Category Archives: Branding

Emotion Recognition Technology in Marketing

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If you think responsive design was a game changer, think again. Recognizing the screen size of a device and adapting to that resolution is a pretty awesome feature that has pretty much been an industry standard now. What if your website could recognize the emotional reactions of a user and be responsive to that as well?

In a previous post I talked about the power of senses and how they help forge emotional associations with a brand or a product. Now imagine if you could identify these emotions and adapt your messaging accordingly. Live, real time, on the spot!

No, this is not from a science fiction movie. It is quite real and it is happening. It will probably be a few years until it is a reality but there has been a mountain of investment behind emotion recognition technology lately.

Power of Emotions in Marketing

The most successful and widely acclaimed marketing campaigns are always the ones that manage to make an emotional connection with their audience. Think Dove’s ‘Real Beauty’ campaign, Apple’s ‘Think Different’ campaign or Kleenex’s ‘Unlikely Best Friends’ campaign. They all have elements that appeal to different emotions and create really powerful, long lasting connections with the brand.

If you are thinking ‘the purpose of marketing (or being in business for that matter) is not to create emotional connections but to increase revenues’, there is a Nielsen study that was conducted in 2015, which revealed that ads with the highest emotional response resulted in over 20% increase in sales.

The greatest thing about emotional marketing is the longevity of its results. Emotions are extremely powerful. In fact, they are the main drivers of most human behaviour including purchasing decisions. So you can imagine how long lasting the results would be for a business that manages to create positive emotional associations with its customers.

Given the power of emotions, it is not a big surprise that emotion recognition technology is a hot topic in marketing these days. According to Markets and Markets, emotion detection and recognition market is estimated to be worth $22 billion USD by the year 2020.

Of course we cannot talk about cutting edge technology without mentioning Apple. The company has been very interested in emotion detection technology and even acquired an emotion recognition company earlier in 2016.

How Does Emotion Detection Work?

The idea is to catalogue hundreds of thousands of facial images and expressions on a daily basis to create a library, based on which a computer can recognize the changes on somebody’s face and understand their mood instantly.

And that will not be the extent of that either. Thinking about the rise of wearable technology in the last couple of years, collecting emotional data becomes even easier and more real-time. Your mobile devices and computers can only collect data when you are actively using them. But wearables are always connected to us. They are constantly measuring signs like heartbeat and breathing patterns. As the technology for these devices advances and they become more capable of tracking signs such as temperature, blood pressure and other vital functions, emotion detection will be even easier and more precise.

What Does This All Mean For Marketing?

When implemented fully, emotion recognition will be nothing short of a revolution in the world of marketing. The trend in the last 5 years has been towards more and more personalized content whenever and wherever possible. Emotion recognition will only make this easier for marketers and allow them to calibrate marketing efforts mid-stream. Every individual will experience a brand differently based on his or her reactions.

The flip side to this phenomenon is the fact that users will never know if they are seeing “the real” content. When everything is being adjusted to one’s current emotional state in real time, the transparency between a brand and its prospects could diminish dramatically. As much as personalized content makes us consumers feel special, we do not want to feel that we are being sold. There is a fine line between a genuine interaction and a sales pitch that only tells the prospect what he/she wants to hear and brands that know how to walk this line will come out as winners in this new era.

Creativity Knows No Bounds… Or Does It?

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The conventional belief is that freedom fuels creativity. When you have artistic independence with no preconceptions or guidelines limiting your creativity, you are considered to have the optimal environment to come up with brilliant ideas.

However, if you are anything like me, you may find this concept a bit intimidating and overwhelming. I find that the idea of unlimited possibilities actually limits my ability to create anything because there is an infinite number of things I can do and in the end I feel overwhelmed with the number of options.

If you share this feeling, don’t feel bad because it turns out that we are not the only ones! Lately I have been reading a number of articles that talk about the correlation between constraints and creativity and how a healthy balance of restrictions can actually fuel the creative genius in people.

“Constraints can force people to be imaginative and think outside the box”

pi14802-hrWhen the German car manufacturer Audi was looking to improve its Le Man’s race car performance, the chief engineer presented his team with a constraint. He asked his team how they could win the race if their car couldn’t go faster than anyone else. In other words, he challenged his engineers to find a way to improve the car’s performance without increasing the vehicle’s top speed (the constraint). This self-imposed constraint forced the engineers to think outside of the box. Since they couldn’t increase the speed, they decided that making fewer pit stops during the race would put them ahead of the opponents if their car could go longer without having to refuel.

How could they make fewer pit stops? If they had a more fuel-efficient car.
How could they make the car more fuel-efficient? Use diesel technology.

As a result of this process, Audi came up with its R10 TDI race car that ended up winning Le Man’s for the next three years straight! All because of a limitation that pushed the engineers to find a different solution that they normally wouldn’t think about.

Let’s get more scientific

Of course, this is just anecdotal evidence that glorifies one isolated example. But there is also academic research data that supports this theory. A study conducted by the University of Amsterdam set out to research people’s global processing ability based on a computer maze game.

