines the latest science and academic work on emotions and what this means for brand, communications, customer experience, behaviour change, innovation and insights.
Emotion sells. Emotions are essential to marketing, communications, and behaviour change because they are the source of our memories. It’s why emotionally based advertising is effective – we remember it. The reason we remember the emotional high points in customer experiences. And so on.
If emotions are that important, how can we better understand them?
Emotions are the manifestation of our humanness. They are our unconscious responses to the world. They’re also highly complex and rarely pure or single-dimensional. We experience multiple different feelings simultaneously, with varying degrees of potency. So, how can we unpick this complexity to better understand emotion?
Language alone isn’t sufficient – it doesn’t account for nuance and relies too heavily on individual’s vocabulary. Emotions happen fast and, for the most part, unconsciously, long before we have thought about words to describe how we feel. Thinking happens only after emotions are activated. So, not only is our vocabulary limited, language tends to draw out cognitive, not emotional, responses. Facial recognition also isn’t sensitive enough either – it doesn’t detect mixed feelings and cultural differences.
The Paul Ekman six universal emotions theory is widely known and respected. It’s grounded in the belief that humans share six universal emotions that can be captured through facial expressions – anger, surprise, disgust, enjoyment, fear, and sadness. This idea that we all experience emotions similarly has held sway for many decades.
Yet, despite the popularity of this theory, there’s a significant body of evidence contradicting the concept of universal emotions. Instead, we find that emotions are culturally embedded and wired.
From the moment a baby is born, its parents, wider family and community send signals about how to respond to stimuli. These signals shape our brain’s connection to culture because, as we know, babies’ brains are high in plasticity.
We don’t have to look far to see how these cultural differences manifest themselves. Take shame, for example. Individualistic, typically Western, cultures see feelings of shame as unfavourable. In other, more collectivist cultures, shame shows moral awareness and a desire to maintain harmony or improve oneself – a positive emotion.
So, knowing that emotional states are culturally wired, how can we begin to navigate the implications? Here, we outline key considerations.
- Know your audience. Get to grips with the cultural diversity in your audience. For instance, TRA research in Australia and Aotearoa has shown that new migrants from culturally and linguistically diverse countries don’t think brands ‘get them’.
- Think carefully about context. Consider the collectivist cultural mindset around emotions.
- Beware of relying on language or facial expressions. These are the strongest points of difference between cultures.
- Avoid using universal symbols. When people from different cultures respond to Ekman’s faces, for example, we recognise universal symbols – not the emotions they carry for people from diverse cultures.
Ultimately, accessing the complexity and cultural context of whole emotional states opens up opportunities.
In the previous chapter, we explored how emotions define our humanness. In this chapter, we turn our attention to thinking.
Thinking enables us to navigate and make meaning of the world around us. It guides our understanding, attention, decisions and interactions with our environment.
To understand the concept of thinking, we need to understand the nature of consciousness – that’s why the subject is as much a philosophical topic as a scientific one. However, the good news is that we don’t need an in-depth understanding of neuroscience to know how ‘thinking’ matters to marketers and organisations.
Attention is critically important to marketers – it’s the gateway to thinking – but we’re selective about what gets our attention. We reach cognitive overload easily, so anything we can do to reduce this will help us get people to pay attention.
When people are exposed to rapid streams of stimuli and information – such as scrolling through social media feeds or viewing dynamic digital comms – it increases cognitive overload and decreases stimulus effectiveness.
To address this, marketers can use techniques like repetition and design that optimises spatial attention to slow down people's thinking and to get them to pay conscious attention. Another technique is to integrate personally relevant information. This carries a heavier emotional charge and a lower cognitive load, which triggers us to think about personal consequences. This makes stimulus more likely to attract attention and result in retention.
Humans think collectively. This plays out in different ways. Shared thinking, for instance, is a highly effective problem-solving method. When people are put in groups to solve a challenge, they outperform individuals alone. Groupthink, on the other hand, refers to the point at which critical thinking gives way to consensus-seeking. This impacts innovation as it can stifle unique perspectives.
What we know about collective thinking has clear implications for marketing and research. For instance, while shared thinking isn’t the same as creating or innovating, watching people think can be a source of inspiration for creativity. However, it’s essential to understand everyone’s contribution to the thought. When shared thinking means group think, context is key.
As marketers, we can’t change how people think about our brand or product. We can, however, walk alongside them, offering alternative viewpoints.
A mind set against you will have a strong emotional basis for their rejection – so rational arguments won’t work and apologies will only get you so far. While they might make people more open-minded, people need supporting reasons to change their minds – strong arguments they can use to persuade themselves they are right to change their mind.
Only self-reflection can shift the dial if you’re seen as unfamiliar or an outlier. By finding ways for people to share their experiences, you’ll expose their pre-conceptions to themselves. This will lead to reappraisal and reflection.
In some cases, you need to accept when you can’t change a mind set against you. You might not be able to make a positive advocate – but not having them speak out against you can also be a win.
