Many of us remember the moment when Apple CEO Steve Jobs died. Hundreds of thousands of people lined up in front of Apple stores with flowers in hand. They were not only mourning the passing of a great tech visionary, but they also paid tribute to the man who created a brand with which they had a strong emotional connection.

Apple has a larger market share than Microsoft, at least with smartphones. It also pulls at millions of consumers’ hearts. While it is true that customers can get useful information, and this will help reduce risk, what is more, important is the ability of your brand to evoke emotions. Apple does this well.

Research shows that customers who are fully connected to the brand have higher values.

It is not surprising that emotional connections to brands lead to higher customer lifetime values and brand loyalty. Why spend advertising dollars on brand equity when you can build a lasting emotional connection with your customers?

This post will focus on customer-centricity. We’ll look at the emotional motivators that drive human behavior and how we can use this knowledge to increase brand value over time.

1. Motivation – What drives our actions?

Marketing success depends on modeling the behavior of your target customers – whether that means trying new products, switching to a different brand, or sticking with the same product over and over again. Without motivation, the behavior will not last. Your customers should consider motivation the driving force in their lives. It gives them a sense that they are important and a reason to do so.

What drives our behavior? What drives us to take action? Clark L. Hull (1943), famously proposed the Global Theory of Behavior (a description of what drives behavior). Hull’s theory linked many factors in precise mathematical terms using this formula:

sEr = D x V. x K

Reaction potential (sEr), is positively related to D (drive force), and drive strength can be determined by a need condition: The longer the subject is without a particular need (such as food, water, or sleep), the higher the subject’s drive strength. The higher the drive strength, the more it is.

Incentives are another factor that can motivate behavior in Hull’s framework. Incentives are used to motivate us to take action to meet a future need. In the case of eating, hunger is a driving force that increases our need to eat while satisfaction after eating is an incentive.

The 1948 hunger rat experiment by psychologist Neal E. Miller is another important scientific discovery about motivation. The psychologist looked at the behavior of both a well-fed (satiated) and hungry rat in his experiment. When hunger was triggered, the hungry rat was motivated to learn a new behavior. However, the satiated rat was not motivated by food. The psychologist used an electric shock to trigger the satiated rats’ desire to reduce physical pain.

[fve]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-DgV2vixSo[/fve]

Miller’s theory added a layer to Hull’s: the role of both internal and external rewards in driving behavior. Miller’s experiments showed that driving can be learned from environmental cues. For example, the satiated rats are learning to decrease an artificially imposed “drive”.

The classical physiological behavior model, which is essentially goal-oriented and need-based, suggests that we are motivated by the need to live, to be able to:

• optimize well-being
• Reduce physical pain
• Maximize pleasure

However, motivation theories only focus on our autonomous needs. They ignore our emotional and psychological motivators. Human motivation is more complex than animalistic.

2. Motivation: The role of emotion

There are many myths surrounding emotion. First, emotion is not a feeling.

Dr. Sarah Mckay is a neuroscientist and author of the blog Your Brain Health. She explains it well.

“Emotions are reflected in the theater of our bodies.” The theater of the mind is where feelings are expressed.”

Emotions are physical. They can be found by conscious emotional experiences, subconscious associations of one’s desires, beliefs, and actions, or by looking at the body. Feelings, on the other hand, are subjective representations and mental reactions to our emotions.

Second, emotion is not synonymous with mood. Mood refers to an emotional state that is influenced heavily by our environment and physiology. It also reflects current emotions and our thinking. The mood is more diffuse than emotion and lacks context stimulus. Although emotion has many dimensions, mood can be more general and dualistic. We often refer to the mood as either positive/negative.

How is emotion defined in psychology? Emotion is derived from the French term boudoir which means “to stimulate”. Encyclopedia Britannica defines emotions as “a complex experience that consciousness, bodily feeling, and behavior that reflects a person’s significance of a thing or an event”

Psychology is still at the frontier of emotion definition. Paul Ekman attempted to define emotions using facial expressions. He showed people photos of his facial expressions and traveled to other countries. These six emotions were later referred to as the “basic emotions”, which all people can identify and recognize regardless of their culture.

Paul Ekman describes six emotions: sadness, anger, and surprise. Fear, disgust, fear, and disgust are the other five.

While psychology is not able to agree on the definition of emotion, there are a few theories that can help to explain the complex array of emotions. Robert Plutchik famously divided emotions into eight broad categories based on their positive or negative aspects. This model is multi-dimensional and highlights many potential areas between polarities.

What is the relevance of emotion in motivation discussion? Emotions are directly linked to behavioral tendencies. Motivation, whether positive or negative, is often driven by emotion (Gaulin. Steven J. C. McBurney, and Donald H. McBurney 2003). This association is implied by the Latin roots “emotion” (to move) and “motivation” (to motivate).

