Today, the success of any business largely hinges on how much it’s able to manage the emotional needs of its customers. People do business in pursuit of emotional experiences. And when they find it, they return to the same business and become devoted to it because of the way the business makes them feel.
Emotion drives buying decisions
Science has partnered with the psychology of performance and has provided us with stacks of statistics that emotion drives our decision-making, even in business. We make emotional choices and then back them up with logic, reason, or data. That is to say, what we feel is more important than what we think.
Emotion is what really drives the purchasing behaviors, and also, decision making in general. Studies completed by neuroscientists have found that people whose brains are damaged in the area that generates emotions are incapable of making decisions.
Although we might choose to convince ourselves that our decisions are based on logic. It’s really our unconscious emotional side that keeps pulling us beyond our reason and drawing us towards the business we patronize. Like they say, ‘Need is logical and want is emotional. Emotions will win every time, even with the most intelligent people.’
We are generally carried away by emotions while making buying decisions. Emotions make us develop some sort of affection towards what we want to buy. After all, we don’t buy products and services as such; instead, we buy things that meet our emotional needs. For example, we buy food when we are feeling hungry.
Emotion builds connection
Emotion builds connection, consciously or unconsciously. Dale Carnegie was right when he taught that, ‘When dealing with people let us remember we are dealing with creatures of logic but emotion.’
Whatsoever meets a man’s emotional need is the most important thing in his life then. Our humanity is defined as the ability to involve ourselves emotionally in everything we do. Man, whether male or female is an emotional being. And that humanity is most evident in our feelings.
Feelings are the way we personalize our thoughts, ideas, and reactions. People do things for their reasons (not your reason), and those reasons are emotionally aroused by the way they feel. It’s natural for customers to connect with businesses that make them feel good about themselves, and that connection is always strong.
You can rarely move people into action unless you first move them with emotion. When an enterprise forgets about the emotional connection with its customers and only concentrates on the business operations and processes, it will lose touch with its business’s true essence.
Emotions have been likened to little storms of energy that happen in the bodies and minds of your customers. You don’t want them just to be satisfied; you want them to be happy. It’s a step beyond service, and you have to develop an emotional connection with customers through every contact you make with them.
Emotional connection precedes business prosperity
Emotional bonding is the single most important element you can integrate into your business in today’s marketplace. ‘The purpose of any business’, Scott McKain, a business executive said, ‘is to profitably create emotional connections that are so compelling to customers, that loyalty is assured.’
He also added, ‘Today’s customers are saying “good is not good enough”. If you want my business, amaze me. Knock me out. Make an emotional impression I won’t forget.’
Emotional connection always precedes economic ones, the way the heart comes before the head. If you ignore the former, you lose the later. The mind-share (and the heart-share) often come before the market-share.
‘As times are changing, so is the standard desired by customers. No longer are they searching for excellence: now they are pursuing something that would make them go, wow! They want to experience a product or service that does more than simply satisfy them: they want to be amazed’. Those were the words of Tom Peters, the renowned American business consultant.
It’s not only the quality of products or services that have changed in recent times; the expectation of the people who buy the solutions have also changed. If you don’t understand and change the way you relate to your customers you are going to struggle in business.
About the Author:
Tony Ajah is a Business Growth Strategist, and the author of BUSINESS SENSE, and ON BECOMING AN ENTREPRENEUR.
He maintains a personal blog, where he shares proven business ideas and principles for SMEs.
