Article Summary
Article Summary
Nowadays, many companies realize that customers’ emotions affect their behavior. However, companies still don’t know how to use this knowledge. The article, written by Magids, Zorfas and Leemon (2015) describes and explains how important and profitable the emotional connection with the customers is. Specifically, the authors state that the knowledge of customers’ emotional motivators, or the feelings that influence their behavior, is a great source of profitability. Therefore, this article is valuable for the companies, because it provides a guide of how to create this emotional connection and leverage it.
Customers’ emotional connection passes 4 steps: 1) connection to the brand is missing 2) high satisfaction with the brand 3) perceived brand differentiation and 4) full connection to the brand. Fully connected customers are the most valuable and profitable. Therefore, it is more important for the company to turn their satisfied customers into fully connected than attract the new ones. This is where emotional motivators can be used. First, the company needs to conduct an analysis of a customer database and identify emotional motivators for the most valuable consumers. Then, the company needs to compare the results with the patterns of customer behavior and define what motivators produce the most profitable behavior. Finally, the value of motivators is computed and the implementation strategy is built. The example of the retail company showed that all the efforts paid off (sales, market share and customer advocacy increased) (Magids et al., 2015).
After the broad research the authors got a unified list of high-impact motivators. However, they also mention that motivators vary by brand, customer segments and consumer’s position in the customer journey. So, the company needs to consider the existing differences, while applying the emotional-connection strategy (Magids et al., 2015). The last but not least issue, emphasized by the writers, is that the process of this strategy starts with marketing, but all the company's departments and functions should also work in conjunction with each other in order to achieve common goals and make profitable changes. Only then the strategy will be successful (Magids et al., 2015).
The topic of the article is one of the most discussed nowadays. It has always been hard to study person's emotions and feelings and, especially, define how they affect the behavior. However, the article gave an impression that nowadays it became possible not only for the psychologists and scientists, but also for marketers. The authors' work looks meaningful and useful. It is also clear that authors' thoughts find their support in real life. The evidence states that, yes, many companies try to touch customers' emotions to gain their attention and then make them loyal to the brand. So, the article has an additional value to all the studies in this area.
However, there are some issues that come to mind. First, the study has its limitations, because the strategy is money and time consuming and only big companies can afford it. The authors didn’t consider smaller firms. Secondly, the writers didn't take into account future social and cultural changes. Therefore, how often such study needs to be executed by the companies? Also, what about cultural differences among countries? Is this theory applicable to other regions (for example, African or Asian countries)? So, the potential future studies can focus on answering these questions and analyzing how the social and cultural differences affect emotional-connection strategy.
References
Magids, S., Zorfas, A., & Leemon, D. (2015). The new science of customer emotions. Harvard Business Review, 3-11.