Miller’s experiment with hungry rats showed that our instinctive emotions of hunger and pain can lead to withdrawal and eating. Some psychology defined emotion’s original role to “motivate adaptive behavior that in the past would contribute to the survival and well-being of humans”.

Emotion’s role in motivating behavior is more than just serving our survival needs. Thayer-Newman-McLain’s research on self-regulation of mood by McClain, McClain, and McClain shows that emotion is closely linked to motivation. This indicates that people are more inclined to do things, such as exercising, relaxing, listening to music, or sleeping. – To reduce negative emotions.

Maslow’s Need Hierarchy theory is a more humanistic approach to emotional motivation. It is a combination of biological and social needs. It is a pyramid-shaped concept that places the need to self-actualize above the fundamental needs of safety and health. Once we have satisfied our fundamental needs, we can move up the hierarchy to meet higher needs like the need for love, belonging, and self-transcendence.

Because we all are social animals and go through different stages of development, each one has different emotional needs, Maslow’s hierarchy is an important concept to remember.

Can you identify the emotional needs of your customers higher up the pyramid, beyond the benefits your product provides? Is your brand helping your customer feel more fulfilled or have higher self-esteem?

3. Emotional connection is the key to growth

Customers are more likely to repeat purchases and promote your brand if they have emotional motivators. Although marketers spend a lot of effort crafting emotionally engaging copy, it is not enough to leverage your customers’ emotional motivators. Understanding the emotional motivators of your customers and how they impact their lives is key to creating a customer experience that is fueled by the most powerful motivators.

How can brands use emotional motivators to their advantage?

1. Brands must first make emotional motivators a key metric for customer success.
2. Second, every product has its motivations. Find out what motivates customers by collecting data.
3. Finally, make sure you turn insights into actions by providing consistent customer experience throughout the customer journey. This will help customers become fully connected.

This study, published in Harvard Business Review, demonstrated a data-driven method to determine top emotional motivators based on their impact. Researchers identified the 10 most powerful motivators by analyzing 300 universal emotions using big data analytics tools.

• Standing out from the rest
• Be confident in the future
• Feel a sense of well being
• Feel the freedom you desire
• You will feel a rush of adrenaline
• Feel a sense of belonging
• Protect the environment
• Be the person that I want to be
• You can feel secure
• You can succeed in your life

You can see that the Maslow hierarchy ranks the most motivators higher up. They are primarily concerned with esteem, belonging and love needs as well as the need to self-actualize.

These top motivators can be a source of inspiration but may not apply to your business. You should conduct your research as emotions motivate differently by product and industry. It is possible to be wrong about what you believe you know about customers’ emotions. You should test your hypothesis using objective empirical research to truly understand what your customers feel.

Before undertaking large-scale research, segment your most valuable customers. This could include the most loyal paid users or those who recommend your product to others. In other words: Find a way to connect with people who are satisfied with your product. According to HBR research, customers who feel connected are 52% more valuable than those who are satisfied.

Next, analyze customer behavior data and their attitude data to identify high-impact emotional motivators. Online focus group research, opt-in surveys, ethnographic studies, and other methods can be used to gather customer attitude data.

Don’t forget to look at the data that you already have. What demographic information can be found in your customer database? You can infer what emotional motivator you can from their demographic characteristics. What can you learn about their emotional needs from feedback? What do their behavioral data reveal about their motivation?

What does this all mean for a real company?

Visme is a drag-and-drop presentation and infographic tool that non-designers can use. We already have tons of information about our customers, including their location, industry, and the type of content they create within the app. We couldn’t see the “WHY” behind their purchase despite all the background information.

We set out to conduct a quantitative survey that allowed us to connect demographic data with customers’ motivations and pain points. Some of these discoveries challenged our assumptions about who our customers were. For example, the majority of them were older than we thought and had different communication needs.

We went one step further and gathered qualitative data about their emotional motivations. This included information not only about how they use our product but also about what motivates the rest of them. We gathered detailed information from one-on-one interviews about their passions and highest sense of achievement.

We found that these were the top motivators.

• Creative freedom.
• More confidence in leading the team or presenting to the board
• A sense of purpose

We discovered the motivators that drove our most passionate users and created more content and features to cater to them. We added more widgets to allow for more creative visualization of data. We set out to create more content to help users design faster, be more confident presenters, and tell more stories using data. We’ve seen greater engagement in our app. We saw increased user acquisition as a result of our concerted efforts in connecting with our users.

What are the top motivators for your brand? Leave a comment below with your thoughts.