#7 UNCX NEWSLETTER | Know Your Customers Emotional Motivators
PLUS: The Inspiration Trend | Conspicuous Commitment | Wellness Oasis | Pop-Up Galore | Experiences Go Motoring | Smart Thinking | News
Hello! This newsletter brings you the best and freshest thinking in CX - leadership tips, experiences, consumer behaviours, trends, and how to better engage consumers. As one subscriber commented: “Inspiring. Thank you for the clarity of mind”
Inhabit others’ perspectives
At its core, consumer anthropology is taking the perspective of customers. Because your customers – the humans who buy stuff from you – think and feel differently than you who make stuff.
Your brand is working to know how to sell, build, engage, list, or position more. But customers working to buy your stuff want to know how they’ll look and feel, what they’ll get and what others will think of them.
We won’t understand anything in CX if we don't get this.
Because you don’t own the customer’s experience - your customer owns their experiences; they create them as they connect the dots of your actions. It’s an outside-in experience created by customers.
This isn’t new thinking. But add into the mix of a permacrisis - we arrive at the age of ‘the disruptive consumer’ because consumers’ wants and needs have not only changed from a status quo but are still in flux.
Think about it another way. The process of running a company is quite functional – often on an industrial scale. But your reality is your customers’ feelings, and they often matter much more than how your product was shipped, how clean your shop was or how long the lines were. For customers, life is emotional. Life is their perspective.
What becomes challenging for us, then, is getting to grips with your customers' new individual emotions and perspectives – they’re difficult to understand, measure, manage, and scale.
Our trap is that functional elements of an experience are easy for customers to recall. As customers talk about them, we then measure them, as they’re easy for us to measure, and when/if we spot something to fix, we go fix it and feel good as managers.
But the truth is, these functional elements are things anyone can measure and manage - as your competitors do. Yet rarely does measuring and managing functional operations offer any long-term competitive advantage. They won’t make you stand out.
But unless done well, they will make you stand out for all the wrong reasons.
So table stakes - pleasant, easy, simple, quick, and as promised and other variables are vital. Vital for Trust. Because you can’t move from the first rung of the engagement ladder without it.
Customers don’t want to remember table stakes. They already experience many things every day. Having a coffee, catching the bus, arriving at work, having a conversation, reading a book or watching TV - this is their Experiencing Self, living in the present, processing inputs and information from the life around them in a continuous series of ‘moments’. But most of these moments don’t leave behind a memory trace once they've had them (and Kahneman calculated that the psychological presence of an experience lasts about three seconds) unless there is some form of emotion attached to the ‘moment’. Then, it is remembered - in fact, there's no such thing as a remembered experience that doesn’t have emotion attached to it - because it’s emotion that triggers long-term memory.
We use the word ‘emotion’ a lot, sadness, happiness, love, and hate, as examples. In the context of CX, it deserves a better explanation. Consumers experience emotions, and they are motivated by them.
Despite the insight it can provide into the impact you’re making, customer satisfaction on its own won’t provide insight into the success of your customer experience strategy. Why? Well, for example, a customer could be highly satisfied with you but completely unmotivated to buy more or recommend you to others.
Emotional motivation engagement establishes a lasting relationship in the hearts and minds of your customers. Apple, Amazon, Target, Nike and Patagonia are just some of the top brands that have successfully established emotional connections with their leagues of customers. Your job is to engage, keep your customers, increase buying frequency, increase your share of wallet, and discover new customers through the emotions you engage them with.
Amazon isn’t just about convenience. They not only makes the purchase experience seamless, they provide opportunities for customers to forge connections with its brand through Prime, user profiles, wish lists and product recommendations. They ensure these connections during every interaction, as well as facilitating connections among customers through user reviews. Ultimately, Amazon customers are motivated because they are motivated by the knowledge Amazon care and know about them - one of the main drivers in establishing emotional connections.
Starbuck’s isn’t about coffee. Starbucks is seen as accessible, innovative and welcoming. By creating physical spaces where its customers could interact with each other, the brand spoke to their motivation to feel a sense of belonging. Starbucks has successfully established an emotional connection with customers that keeps them returning again and again.
You must behave like a mirror to your customers’ psyches and attempt to forge relatable, intimate connections.
Researchers at Motista found that over 300 emotional motivators are behind customer purchase decisions. Their top ten?
Stand out from the crowd
Have confidence In the future
Enjoy a sense of well-being
Feel a sense of freedom
Feel a sense of thrill
Feel a sense of belonging
Protect the environment
Be the person they want to be
Feel secure
Succeed in life
Specific motivators will take play over others, depending on your brand and your consumer. A home furnishings store ‘helping me be creative’ inspires consumers to shop more often. The desire to ‘belong’ drives loyalty to Starbucks. Whatever your brand, specific emotional motivators bring customers to your door. Or to pass you by.
You need to unearth these motivators. They will overlap. They will change according to context. But they all have one thing in common beyond your product or service: they meet a need, overcome pain, or discover something ‘missing’. Motivation can stem from a variety of sources. They can include curiosity, autonomy, validation of one’s identity and beliefs, creating a positive self-image, and the desire to avoid potential losses.
