Something I learned in the course of raising and homeschooling a couple of special needs kids:
Emotion is a form of memory. People who lack much in the way of affect are terrible at making snap decisions. They lack a "gut feeling" to go on. That "gut feeling" is a shorthand way for the brain/body to store info and make decisions quickly. I have one son that is very emotional and capable of making snap decisions. I have one son who has little affect and can't make snap decisions. So I think using "emotional appeal" is a form of shorthand to communicate value to the audience. I don't think I can explain it better than that, but I really think it doesn't deserve the bad rap it gets. Emotional appeal is not some sort of illogical, shallow, silly means to make a decision. It is an alternate means, but not necessarily any less information-dense than scads and scads of logical analysis. In fact, it is probably more information dense (a la "a picture's worth a thousand words" -- "a gut feeling is worth hours and hours of study and analysis") and that is likely why it contains power to sell so much more effectively.
Peace.
Edit: Utterly baffled by the downvote. No one needs to upvote me, but some thoughts as to what the issue is would be appreciated. Thanks.
"Emotional appeal is not some sort of illogical, shallow, silly means to make a decision. It is an alternate means, but not necessarily any less information-dense than scads and scads of logical analysis."
I'd actually go even farther than that. I would say that many times, people make decisions based on emotion (and "gut feelings"), but justify the decisions to themselves and others with logical analysis.
In other words, most decisions are emotional and not logical, however much people disagree.
Easy way to see the truth of this in many situations - lots of times, people make up their minds, and there is literally nothing you can say or do that will change it. This would not be true if their decision was a rational one (something you think, but which is unfalsifiable, is a belief and not a rational decision).
IIRC, there is a book called "Blink" and I believe it is based on research which basically determined that, statistically, the initial "gut reaction"/first impression is actually the most reliable. That initial reaction apparently sums up quite a lot of info quickly which tons of analysis often fails to top. In my experience, a combination of "gut feeling" and analysis is a superior decision-making model but not easy to achieve. You basically have to be willing to do a form of self-therapy and question what your negative emotional reactions are based on and whether those biases really apply in this situation or not. Most folks are not comfortable with that. And I think individuals probably get burned repeatedly in a similar manner because of something inherent to themselves (like if you have bad eyesight, some things just won't work well for you no matter how hard you try -- it becomes a more efficient decision-making model to "just not like it" than to logically analyze that it probably won't work well because of your eyesight issues).
But if you are not the consumer, if you are the seller, then designing your sales effort to key in to that quicker, more efficient decision-making process (aka "emotional appeal") is going to be a more effective sales tool. If the emotional appeal you make is not a lie, if it is based on genuine, meaningful information (like testimonials), then there is nothing inherently wrong with it. It is just a means to go with the most efficient way to transmit data about the value the product has.
For me, understanding this aspect of human decision making is empowering (so I shared it in hopes of helping it make logical sense to folks who seem to generally think logic is superior to emotion). For example, it helped me and my sons deal effectively with my dad who has Alzheimer's. If someone doesn't have good conscious memory, then they base a lot of their decisions on how they feel about you. Yelling at them and such, like other family members did, makes them not trust you because they have a bad feeling about you, even though they can't say what you did that made them dislike you. My dad trusted me while I lived there, even though he wandered around the house with my mail and ask me to my face "Have you seen <my first name>? I have her mail." He couldn't put my name and face together but he would eat what I cooked and things like that, something which astonished the rest of the family because he has always been a paranoid SOB and won't eat food cooked by just anybody. He liked me and trusted me -- his emotional memory system was still functional even though other types of memory were failing -- and I also worked with his routines, rather than against them, which are another type of memory.
I didn't downvote you, but I am going to thoughtfully disagree.
Emotional heuristics aren't cognitively worthless, and they're not even that bad, but they definitely have their own biases that you need to adjust for. Our emotional intuitions are largely shaped more by evolution than by our own values and preferences. If emotions were great cognitive tools, we wouldn't need to discover rationality.
