Emotional Boosting - Englische Version

Hans-Georg Häusel

• Publisher: Haufe
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Business
• eBook ISBN:
  9783648040867
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Details matter! Hans-Georg Häusel reveals a customer's mindset when making purchase decisions. He explains why emotions are highly relevant for a product's success on the market, how you could create unique products and claim the decisive competitive edge. Winners have one thing in common: A downright passion for details. Whoever is best at getting all odds and ends right can secure a competitive advantage in the end. The fact that every customer perceives those small details merely on a subconscious level is of fundamental importance. Once processed, they form an overall picture of a product in the customer's mind and ensure that it is preferred to another one.

II. How to obtain a decisive advantage with Emotional Boosting

3 Product Boosting

3.1 How to increase the inner value of products and brands

What is in store for you in this chapter:

Products and brands have an inner value and motive structure comprised of functional, distinctional, mythical and magical emotional boosters. You can create added emotional value on all of these levels by knowing the rules of the unconscious.

Now that Chapter 2, „Think Limbic!“, has given us a first look at the structure and logic of our emotional „top floor“, let's go into how to translate this into action. But before we do that, let's take some time to briefly think about something that will help us better understand the connection between this chapter and the next one. Let's assume you go to the theater to see a play. What awaits you there? In principle, a performance comprised of two levels. Level 1 is the piece the way the author has written it – the actors, the story and the deeper meaning. Level 2, which you also see, is the individual staging by the director. The same piece, as theatergoers know, can be staged in very different ways. We want to approach this topic in a similar manner. In this chapter we will deal with how we intensify the inner emotional qualities and structures of a product or a brand by means of emotional boosting.

The next chapter is about the staging, the question of what you can do in the dramaturgy so that the product is shown from its best side. This differentiation can also be found in art theory. A work of art is always comprised of „inventio“ and „disegno“. Inventio is the central idea of the picture, while disegno describes the artistic-graphic conversion into action. So for us this is about the inventio of a product or brand. As you have already noticed, I use the terms product and brand together. There is no doubt that there are distinct differences here: A product's brand is an emotional-cognitive structure in the consumer's mind – it is the final result comprised of product experience, advertising, etc., so a brand is far more than a product. Moreover, several products can also be offered within a brand. But the emotional product promise is still at the center of every product brand, and that is what this chapter is about.

3.1.1 Functional boosting: The visible benefit is also highly emotional

Why do we buy certain products? A TV armchair, for example, or a life insurance policy, a drill, a snowboard, a luxury sedan or an mp3 player? The answer is simple: because products always have a basic emotional benefit. The TV armchair gives you cozy comfort, the mp3 player is there for (passive) entertainment, with the snowboard we experience freedom and adventure, the drill increases our self-sufficiency and with the luxury sedan we demonstrate power and status. As you can easily recognize in Figure 22, products have a fixed emotional place on the Limbic® Map in regard to their generic basic benefit.

Figure 22. The emotional generic of products

These generic primary benefits are often described as „rational“ benefits. But that is incorrect, because the primary benefit of a product always has an ultimate emotional basis in addition. Plus we know that „rationality“ is not the opposite of „emotion.“ The only rationality our brain knows is: „Maximize your positive emotions; minimize your negative emotions and try to achieve the best overall emotional result in the short, medium and long term.“ But of course there are still functional differences in terms of purpose: A hammer and a saw are both located in the efficiency sector of the Limbic® Map, because they increase self-efficiency. Yet they still work in very different ways and are also used in different situations. But it is always the boosting of efficiency that gives a hammer and a saw their importance and their value. Now we are interested in the question of how we can conduct emotional boosting on the functional level.

How motives and emotions are linked

We just saw that most products occupy a generic emotional field; but that is not enough to completely understand products. Many products namely activate the most varied emotional fields simultaneously. And with that we come to the level of motives. What are motives? Motives always draw their inner drive and their direction from the emotion systems. But motives home in on products, because they expect them to fulfill biological goals predetermined by the major emotion systems. So motives are emotional expectations of and desires toward a product that originate from the emotion systems.

The primary motives of a product

In order to illustrate this, we will use an apparently very „everyday“ product category, mineral water. Let's recall our water example from the first chapter. We saw that Bling H2O is successful at achieving an increase in value of umpteen thousand compared to everyday (yet perfectly good) water. Why do we buy and drink mineral water? The reason is a basic physiological need: thirst. And we get thirsty when our body's fluid/sodium balance is no longer as it should be. But all water quenches thirst. This alone does not yet create a difference that increases value. Differentiation takes place when we switch from the physiological need level to the emotional motive level. Here we recognize an entire range of different primary motives for mineral water. What are primary motives? They are the motives that usually result from the direct function. Because water has a rather neutral taste, the wish for enjoyment is only weakly pronounced (enjoyment motive). We drink water to achieve harmony in our body and mind and to relax (relaxation and harmonization motive), we want to refresh and revitalize ourselves (revitalization motive), we want to do something for our health (health motive) and we want to ready our body for high physical performance („doping“ motive). As shown by Figure 23, all of these primary motives have a fixed place on the Limbic® Map.

