Affected

Emotionally Engaging Customers in The Digital Age

Cara Wrigley, Karla Straker

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780730357018
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780730356998
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

How can you create meaningful connections with customers in the digital space? 

The rapid emergence of new technologies has revolutionized the way companies build relationships and interact with their customers. Today, it's more important than ever to have an emotional understanding of customers and how they feel about a product, service, or business, even when your primary interactions are via digital channels. 

Affected goes beyond influencing behaviors to understanding cognition and emotion as a way to better connect with customers in the digital space. In it, Wrigley and Straker offer a new approach—one that examines channel relationships and useful concepts for clarifying and refining the emotional meaning behind company strategy and their relationship to corresponding channels. Using case study examples from and over a decade of primary research in the area, they discuss the process and impact of such emotionally aware channel designs. Spanning entrepreneurial start-up techniques of wunderkind artist Cj Hendry through to the lucrative retail sector of luxury brand Burberry, this seminal book offers multi-channel design approach that can show companies how to select, design, and maintain digital engagements based on their strategy and industry needs.

• Shows businesses how they can better understand and engage with customers digitally
• Demonstrates how to gain competitive advantage by integrating design methods into corporate strategy
• Provides multi-channel approaches for how businesses can select, design, and maintain digital engagements
• Establishes a clear framework for analysing and applying the right strategy for your digital engagement                                                                                               

Connecting and engaging with customers is pivotal to business success, but in the digital space the old methods just won't cut it. With Affected, you'll find the tools and techniques you need to find your customers where they are.

PART I
Affecting customers

CHAPTER 1
Introducing affect: Creating enduring engagements

Affect (verb): to touch the feelings of; to move emotionally.

It is said that Darwin was the first to research emotions, in his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. That was nearly 150 years ago. Yet even with over a century of investigation since then, many things still remain unexplained.

Martin Lindstrom’s research on cigarette warning labels is a great example to illustrate the complexity of emotions and their effect on behaviour. Participants in the research would report that they were smoking less due to the warnings on cigarette labels (see figure 1.1, overleaf); however, an MRI scan revealed that the centre of the brain associated with desire was stimulated when participants viewed the labels. Surprisingly, the cigarette warnings were creating a greater desire to smoke.

Figure 1.1: plain packaging = more smoking?

This simple example illustrates the complexity of emotions and highlights that our unconscious mind is always active. It shows that our emotions can lead us to behaviours that we may not be able to rationalise. This example also encapsulates the three areas explored in this book:

1. affect (how our brain processes and rationalises emotions)
2. the design of a product, system or environment (the plain packaging and the marketing of the cigarettes)
3. the intended or resultant behaviour (continued smoking).

The complexity of emotions becomes increasingly relevant as our world is forever changing and technology insinuates itself into all aspects of our daily lives. The increased use and interconnectedness of technology has redefined all aspects of modern life. In a news article titled ‘Still living in the moment’, an elderly woman was photographed at a movie premiere for being the only one NOT taking a photo of Johnny Depp (as shown in figure 1.2). The fact that this was a ‘newsworthy’ event illustrates the extent to which technology has become an expected part of life; by simply not using it, you become the odd one out.

Figure 1.2: making headlines by still living in the moment

Not only has technology integrated itself into our lives, but it has also disrupted the traditional model of communication for companies. Conventional one-way, company-dominated communication is now a two-way street, creating a power shift between businesses and customers, leaving the customer largely in control.

This distribution of power, and the ever-changing field of digital communication, has left companies desperate to understand how best to integrate technology into their business practice. Yet existing commentary overlooks the emotional impact of the daily use of technology.

There is no doubt that technology is affecting the way we communicate, learn, and purchase items, but it is also playing a vital role in influencing our emotions and experiences. Understanding the extent to which interactions through technology can and should influence company strategy is crucial. In the rush to avoid being ‘left behind’ or the odd one out, many businesses, to their detriment, implement technology with little or no strategic plan at all.

DESIGN THINKING

In recent years, design methods have been recognised as a way to implement customer-centric innovation. In particular, ‘design thinking’ — seen as a theory for solving complex problems — is increasingly considered the way to develop innovation processes within organisations globally. Tim Brown, one of the creators of the popular press term, explains design thinking as ‘a methodology that imbues the full spectrum of innovation activities with a human-centered design ethos’.

Design thinking involves stakeholders throughout all stages of the process, and encompasses the areas of business, people and technology (see figure 1.3). In a commercial world where customers have so many options it’s easy to see why this type of thinking has gained so much traction.

Figure 1.3: at the intersection (design thinking)

Source: Brown, 2006.

Customer empathy is a sizable component of the design thinking process, but the role that emotions play within this is not yet well understood. In Dan Hill’s book Emotionomics he explains that by focusing on customers’ unarticulated aspirations, companies can become better informed and nimbler.

However, to better understand how emotions can be used to design digital engagements, we need to explore virtual relationships in depth, understanding the ways we process information and perform tasks, and how this influences our motivations, arouses certain feelings and affects our behaviours.

Therefore, the focus of this book is at the intersection of emotion (people), strategy (business) and digital channels (technology): to understand how to emotionally engage customers in the digital age (see figure 1.4).

Figure 1.4: at the intersection (emotional digital engagements)

AFFECT AND COMPANIES

Digital innovation has created an entirely new class of competition for businesses. The explosion of available data and the growing capabilities of technology have provided companies with valuable information when making strategic decisions. As a result, technology has moved beyond functional applications, towards a more strategic role.

The challenge for companies is to keep up with these changes and develop new theories, models and methods to learn, respond, and adapt their position in such competitive environments. An example of this is Kodak’s failure to anticipate how social technologies (such as Instagram) connect people, facilitate the sharing of visual experiences and morph the meaning of photography.

Kodak’s missed moment

Kodak held a strong market position for many years until the late 1990s, when they began to struggle financially as a result of their slowness in transitioning to digital photography. It is therefore surprising to learn that Kodak actually developed the first digital camera in 1975, but did not release it as they feared it would threaten their current business model built on selling film for their cameras. The following years saw digital cameras became commodities. Kodak’s slow reaction and their fear of product development led them to fall behind the competition throughout the 2000s. They also failed to realise that online photo sharing was the new business, not just a way to expand the printing business. People went from printing pictures to sharing them online (see figure 1.5).

Figure 1.5: Kodak to Instagram

Kodak failed to see the disruption of technology but, more importantly, they missed how people would use photos. They failed to anticipate how:

• such a technology might connect people
• photography might morph from a professional and recreational activity into a social currency
• the camera might become integrated into a new way of life.

These failures sent Kodak into bankruptcy in 2012. If only Kodak had kept true to their original value offering: ‘share memories, share life’.

Kodak and others (as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Epigraph
• Title page
• Copyright
• Foreword
• About the authors
• Preface
• Part: I Affecting customers
• Part: II Affective companies
• Part: III Affective strategy
• Appendix A A (very) brief history of emotions
• Appendix B Digital Affect Framework canvas
• Appendix C Typologies and touchpoints index
• Glossary of key terms
• Personal reflections and acknowledgements
• References
• Index
• EULA