(Not to be sarcastic, but cute) I didn't downvote you, but I am going to thoughtfully disagree.
Our emotional intuitions are largely shaped more by evolution than by our own values and preferences.
Well, if that were the case, people would have the same emotions about the same things, but actually, different people have different reactions to different things. (That's because they value different things.)
If emotions were great cognitive tools, we wouldn't need to discover rationality
Emotions are responses to values (as patio11 said, rightly, in his talk). You need to use reason to figure out what you value. Once you do, your emotions follow therefrom. But "what you value" is actually very complex and context-dependent sometimes, which is why emotions are so useful to give you a snap summary of what could otherwise be a very complex situation to analyze thoroughly.
It's certainly the case that your emotions can be "wrong," but they just follow the thinking you've done previously, whether that thinking was deliberate or accidental.
I'm sure it's extremely rare (maybe not 100% possible) to have all your values be fully consistent with one another. (I'm certainly not there.)
Our mental data is stored out of our conscious awareness unless we're actually thinking about it, and emotions actually come out of that (i.e., out of the subconscious). So one can't even be aware of all the values held in their subconscious unless they take a long time and pay a lot of attention to their emotions. Hence, getting them all to be consistent is no easy feat. Unless one were to start out with sufficient knowledge to do it right in the first place, which we don't.
Thanks, but I think I must have not made my point effectively. I'm well aware that we have biases and being burned can make one avoid something "illogically". But if you are trying to sell something, then emotional appeal contains shorthand, dense information. As an example, see edw519's post in this same thread and the remarks of his he linked to: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2372514
In short, he says he wants someone "shaking with excitement" to use his product. "Shaking with excitement" conveys a great deal of info about the value of the product with very little effort. If you can sum up the value of your product so succinctly and powerfully, then there is a kind of density of info of the sort that influences decision-making (ie leads to sales).
Bzzzt. You are having a common nerd/guy adverse reaction to the word "emotional", but as someone who has sold software and services to huge companies staffed with gun-totin' Ron Swansons for 15 years, let me assure you, everyone is receptive to emotions. They're just different emotions†.
Watch Patrick's talk. Particularly the Google slide.
† "Fear" is one my industry has used to great effect; "egotism" is another one.
And as someone who has sold software and services to huge companies with gun-totin' Ron Swansons for over 15 years, let me assure you that this is untrue.
So, yeah, it's a question of approach. Which was my entire point.
You've never seen the "better" product, with superior performance and more feature check-boxes, lose to the product with the more attractive user interface? Because I feel like that's the oldest blues song I've heard sung.
Of course. But I don't believe that every sale I have lost for what I believe to be non-rational reasons is inherently an emotional decision. Sometimes I just don't understand the motivations of my customers.
We're spiraling here. All I'm saying is, emotional appeals are very much in play in most markets, very much including old conservative white males in '50s-era financial products businesses (fear; get - me - home - in - time - to - see - the - kids; fraternity) and young thin white males at software shops (vanity).
Someone said, "sell emotional experiences and features". You said something to the effect of "eh, maybe that works in your market". Here's where I cut in: bzzt! It works in virtually all markets.
Even in buy-by-committee enterprise sales, there are emotional appeals that will give you an edge.
A fun exercise: look at the most successful, best marketed products in a variety of fields, and spot the emotional elements. Start with Github.
It's all good. I've lived an odd life, but essentially every dollar I have made has come from someone thinking he is getting more value for his dollar than I am charging him for my software/service/whatever. Considering the businesses in which I have often found myself, that has often meant that they felt they were smarter than me. I doubt any of them felt an emotion beyond greed. If that counts, then I'm well and truly wrong.
Then, again, you managed to drag a huge thread out of me based on my emotional reaction to your (frankly offensive) "Bzzt" so maybe you're right for "most" markets.
1. The business man from the city that buys a small piece of land (40 - 60 acres) and cash rents it out. Now you might say that's greed. He's looking to make more money and is greedy pushing the family farm out and renting to the big corporate farmers. You're wrong though. He bought the small farm to brag about it at cocktail parties. That's why all these business types own small chunks of land in rural areas. That's an emotional reason to own it.
