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The “trend” of understanding consumer emotions has been on an upswing for the past several years. Organizations all over the world have realized that emotions are the critical factors driving customer loyalty – understanding how your customers feel when they interact with your brand is the key to improving the customer journey. However, many companies don’t know what to do with these emotions, in other words they struggle turning emotion research into action.
One of the main reasons for this is that most brands don’t have a process in place to quantify emotions in a way that makes sense for their businesses.
What is the Martec Emotion Score work and how does it work?
The Martec Emotion Score is a numerical representation of the emotions that are associated with a specific topic. This could be a product, brand, or even an experience. Typically, the majority of emotion research is qualitative or presented in a highly scientific mode that is hard to digest and understand. There are no numbers around it.
The Martec Emotion Score gives these emotions a simple number that everyone can understand, and therefore use as analytical data that can help reach specific business goals.
How it works:
- We start by looking at the words people provide about a brand, a product, their experience in a store, etc. This can come from a wide variety of sources – qual or quant (survey) data, social media posts or comments, customer service call transcripts, online community groups, etc.
- We take those words and categorize each using Plutchik’s wheel of emotions to determine if the emotion is pleasant or unpleasant, how intense the emotion is (passion) and whether it is primarily a conscious or non-conscious level emotion.
- With this information we calculate the Martec Emotion Score. The spectrum ranges from -100 (very unpleasant) to +100 (very pleasant).
We created this metric in order to bridge the gap between language and numbers (i.e., qualitative and quantitative). Our clients needed a concrete way of understanding and categorizing specific consumer emotions, and they needed data to fit neatly into other metric evaluators they already have in place. The Martec Emotion score is simple, scientific, scalable and fits seamlessly into practices you are already relying on.
Although there may be other numerical data points that are based on emotion, those tend to be based on questions like “Tell me how satisfied you are on a scale of 1-7” and don’t give you the why behind that score. We’re telling you that with these other metrics, you’re missing something. In a way, we become like a therapist for your customers – we sit them down and ask them “and how does that make you feel.” These open-ended questions allow for the why to become clearer, going beyond a traditional customer satisfaction rating or likelihood to recommend.
What can you do with MES?
The most important advantage to MES is the resulting ability to have a numerical representation of language that you can plug into all your other numerical data. The Martec Emotion Score serves as a bridge between quant and qual, a way to put a number to an emotion making a previously intimidating task easy. Emotions (when presented as numbers) can be as easy to understand as quality or value for researchers who were previously hesitant to tackle emotions.
The output of using MES is valuable to all departments and industries, but those who benefit most are those who are communicating with customers: advertisers, communications professionals, marketing professionals, and so on. The overarching question driving the work of these professionals is “How do I better connect with my customers?” They recognize that connecting with customers leads to trust and loyalty, which leads to a better market share and therefore more money. It also solves the basic problem faced by professionals everywhere: “How do I make more money than my competitors?”
The Martec Emotion Score gives you focus and allows you to develop a deeper understanding of your customers and what they are feeling when they associate with your brand. With this information, you can create customer journeys and experiences that are more personalized and ultimately beat out the competition by creating a magnetizing brand that draws people in. What gets measured gets done!
The point behind all of this is simple: emotions don’t have to be difficult. You are already sitting on data with important nuggets of information on how your customers feel about your brand. Now all you need is a way to extract that data and turn it into actionable intelligence.
