Why Emotions Are Important For Business

Image by Gino Crescoli from Pixabay 

Some people believe that business has no place for emotions, but this couldn’t be more wrong. Emotions play a huge role in business and in the success of your business. Emotions have an effect on teamwork, customer satisfaction, manager-employee relationships, and employee retention. Plus, the brain’s emotional state affects decision making, planning and negotiating, and creative thinking. More so than this, emotions have a huge impact on the amount of sales you make, the amount of money you make and overall whether your business makes it or breaks it. 

It probably comes as no surprise that customers report a higher satisfaction rate when a staff member really seems to understand their problem. But more than customer service, this is also the same for colleagues working together as when people feel that other people understand them, they work better together and create a longer-lasting and stronger team.

It is important in business for managers and leaders to develop a higher degree of emotional granularity in their own lives, as this would give them a better command over situations and their employees. It is important to get to the heart of someone’s emotional state, as this helps avoid offering the wrong solution. Instead of fearing unpleasant emotional states at work or fearing emotions altogether, if you can accurately identify these emotions, and get to the cause, it is a significant first step to using the emotional brain to work better together.

Emotions are essential when it comes to customer service and important for teams working together, but they are also imperative when it comes to sales and marketing and ultimately making money in your business, as the more people feel, the more people buy. You only have to look at your own purchasing habits and what triggers you, to see that this is true. So, how can companies apply this to their marketing techniques to boost sales and grow profits? 

When it comes to identity building, it doesn’t matter how creative and entertaining your brand campaigns are, if you miss adding an emotional connection, your marketing strategy will likely miss the mark. According to research by Binet and Field, emotion is the key to successful marketing and campaigns that can tap into people’s emotions are almost twice as likely to result in very large business effects. Because of this study, many marketers are now interested in emotion and see it as a driver of business success. For conversion, retention, and brand building, people are coming round to the idea that seduction beats persuasion, every time.

According to a behavioral scientist, Gerd Gigerenzer, human beings like “fast and frugal” decisions. He says that they like decisions that don’t take too much time or energy, so creating positive emotion is one surefire way that a business can make itself easy to choose. Positive emotion could be as simple as using brighter colors or more smiling faces on your marketing materials because if people come away feeling good about you and your business, that will be more helpful than any single product feature.

The importance of emotion is nothing new. If you look back at human history, we mainly communicated by emotion, for example, we used grunts and grimaces which were designed to warn, scare, or win over our fellow primates. So it makes sense that emotion is still the core of marketing effectiveness.

According to Psychologist Paul Ekman who has traveled the world studying and looking for universal emotions, which are ones which every culture has in common, emotions that show up in the same way on the face, this shared emotional DNA comes down to seven core feelings which are happiness, surprise, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and contempt.

Translating all the research into simple terms and into sales and marketing terms essentially means that the ads which are most effective, the ones who get the most click-throughs, likes, shares, and immediate purchases, are the ones which take the customer on an emotional journey—the ones that mix positivity, a few negative emotions, and even a big dose of surprise.

While the psychology of emotion is deep and complex as there are differences between types of happiness, and the way different negative emotions work are the subject of many psychological studies, it still comes down to the fact that any business can tap into the power of emotion, by remembering that the more people feel, the more people buy.