2.Imagine a company that allows you to out source your life. One might say, "If I can make $100 an hour free lancing, then I should out source all tasks that I can for less than $100 an hour" and you would argue this is logical. But the real reason someone would want to outsource the laundry, and all aspects of their life is purely emotional. They can then go brag about to all their friends how perfect of a life they have because they don't have to do any crappy work. That's why people making $35 an hour are paying $50 an hour to have the crap done they could do themselves.
If you damage the emotional part of the brain, you are unable to make decisions. You can reason all day long and compare and contrast, but you can never decide.
I wouldn't be surprised if the emotional value that the guys you run into is how they can brag at cocktail parties or to their business associates how they screwed over some computer science graduate and that they used their Harvard MBA to do it.
"Sell benefits, not features" is a marketing-101 principle; a good way to tell if you're selling a real benefit (and selling it effectively) is to isolate and hone the emotional component to it. You can do this even in hard-nosed products; there are emotional components to the "we're not full of shit and our products just do what you need them to do" pitch.
I'm not trying to argue with you now; just extending my point.
> but essentially every dollar I have made has come from someone thinking he is getting more value for his dollar than I am charging him for my software/service/whatever.
Isn't that the basis of all voluntary transactions?
I kind-of agree with dtby because I've been able to sell some of my web software because of my massively exhaustive list of features. For my customers, it left them thinking, man we have to have this, we had no idea there was a software solution for all these problems.
Comments
The best line is when he says, "features.html should 404."
What he says is basically:
1. Develop a niche, and this is probably easier if you target women.
2. Sell an emotional experience, not features.
3. Tell stories because software is boring.
4. Profit!!!
>'The best line is when he says, "features.html should 404."'
Redirect 301 /features.html http://example.com/benefits
Surely ...?
2. Sell an emotional experience, not features.
Something I learned in the course of raising and homeschooling a couple of special needs kids:
Emotion is a form of memory. People who lack much in the way of affect are terrible at making snap decisions. They lack a "gut feeling" to go on. That "gut feeling" is a shorthand way for the brain/body to store info and make decisions quickly. I have one son that is very emotional and capable of making snap decisions. I have one son who has little affect and can't make snap decisions. So I think using "emotional appeal" is a form of shorthand to communicate value to the audience. I don't think I can explain it better than that, but I really think it doesn't deserve the bad rap it gets. Emotional appeal is not some sort of illogical, shallow, silly means to make a decision. It is an alternate means, but not necessarily any less information-dense than scads and scads of logical analysis. In fact, it is probably more information dense (a la "a picture's worth a thousand words" -- "a gut feeling is worth hours and hours of study and analysis") and that is likely why it contains power to sell so much more effectively.
Peace.
Edit: Utterly baffled by the downvote. No one needs to upvote me, but some thoughts as to what the issue is would be appreciated. Thanks.
"Emotional appeal is not some sort of illogical, shallow, silly means to make a decision. It is an alternate means, but not necessarily any less information-dense than scads and scads of logical analysis."
I'd actually go even farther than that. I would say that many times, people make decisions based on emotion (and "gut feelings"), but justify the decisions to themselves and others with logical analysis.
In other words, most decisions are emotional and not logical, however much people disagree.
Easy way to see the truth of this in many situations - lots of times, people make up their minds, and there is literally nothing you can say or do that will change it. This would not be true if their decision was a rational one (something you think, but which is unfalsifiable, is a belief and not a rational decision).
IIRC, there is a book called "Blink" and I believe it is based on research which basically determined that, statistically, the initial "gut reaction"/first impression is actually the most reliable. That initial reaction apparently sums up quite a lot of info quickly which tons of analysis often fails to top. In my experience, a combination of "gut feeling" and analysis is a superior decision-making model but not easy to achieve. You basically have to be willing to do a form of self-therapy and question what your negative emotional reactions are based on and whether those biases really apply in this situation or not. Most folks are not comfortable with that. And I think individuals probably get burned repeatedly in a similar manner because of something inherent to themselves (like if you have bad eyesight, some things just won't work well for you no matter how hard you try -- it becomes a more efficient decision-making model to "just not like it" than to logically analyze that it probably won't work well because of your eyesight issues).
