Introduction

Facts and truth really don’t have much to do with each other.

—William Faulkner

The motivations customers act on are seldom logical, predictable, or even conscious. Instead, their strongest responses stem from one source: emotion. It’s a deceptively simple reality, one that the business world has resisted, preferring instead to concentrate on quantifiable explanations for customer behavior. But whether customers are consumers or other businesses, all customers are people. And people are emotional beings. Despite any posturing to the contrary, decisions are swayed by emotion. When this emotional dynamic is acknowledged, it changes the way organizations must go about understanding their customers. It changes the way companies must make decisions. It changes the search for clarity.

That poses a difficult question. Exactly what is the best way to achieve clarity? As we began to consider this question, we came to recognize the connection between the method by which information is acquired and the frequently misleading information that is collected. Typically, studies are one dimensional. They are designed to collect a series of facts. Yet depending on how those facts are compiled, a number of contradictory interpretations are possible. The missing component in the research is insight.

We define insight as the difference between what is technically accurate versus what is real and enlightening. It’s the engine that drives the decisions that solve problems. Admittedly, insight has become the fashionable buzz word for research. Articles are written about it. Books are devoted to the topic. Speeches are given on it. Courses on the subject are available at colleges and universities. The term is even incorporated into the title of marketing associates at many companies. But labeling research findings as “insights” doesn’t make them so.

Insights are much richer than findings. Findings are straightforward answers, while insights reflect a deeper, more nuanced appreciation of a given issue. They paint a picture of the emotional triggers that drive customer behavior. Insights result from discovering the connection between emotional triggers and subsequent actions.

An emotional trigger is any occurrence, real or imagined, that produces intense feelings. Those feelings become the reason customers act in certain ways or adopt strongly held convictions. When the link between emotional triggers and actions is revealed, it breaks down the barriers that prevent companies from going beyond what their customers say to the far deeper level of what they really mean. Once understood, companies are better positioned to act on what drives customer sales.

That’s why we’ve always been big fans of research. Throughout our careers, it has been an invaluable tool. We used it religiously to acquire statistically accurate measurements, validate data, obtain feedback, or gain a better understanding about a particular subject. We appreciated how different types of research served different purposes, but, sadly, all too often research proved unproductive, because the methodology was at odds with the objective.

Many traditional approaches that measured, rather than informed, were outmoded and counter-productive. This was particularly evident when we sought to dissect complex issues. As executives, we had become comfortable with numeric measurements, but insights are not readily apparent in statistics. And if it’s unclear what the numbers mean, it’s impossible to determine the right strategic solution. Even conventional qualitative approaches did little more than confirm pre-conceived assumptions. They were designed to answer “How can we sell more of our product or service?” But that was the wrong question. The primary question should have been “What product or service do my customers want or need?”

Once we admitted that factual input could be misleading, we started to explore alternative ways to dissect complex issues. That’s when we came to recognize and embrace the importance of emotional triggers and emotional-trigger research. Unlike traditional methodologies, emotional-trigger research is an indirect approach that disarms customers with unexpected and provocative questions, employs insightful listening, and consists of in-depth conversations.

Our search for a more effective way to analyze complex issues began with an evaluation of the quantitative and qualitative techniques we had commissioned in the past. We wanted to figure out how each of the most frequently used traditional methodologies presented obstacles to finding the truth. Some obstacles were obvious, others more subtle. But the very real likelihood of making the wrong decision, unless we uncovered the authentic reasons that explained customer behavior, was a powerful impetus for rethinking data collection methods.

Why Customers Really Buy: Uncovering the Emotional Triggers That Drive Sales shares what we discovered about the power of emotional insights and how we used this knowledge to help transform companies.

Throughout history leaders have relied on information for reaching conclusions and making decisions. Yet, instinctively, they recognized that facts alone were not enough. So they sought to supplement facts with insights. That’s why they used any means at their disposal, including personal experiences, collective wisdom, envoys, secondhand reports, documents, even rumors, as a basis for making major transformational decisions.

This balance between quantitative and qualitative methods to acquire knowledge has always existed. More recently, the emergence of sophisticated research techniques, global communications, technology, and the Internet, have all converged to give us greater access to hard facts. With this access, we’ve shifted our reliance from what must be interpreted to what can be measured. As quantitative information has achieved dominance, it’s become the rationalization for actions taken or planned. Facts, quite literally, have become the currency of justification. In the process, qualitative or “emotional data” has often been devalued.

But we believe emotional data is more than a valuable tool; we believe it often makes the critical difference. We believe what is technically accurate may not provide real clarity. So as we strive to learn the truth, it’s our intention to bring emotional data out of the closet and give it the rightful place it deserves.