But we don’t need every touch point on a customer journey to be something ‘positive or motivating’. And, sometimes no experience is the best experience, especially when dealing with a hygiene or transactional items.
Unearthing the Motivators
Asking the right questions involves more than just asking questions.
You need to examine pain points that probably hadn’t been salient before. How do you get the data to have an empirically based, factually based customer journey, such that it identifies the pain points and wants in each stage?
David Ogilvy famously said, ‘The trouble … is that people don’t think how they feel, they don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say.’ Most social psychologists share this scepticism towards claimed data.
The proof? In 2010, a 25,000-strong survey found that British heterosexual women admit to a mean of eight sexual partners, compared to twelve for men. The difference is logically impossible. All of this not only confirms that males always brag about sex, but that in trying to understand our customers, we have a problem: if we listen uncritically to consumers, we’ll be misled.
The answer is that engaging consumers in their natural habitat helps you glean insights that would never be visible in a spreadsheet.
And it’s this topic I’ll explain in the next newsletter.
Meanwhile, for now, here’s a reading recommendation:
One of the better books on how observed data can give an understanding of consumers. Dataclysm
WANT MORE?
Read my post on How to understand a customer experience
Read my post on the Consumer Wars
Over the coming weeks, I’m drilling deeper, with posts on:
Customer Anthropology
Customer and Brand Archetypes
The JTBD theory
How to reveal the needs of customers
Designing for memorability
MAKE SURE TO SUBSCRIBE TO GET THESE INSIGHTS
My Pick of the Latest Consumer Trends*
Inspiration
We all need to feel some inspiration. 75 per cent of people actively seek it, and 85 per cent say they are motivated to get to the real truths about things in the world today. Wunderman Thompson
In becoming a brand that understands and fuels inspiration, you can be more valuable to consumers. You can discover fresh perspectives that allow you to differentiate from your competitors and leave them to play more superficial roles.
Inspiration helps consumers imagine and set up new behaviours, mindsets and routines valuable to them. And valuable in many ways: helping them achieve practical goals, try new things, and construct identities they’re proud of.
This is why, for brands, inspiration can be both interesting and practical. Different and complementary brand roles are set up to define a brand’s potential to inspire people. Higher-order roles in identity creation can co-exist with utilitarian roles that help people get things done.
In a 2020 ‘Inspiring Growth’ study by Wunderman Thompson, inspiration scores predict 63 per cent of the variation in consumer demand for brands, 52 per cent of brands’ ability to command higher prices and 48 per cent of brands’ ability to convert customers at purchase.
A brand that can step in and deliver on this ‘inspiration gap’ can win and grow because wherever we look, inspiration is a powerful growth accelerant.
Interestingly, when choosing between digital or IRL (in-person) inspirational experiences across multiple dimensions, IRL is the stand-out preference, from immersive experiences to crafts, fashion, books or magazines.
Self-transformation is a leading trend in desired Inspiration outcomes. The pandemic made us appreciate what we have and feel more optimistic about the changes we can make to ourselves and the world around us.
Setting new goals, being more healthy, having a simpler life, changing habits and changing my perspectives are the self-transformation outcomes wanted.
Can your experiences aim to deliver not more noise but, instead, any of these outcomes, such as ‘having a simpler life’ to the 25 per cent who are inspired to achieve that?
You can read all previous Trends here
Experiences are motoring
Ford has created an Experience unit to spearhead the car maker’s customer experience strategy across its software, hardware and online products.
They are building a new team to bring together hardware, software and services for three Ford vehicle brands, oversee the Ford Next venture studio, and manage some ‘out-of-vehicle’ customer experiences beyond operating a vehicle.
This comes as other carmakers reorganise to become technology service providers in the electric era. The pivot is from focusing on smooth and powerful drives to automating services such as breakdown recovery, creating dashboard displays that resemble the user interface on laptop screens, and offering subscriptions to features such as heated seats.
At the same time, car companies are re-configuring showrooms and bolstering their websites to sell more cars online.
Some have named customer or user experience leaders to handle the complexities of designing, marketing and managing multiple customer touchpoints outside dealerships and auto shops. In 2021, GM hired Mastercard’s Donald Chesnut as its chief experience officer, and Volkswagen followed, creating a similar role.
A few months later, Ferrari said it had a deal with LoveFrom, the design studio owned by former Apple design chief Jony Ive.
Ford hired an Apple product design leader as its chief advanced technology and embedded systems officer in September 2021. He is joined by the former VP of services at Apple TV+, Apple News+, Apple Books and Apple Arcade.
‘Everyone is so focused on the EV transformation,’ Ford Chief Executive Jim Farley said on a call with reporters, ‘but I keep saying the biggest change in our industry is to go to a digital product and physical services’.
The imminent arrival of self-driving vehicles brings nearer an immersive media and entertainment experience within cars. Audi cleverly referred to the free time that will become available to people in autonomous vehicles as ‘The 25th Hour’ when the automaker revealed its partnership with The Walt Disney Company to develop new media types to include in its future cars. With Tesla again taking the lead, video streaming is already part of the in-car media experience for some consumers following the innovative company’s addition of Netflix in a software update last year.