But if you are not the consumer, if you are the seller, then designing your sales effort to key in to that quicker, more efficient decision-making process (aka "emotional appeal") is going to be a more effective sales tool. If the emotional appeal you make is not a lie, if it is based on genuine, meaningful information (like testimonials), then there is nothing inherently wrong with it. It is just a means to go with the most efficient way to transmit data about the value the product has.
For me, understanding this aspect of human decision making is empowering (so I shared it in hopes of helping it make logical sense to folks who seem to generally think logic is superior to emotion). For example, it helped me and my sons deal effectively with my dad who has Alzheimer's. If someone doesn't have good conscious memory, then they base a lot of their decisions on how they feel about you. Yelling at them and such, like other family members did, makes them not trust you because they have a bad feeling about you, even though they can't say what you did that made them dislike you. My dad trusted me while I lived there, even though he wandered around the house with my mail and ask me to my face "Have you seen <my first name>? I have her mail." He couldn't put my name and face together but he would eat what I cooked and things like that, something which astonished the rest of the family because he has always been a paranoid SOB and won't eat food cooked by just anybody. He liked me and trusted me -- his emotional memory system was still functional even though other types of memory were failing -- and I also worked with his routines, rather than against them, which are another type of memory.
I didn't downvote you, but I am going to thoughtfully disagree.
Emotional heuristics aren't cognitively worthless, and they're not even that bad, but they definitely have their own biases that you need to adjust for. Our emotional intuitions are largely shaped more by evolution than by our own values and preferences. If emotions were great cognitive tools, we wouldn't need to discover rationality.
(Not to be sarcastic, but cute) I didn't downvote you, but I am going to thoughtfully disagree.
Our emotional intuitions are largely shaped more by evolution than by our own values and preferences.
Well, if that were the case, people would have the same emotions about the same things, but actually, different people have different reactions to different things. (That's because they value different things.)
If emotions were great cognitive tools, we wouldn't need to discover rationality
Emotions are responses to values (as patio11 said, rightly, in his talk). You need to use reason to figure out what you value. Once you do, your emotions follow therefrom. But "what you value" is actually very complex and context-dependent sometimes, which is why emotions are so useful to give you a snap summary of what could otherwise be a very complex situation to analyze thoroughly.
It's certainly the case that your emotions can be "wrong," but they just follow the thinking you've done previously, whether that thinking was deliberate or accidental.
If all of your emotions are perfectly consistent with your rationally chosen values, I seriously envy you.
I'm sure it's extremely rare (maybe not 100% possible) to have all your values be fully consistent with one another. (I'm certainly not there.)
Our mental data is stored out of our conscious awareness unless we're actually thinking about it, and emotions actually come out of that (i.e., out of the subconscious). So one can't even be aware of all the values held in their subconscious unless they take a long time and pay a lot of attention to their emotions. Hence, getting them all to be consistent is no easy feat. Unless one were to start out with sufficient knowledge to do it right in the first place, which we don't.
Thanks, but I think I must have not made my point effectively. I'm well aware that we have biases and being burned can make one avoid something "illogically". But if you are trying to sell something, then emotional appeal contains shorthand, dense information. As an example, see edw519's post in this same thread and the remarks of his he linked to: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2372514 In short, he says he wants someone "shaking with excitement" to use his product. "Shaking with excitement" conveys a great deal of info about the value of the product with very little effort. If you can sum up the value of your product so succinctly and powerfully, then there is a kind of density of info of the sort that influences decision-making (ie leads to sales).
Does that make more sense?
Sounds basically like the Apple method (sans the explicit focus on Women)
2. Sell an emotional experience, not features.
Eh, that works for your market.