In this chapter, we talk about human behaviour. When TRA began writing from a behavioural science perspective seven years ago, some ideas were new to marketing. Today, they’re widely understood and utilised. What marketer hasn’t used nudges, defaults or scarcity biases?
In more recent times, we have seen a shift in the field of behavioural science. While the previous two chapters build on the latest work or upturned previous theories, understanding why people act the way they do requires a different approach. This chapter goes back to the roots.
Let’s begin with what’s already accepted about people’s behaviour.
Attitudes don’t result in actions or behaviour change. The reverse is true. Change someone’s behaviour and their attitudes will change.
Smokers will begrudgingly accept the health hazard for instance, but they’ll mitigate the threat by comparing it to alcohol consumption or the risk of dying in a car accident. Converted non-smokers enthusiastically espouse their attitudes to the health risks. So, if attitudes don’t act as a trigger for people to act, what does? Motivation.
Another widely accepted ‘known’ is that context influences people’s actions. People can only act if it’s possible to do so. Often, these possibilities are things beyond the control of the individual. Instead, they’re controlled at a systems level. This is called systems thinking.
Finally, we know that people do not behave rationally. The broad knowledge about biases suggests that seemingly irrational psychological tics influence people’s behaviour. So, in this chapter, we also look at cognitive dissonance.
Our behaviour is often habitual. We rinse and repeat if something is good enough. Habits aren't easily broken – we rely on tried and tested shortcuts (heuristics) instead. But babies aren’t born with habits. So, looking upstream before habits are formed or actions are taken is valuable. It teaches us what triggered a behaviour for the first time and why it became a habit.
Motivation is at the heart of how people act and behave – and it’s essential for applying behavioural techniques (think nudges, defaults and choice architecture). When these techniques fail, it’s often due to a lack of understanding about the underlying motivations driving behaviour.
There are two types of motivation – intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic motivation refers to actions driven by internal satisfaction, and extrinsic motivation relies on external rewards or punishments.
Intrinsic motivation is more potent in certain settings. For instance, situations that require creative thinking. If you want someone to take action, but doing so requires a new behaviour or creative thinking, make the reward intrinsic. This could be as simple as making it fun or creating an opportunity for autonomy. Customers who are offered autonomy will be encouraged to come back for more.
Extrinsic motivation, on the other hand, works well for routine or process-related tasks – especially if they’re boring or repetitive. In this case, the reward will be perceived as task-specific. Be warned, however, this could have a negative knock-on effect if somebody is later asked to carry out similar actions with no reward.
Behavioural Science has been criticised, quite rightly, for being overly focused on individual behaviour. Yet many of us are working on complex problems that can’t be looked at solely from an individual behavioural perspective – challenges like reducing energy emissions, enhancing cybersecurity or increasing retirement savings.
A simple way to look at systems thinking is reframing the problem, such as ‘reducing traffic congestion on the roads’ to ‘enabling people to move around the city more efficiently’, resulting in a different solution.
At the core of systems thinking is a systems map – a map recording all the potential parts of the system and their connections to interdependencies. Components of this map are referred to as nodes and lines show links to other nodes.
To add nuance, the maps can show where feedback loops exist and impact each other, or where there’s hierarchical layering. Plenty of resources are available to learn how to do this – if you get people in front of a whiteboard, it’s not difficult to create. But a map is just a map. It’s a useful input tool, but not the output. So, how can we use the tool to change how people act?
One way is to use scale and perspective. Think of it like this: A scuba diver with an underwater camera will use a macro lens to capture the minutia of the tiny coral animals making up a coral reef. By drifting back, and using a wide-angle lens, the diver can also take in the reef structure holistically – including the fish that are part of the ecosystem.
If taking a systems approach, it’s important to understand the whole interconnected, adaptive system. A change at one point may have ripple effects elsewhere, and attempts to intervene without knowing the full picture can worsen issues.
To address problems in a system, it helps to focus on root causes – the structural or behavioural roots of problems rather than surface-level symptoms. Look at the detail but take a big-picture perspective. Reframing the problem and using ideas from other systems are useful tools. Observe systems maps from different angles – some nodes look different from an oblique perspective.
Cognitive dissonance happens when people strive to remove discomfort by reaching a balance between beliefs and actions.
People don’t like things to be out of kilter. For example, seeing ourselves as kind but acting unkindly to someone feels uncomfortable. That’s the feeling of cognitive dissonance at work.
It’s a concept that enables us to trigger desirable behaviours and reduce doubt and uncertainty. For example, if somebody questions whether they’ve made the right brand choice despite being a fan, it will create dissonance. So, to justify past purchases, people double down on brand loyalty – instead of admitting they might have been wrong. For brands, knowing this means investing in the benefit of post-purchase support.
Ultimately, only relying on a toolkit of established biases and behavioural techniques risks missing opportunities. Some techniques will fail, not necessarily because of the technique but because they have been applied without considering broader, underlying frameworks.
By integrating systems thinking, motivational theory, and cognitive dissonance, behaviour change strategies can move beyond surface-level tactics to address the deeper, more systemic drivers of human action.
the book
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