Although the precise time frame varies depending on who you ask, self-driving cars are becoming mainstream. Once autonomous vehicles are commonplace on our roads, drivers and passengers will be much more likely to seek out video streaming to provide entertainment while their car drives to its destination.
With its fast connectivity speeds, 5G allows automakers to take in-car gaming to a new level, opening up the potential for vehicle-to-vehicle games to gain popularity amongst drivers. With self-driving cars coming sooner rather than later, playing games will likely become a significant portion of what commuters spend their ‘25th Hour’ on during daily commutes.
From music and video streaming to listening to podcasts and playing immersive games, the new era of in-car experiences will be led by media and entertainment offerings. With self-driving and 5G, we’re beginning an in-car experience revolution, with endless possibilities for innovative and fascinating entertainment to enjoy while on the road.
more…..
Conspicuous commitment is becoming the next era of status.
When the rules of status change and social equity are suddenly up for grabs, brands can get lucky.
We’re in the midst of one of these shifts now, moving from the self-indulgence of ‘conspicuous consumption’ to the self-denial of ‘conspicuous commitment’.
Conspicuous commitment
Many consumers are devoting themselves to difficult new experiences, diets, spiritual quests, life practices and ideologies. All around us, wellness, food, medical, and lifestyle brands are tapping into self-denial (it’s the new flex and, no surprise, kicked off on the West Coast of the US).
Flaunting material possessions and extravagant experiences is no longer an obsession; instead, we’re seeing the rise of consumers showing their focused dedication to self-work, vulnerability and personal growth.
In a time when nihilism is everywhere, pessimism gets clicks, post-capitalist hopelessness trends on TikTok, and every meme deals in absurdity, conspicuous commitment stands out.
There are two main hallmarks of conspicuous commitment.
The first is it’s very Me-focused. I’m not trying to change the world. I don’t have a socially altruistic angle here. I’m merely trying to better myself. At the end of the day, this is all about me, an individual, isolated.
The second hallmark is Challenge. I’m setting up challenges. Society isn’t giving these obstacles. I’m putting obstacles in my way to overcome them. I’m putting these obstacles deliberately in my way to experience what it feels like to beat the challenges.
So What?
Brands are tapping into this.
Commitment is suitable for finance, wellness, food, athletics - any hobby pursuit with an element of mastery. Think about it. If your product/service is that somebody can get better at something, why can’t commitment enter the picture? To providing experiences that give people rituals helps them feel that they’re going from point A to point B and that things are changing in their lives. You’re offering them a journey. You’re framing your experience as a transformation journey to make it feel like you’re committing to something. And another: you can give people opportunities to experience new discipline. Nearly everything for the last 20 years is about easy, easy, easy, wanting to make things as easy as possible and eliminate as much friction as possible.
Instead, conspicuous commitment says friction is good. I want to overcome the friction. So if you’re a brand that says, ‘We’re not easy, we’re difficult but worth it,’ that helps you stand out and gives people something to believe in and buy into, that feels like commitment. The ways we seek to distinguish ourselves are evolving to prioritise discipline and personal growth over material success.
New rules?
Wellness Oasis: Retail for Body and Soul
In the year ahead, look for retail to lean into nurturing and wellbeing in a big way. Think Lululemon turning its flagship stores into mini-yoga studios, offering free classes for their customers: How Sephora’s Beauty Insider community not only guides consumers through makeup trends but offers meditation and self-care tips. Expect to see more of this type of engagement - to bring consumers into the store for something they won’t get in a virtual or distant setting.
Pop-Up Galore: Limited Time Only
Pop-up stores are, er, well, popping up everywhere, transforming shopping into an event. In the second half of 2023, Pop Up is an ongoing strategy not just about PR but part and parcel of endless consumer engagement tactics.
Many brands that have yet to jump onto the Pop-Up bandwagon will finally reveal their own Pop-Ups during 2023/2024.
*With help from Mintel, Trend Watching, WEF, BOF McKinsey, Wunderman Thompson, Frog, WGSN, Deloitte Tech, The Economist, HBR, Trend Hunter, Webby Awards, Foresight Factory, GWI, Dentsu, Ogilvy, Ford.
Smart Thinking
One thing I love about customers is that they are divinely discontent...People have a voracious appetite for a better way, and yesterday’s ‘wow’ quickly becomes today’s ‘ordinary.’
- Jeff Bezos, Amazon
… And finally, my thanks for reading + an announcement!
As this newsletter is getting longer and longer, I’m splitting its regular content into two separate emails.
This original newsletter will continue to cover CX and How-To’s, Opinions, Smart Thinking, articles and Trends.
A separate, new email/newsletter - a long read, deep diving into one topic with an audio version for the car or bed (?!), … or work perhaps?
You don’t need to do anything; the change is automatic for you, and you can unsubscribe from either one (or both) emails from your Substack app settings or the links on my email. I hope you enjoy the new format, and any feedback is valued.