3. Tell stories because software is boring.
Now we're getting somewhere, this is universally applicable.
Bzzzt. You are having a common nerd/guy adverse reaction to the word "emotional", but as someone who has sold software and services to huge companies staffed with gun-totin' Ron Swansons for 15 years, let me assure you, everyone is receptive to emotions. They're just different emotions†.
Watch Patrick's talk. Particularly the Google slide.
† "Fear" is one my industry has used to great effect; "egotism" is another one.
And as someone who has sold software and services to huge companies with gun-totin' Ron Swansons for over 15 years, let me assure you that this is untrue.
So, yeah, it's a question of approach. Which was my entire point.
You've never seen the "better" product, with superior performance and more feature check-boxes, lose to the product with the more attractive user interface? Because I feel like that's the oldest blues song I've heard sung.
Of course. But I don't believe that every sale I have lost for what I believe to be non-rational reasons is inherently an emotional decision. Sometimes I just don't understand the motivations of my customers.
We're spiraling here. All I'm saying is, emotional appeals are very much in play in most markets, very much including old conservative white males in '50s-era financial products businesses (fear; get - me - home - in - time - to - see - the - kids; fraternity) and young thin white males at software shops (vanity).
Someone said, "sell emotional experiences and features". You said something to the effect of "eh, maybe that works in your market". Here's where I cut in: bzzt! It works in virtually all markets.
Even in buy-by-committee enterprise sales, there are emotional appeals that will give you an edge.
A fun exercise: look at the most successful, best marketed products in a variety of fields, and spot the emotional elements. Start with Github.
It's all good. I've lived an odd life, but essentially every dollar I have made has come from someone thinking he is getting more value for his dollar than I am charging him for my software/service/whatever. Considering the businesses in which I have often found myself, that has often meant that they felt they were smarter than me. I doubt any of them felt an emotion beyond greed. If that counts, then I'm well and truly wrong.
Then, again, you managed to drag a huge thread out of me based on my emotional reaction to your (frankly offensive) "Bzzt" so maybe you're right for "most" markets.
Here are two examples:
1. The business man from the city that buys a small piece of land (40 - 60 acres) and cash rents it out. Now you might say that's greed. He's looking to make more money and is greedy pushing the family farm out and renting to the big corporate farmers. You're wrong though. He bought the small farm to brag about it at cocktail parties. That's why all these business types own small chunks of land in rural areas. That's an emotional reason to own it.
2.Imagine a company that allows you to out source your life. One might say, "If I can make $100 an hour free lancing, then I should out source all tasks that I can for less than $100 an hour" and you would argue this is logical. But the real reason someone would want to outsource the laundry, and all aspects of their life is purely emotional. They can then go brag about to all their friends how perfect of a life they have because they don't have to do any crappy work. That's why people making $35 an hour are paying $50 an hour to have the crap done they could do themselves.
If you damage the emotional part of the brain, you are unable to make decisions. You can reason all day long and compare and contrast, but you can never decide.
I wouldn't be surprised if the emotional value that the guys you run into is how they can brag at cocktail parties or to their business associates how they screwed over some computer science graduate and that they used their Harvard MBA to do it.
"Sell benefits, not features" is a marketing-101 principle; a good way to tell if you're selling a real benefit (and selling it effectively) is to isolate and hone the emotional component to it. You can do this even in hard-nosed products; there are emotional components to the "we're not full of shit and our products just do what you need them to do" pitch.
I'm not trying to argue with you now; just extending my point.
> but essentially every dollar I have made has come from someone thinking he is getting more value for his dollar than I am charging him for my software/service/whatever.
Isn't that the basis of all voluntary transactions?
Now now, tptacek, you know that thinking you're superior isn't an emotion if it's a fact ;)
I think the underserved market is pretty much non-geeks. I don't really think non-geeks like features as much as they like being able to do things.
I kind-of agree with dtby because I've been able to sell some of my web software because of my massively exhaustive list of features. For my customers, it left them thinking, man we have to have this, we had no idea there was a software solution for all these problems.