Get emotional in business (and life)
We buy products based on how they make us feel.
Investors invest based on how they feel.
Data (facts) serve as constraints (i.e. what are my actual choices?) and justifications.
It’s easy to mistake constraints and justifications for decision criteria.
The bigger the decision, the larger the role of emotion.
Think about how you choose significant others, friends, work, home.
Marketing and selling bring buyers on emotional journeys — usually about anxiety, aspiration and/or social acceptance.
For some reason, this bothers us.
We want to be more fact-based, more logical, less emotional in our decisions.
We’re very susceptible to stories because they make emotional decisions seem rational through (simplified) causation.
Storytellers package emotions with causation to elicit specific emotions with built-in constraints and justifications.
Social platforms are so effective because they are 99% emotion — opinions, stories, shared (emotional) moments.
It’s why we use them, what we’re hoping to find when we’re there.
Influencers are the trusted guides to help us make our way through the unknown on the other side of decisions.
Great brands elicit, project, exploit emotions better than others.
Nobody cared about the features of the first iPhone. They wanted to be the person (they could be) with the first iPhone.
This is true of all types of products, B2B, B2C, C2C — including, and perhaps especially, the product of you.
People decide on you (friendship, business, hiring, romance) based on the way you make them feel.
Embrace your own emotions and those of your customers, friends, co-workers.
Invest in systematic empathy (listening) and storytelling capabilities.
Don’t be offended when someone accuses you of making an emotional decision — because they did too!