Participants were divided in two groups; one group was given an easy maze with no obstacles and the second group was given a harder version of the same game with obstacles blocking one of the routes, which limited the player’s options.

After both groups finished the game, they were given a standard creativity test containing word puzzles. Three words appeared on the screen and the participants were asked to find the fourth word that connected them all.

The result, as you may have guessed already, is that the group that played the harder puzzle with constraints solved more puzzles than the other group (40% more to be precise). The researchers concluded that the constraints in the difficult version of the game forced the subjects in that group into a more creative mindset that later helped them perform better in the word puzzle game.

To conclude

If you are in a creative field or in any way required to come up with ideas and solutions to different challenges all the time, constraints are not always your enemy. A healthy balance of restrictions on projects can actually act as guidelines to streamline your creativity without being overwhelmed by the infinite other possibilities that can haunt you.

When working with a client, I find that I can deliver much better products if I am presented with certain conditions or challenges, as they help me focus my creative attention and be a lot more imaginative than I otherwise would be. If you are having a hard time getting started on a project because of infinite options, it may be worthwhile considering some self-imposed restrictions.

What we can learn from Starbucks’ label incident

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By now everyone heard about the label incident that happened recently at a Starbucks location in Florida. If you haven’t, here’s a quick rundown:

A barista served the popular grande white chocolate mocha drink to a customer with a label on it that read “DIABETES HERE I COME”. Needless to say that the customer was furious and felt extremely insulted by the unexpected comment. Moreover, what the barista didn’t know was that the customer had two sisters who struggled with type 1 diabetes, which added insult to injury.

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News travel fast these days and an incident like this could be a big blow to a brand’s public image. Thanks to social media every individual has the opportunity to be a publisher regardless of his/her background or resources. This is why a faux-pas that could have gone unnoticed in the early 1990s becomes highly publicized in this day and age.

Which begs the question “is this the case of one rogue employee, or an indication of a deeper conundrum in a business that relies on front-line employees to deliver its brand experience?”

As someone who works in marketing, I can empathize with an employee who is struggling to internalize a product or service he/she doesn’t believe in. In no way does this justify what the barista did but it could help uncover an underlying problem that Starbucks might have in its hiring strategy.

The obvious first reaction to an incident like this is “the employee should never have worked for Starbucks in the first place.” And that makes perfect sense. If you don’t think that people should be drinking sugary beverages, perhaps a barista job is not the right career choice for you. But what about the people behind the scenes who made the decision to hire this individual?

I have a theory.

It is not for everyone. It will probably defy some traditional schools of thought but I think the Starbucks example makes a strong case for it.

I am a firm believer of the importance of front-line employees. You know the ones; your barista, your McDonalds cashier, your receptionist who answers the phones and greets customers. In some aspects, I would even say that these employees are more important than your high-level executives and here’s the reason:

The front-line employees are the ones who deal with real customers on a daily basis. Not only do they represent the brand with their behaviour, but they are also seen as the face of a company by customers. If a problem occurs such as the one in the Florida Starbucks location, the frustrated customer does not think about the VP of Marketing or the CEO. To that customer, the barista who wrote that note is the representation, the extension of Starbucks. Interactions like the one between a barista and a customer happen hundreds of times every day, all day long. Those interactions are the main points of contact between the brand and the consumers.

When we receive great service in an establishment such as Starbucks, we tend to attribute this to the company rather than the individual who provided the service. We tend to believe that there is a great training program that empowers and encourages the employees so that they can provide outstanding service. For Canadian readers, WestJet is an excellent example of this. As a company, WestJet made the decision to eliminate middle management so that the front-line employees can be empowered to make more decisions at their discretion. This is an incredibly powerful way to develop leadership within entry-level positions. The unfortunate flip side of this is when an incident happens where an employee makes a bad decision, it can bring the brand down on a larger scale.

We put so much emphasis on choosing the right management team and paying them well that we often forget about the real people who are dealing with real customers on a day-to-day basis. I am not suggesting that we should start paying our front-line entry level employees VP salaries nor am I advocating for more strict disciplinary measures. The point I am trying to make is that the difference a front-line employee can make on brand perception is sometimes even stronger than what an executive level employee can. Which brings me to the two great lessons that I think we can learn from the Starbucks label incident:

  1. Strategic hiring is critical for companies. In fact it is so critical that it might make or break a brand. Perhaps a company like Starbucks has enough brand strength to survive these isolated incidents but if they keep making the same hiring decisions, these isolated cases may become regular and damage the brand.
  2. Job seekers have just as much responsibility as employers in making the right decisions for themselves. If you somehow end up working for an establishment that you fundamentally disagree with, you still have the responsibility to represent the brand in a manner that is acceptable to their standards.

In order for everyone to win, companies need to be able to successfully communicate and train their employees on their brand, and employees need to actually share these brand values. Starbucks is a brand that is renowned for its employee training program but there is only so much that training can achieve if the wrong people are hired.