Uncover Emotional Responses & Drive Decision-making

Our lives are constant rollercoasters of emotion, especially recently as we emerge from isolation, return to our offices, and attempt to establish a new equilibrium. But, even in the best of times, emotions permeate every aspect of our lives, right down to every minute decision that we make. Our emotional cognition—gut instincts, trust and suspicion, immediate like or dislike, etc. —play an outsized role in our decision-making. Thus, it is impossible to understand the decision-making process of our consumers without also understanding the emotions that underlie each decision.

Measuring consumer emotions is important, but how do we consistently measure them? A standard approach is to simply take an emotional inventory:

This approach has a few advantages:

  • Easy to analyze
  • Low-effort for participants
  • Not limited by participants’ vocabulary, which often causes communication issues

However, there are some serious drawbacks as well:

  • Lack of context
  • Ambiguous activation (i.e., is the participant feeling “good” in a passive way or an active way)
  • No measure of salience

How do we overcome these drawbacks? Remember: the overall goal is to perform a deep analysis and achieve a nuanced understanding of consumers’ feelings toward a brand. This is very hard to achieve when constrained by the rigid boundaries of a questionnaire, especially as survey respondents become less and less tolerant of extended batteries. Instead, the best solution is to simply present the question that we are interested in answering (“How does [brand] make you feel?”), and elicit an open-ended response using text, voice, or video. When people are allowed to use their own voices to answer the question, instead of being constrained by the inventory format, the most salient emotions rise to the surface, much needed context appears, and a whole body of text data becomes available for deeper analysis—should you have the technology to capture it.

With CMB’s custom automated solutions, you can leverage our consumer psychology expertise and sophisticated text analytics to quickly and reliably classify the emotional context of text at scale.

Unlike other tools on the open market, our solutions go beyond bog standard sentiment analysis to explore the full range of the emotional landscape. Like with everything we do, we create bespoke solutions that fit your business needs. Do you want to understand the emotional content of an unusual question or legacy data? We will customize our approach to suit your project.

With modern natural language processing [NLP] we have the agility, depth, and capability to understand consumer emotions at scale.  Looking to uncover emotional responses and drive decision-making? Contact us today to learn more. Let’s start the conversation.