I don't think it'll surprise you. When I say that a lot of our motivations are focused on very simply making us feel good. People like to feel good and they don't like to feel bad. How's that for a profound statement? So your customers emotional responses to your products, and your marketing messages have a big influence on what they will buy. Let's take a quick look at a company that's been extremely successful, basically, because it makes people feel good.

The Zumba company started as an infomercial producer, the CEO, his brother, who was at the time and out of work advertising executive, saw a movie Billboard with some exuberant dancers. According to his account of the story, he said, immediately I called my brother and said you're selling the wrong thing. You're selling fitness when you should be selling this emotion. So the Zumba program began in the 1990s as a Colombian dance fitness program. Every week, about 14 million people in more than 150 countries take classes. So the founders of Zumba figured out something that many of us knew already, which is that many of our purchase decisions are driven by our emotional responses.

And that's why emotion is so much a part of understanding your customers, motivational states, Unilever, Coca Cola, and other companies today use sophisticated technology that interprets how viewers react to ads by their facial expressions. As part of its global open happiness campaign, Coca Cola set up a vending machine at the National University of Singapore that trades free coke beverages for hugs. In addition to just feeling good or bad, our emotions also conserve as a source of information when we weigh the pros and cons of a decision, the fact that owning a specific brand will make a person feel good can give it a competitive advantage, even if the brand is similar on a functional level to other competing brands. And although we may assume that marketers want to make us happy all the time, that is hardly the case. marketing messages can make us sad, angry, or even depressed.

And sometimes Believe it or not, that's done on purpose. On other occasions, marketing communications may deliberately evoke negative effect, such as regret if you forget to play the lottery. Perhaps a more productive way to harness the power of negative effect is to expose the consumer to a distressing image. Then provide a way to improve it. For example, a nonprofit organization might run an ad showing a starving child when it solicits donations. Recently, we've seen a trend in advertising toward inspirational stories that manipulate our emotions like a roller coaster.

Think about the commercials Budweiser likes to run about a puppy who befriends a horse gets lost finds his way home. This practice even has a name, search advertising. And of course, when we think about what goes on online, we recognize that a lot of our social media activity involves the expression of an effect, both positive and negative. We may share particularly good or bad feelings on Facebook or Twitter, or even resort to corny emoticons in text or emails to convey how we feel a nice example of an online advertising campaign that focuses on emotions is one that's being run by jello, featuring its putting face mood meter. In this campaign, jello will randomly send coupons to users it finds who type in a frowny face emoticon on one of their social media posts. Jell O's manufacturer craft will monitor the twittersphere and the company will launch coupons whenever the national average of smiley faces dips below 51%.

A technique called sentiment analysis refers to a process sometimes also called opinion mining that scours the social media universe to collect and analyze the words people use when they describe a specific product or company. The takeaway your customers typically react to Emotionally first, then they find logical reasons to explain how they feel. Be very mindful of the emotional content of your messages.