Figure 23. Primary motives of mineral water

In principle, all waters fulfill all of these motives. But now comes the first level of emotional boosting: I choose one of these primary motives and declare that I fulfill it in a particularly competent manner. In doing so, sometimes it doesn't really matter whether I can scientifically verify this fulfillment (if it is possible, that is good). It is often sufficient to clearly claim this competence for myself. At the same time, this competence claim is also the foundation for every brand positioning. And that is exactly what we recognize when we look at well-known German brands of water from this perspective (see Figure 24). Although they are all only made of „water“, their emotional boosting takes place via the claim of particularly good fulfillment of one of these primary motives. Vio, whose slogan is along the lines of „stillness that revives,“ promises „harmony“ and „gentle revitalization.“ Staatlich Fachingen stands for „health.“ Vittel banks on „reviving/revitalization“ and, as a „power drink,“ Active O2 banks on the highest physical performance.

Figure 24. Water brands address different primary motives (logos: www.activeo2.com; www.vittel.de; www.vio.de; www.fachingen.de)

Mind you, all of them are water and none of these waters have any additional ingredients. Although Active O2 has a trace of additional oxygen, the level is below any effect threshold.

From function to fiction: The unconscious effect of placebos

Now you will perhaps object that it is deception to promise something that is not objectively true. If you don't know whether you are presently drinking Staatlich Fachingen or Vio, then you could drink this water by the hectoliter without noticing a difference in your health or in your level of relaxation. But this whole picture changes when you drink the water specifically with the brand promise. You will then notice how your health is better with Staatlich Fachingen and with Vio you will soon experience the reviving harmonization it gives you.

This phenomenon is called a placebo effect in the medical sector. The term placebo comes from the Latin and means something along the lines of: „I will be liked“ or „I will do good.“ Placebos are medications that contain no active ingredients at all, but are given to the patient by the doctor with a promise of healing. To date there have been countless studies on the astonishing effect of placebos. What is fascinating about them is that this effect not only takes place in the patient's consciousness, but instead can also be objectively proven in physiologically measurable physical changes.

For example, lung patients with limited tidal volume were divided into two groups. The one group was given a medically tested medication to increase lung volume, but the other group was only given an ‚ineffective’ placebo. The result was astonishing: The medication increased the lung volume by 39%, but the apparently ineffective placebo still achieved a measurable 16%. A similar test was conducted amongst heart patients with high blood pressure. In the group which received the medication that lowers blood pressure, blood pressure dropped by 8%, in the placebo group by 4%. To date there have been many studies that achieve similar results. For this reason there is a strong debate in medical ethics about whether patients can be „lied to.“ But is it actually a lie if the placebo does work in the end, even if only by means of suggestion?

In the practice you often find examples where there are objective differences in function, but where an emotional super-boost is experienced via a claim of an additional function. Let's take a look at an example of this.

Functional super-boosting: Cor Soap

If you buy a bar of soap at a drugstore, for 2 Euros you get a brand-name soap and with it the guarantee of clean hands and a clean face. Could you imagine paying approximately 90 Euros instead of 2 Euros for a piece of soap the same size? For such an everyday bar of soap? If you can't imagine that, then you haven't encountered the Cor soap range from the USA. The bar of Cor soap in our picture (see Figure 25) costs 90 Euros, believe it or not.

Figure 25. Functional super-boosting: Cor soap. Small soap – huge price (reference/photo: www.corsilver.com)

Why is this product a bestseller in the USA and why do they pay so much for it? The reason can be found in the super-boosting of the basic functional motive of „cleansing.“ Though other soaps cleanse too, Cor Soap cleanses much, much more thoroughly. Why? Because Cor Soap is not a regular soap, but instead a high-tech product based on the most modern nanotechnology. The silver nanoparticles go very deep into the depths of the skin (according to the claim) where they cleanse and additionally destroy all bacteria. With this example you see how you can also take a very everyday product, soap, and catapult it into a completely different dimension of price and value via functional super-boosting of the basic functional motive of „cleansing.“ For this to work perfectly, it is of course necessary to properly stage the product by means of its packaging, etc. We will deal with these boosters in the next chapter. By the way, because the functional primary motives are always of central importance for the customer's brain, the functional boosting strategies, for example, of many detergent manufacturers „XY makes your laundry so white, it can't get any whiter“ still work, even if they apparently bore us. Be it „megapearls“ or other function boosters, we are nowhere near exhausting the possibilities.

Functional boosting by means of an additional benefit: Using the example of Nivea deodorant

Let's stay on the level of functional motives for a while. It is an additional strategy of functional boosting to expand the functional benefit structure by means of a functional added benefit. Let's take the product category of „men's deodorant“ as an example. The functional primary benefit structure of men's deodorant is the „protection against unpleasant odor.“ This motive is located on the balance/control area of the Limbic® Map. Now, you can boost the primary promise of protection by for example promising 24-hour all-around protection or also protection during the toughest situations. An important opportunity to get out of this spiral of' ever more' is to provide the primary benefit with a functional additional benefit that does not originally come from the primary motive. For example, Nivea's range of deodorant for men is so successful because it not only offers „protection against unpleasant odor,“ but instead also includes a promise of care for sensitive underarm skin. This benefit promise comes from the area of skin care. Nivea created a distinct added emotional value by transferring it to the deodorant segment. Figure 26 reveals Nivea's motive structure.

Figure 26. Nivea Deodorant: Added value via additional benefit

Functional boosting by means of an additional benefit: Using the example of Geox shoes

Let's (ostensibly) depart from the area of personal hygiene and take a glance at th...

Table of contents

• Table of content
• Half Title
• Preface and Overview of the Book
• I. Emotions: How they work and what defines them
• II. How to obtain a decisive advantage with Emotional Boosting
• About Gruppe Nymphenburg Consult AG
• About the Author
• Index
• Imprint