When customers evaluate a product or service, they weigh its perceived value against the asking price. Marketers have generally focused much of their time and energy on managing the price side of that equation, since raising prices can immediately boost profits. But that’s the easy part: Pricing usually consists of managing a relatively small set of numbers, and pricing analytics and tactics are highly evolved.
What consumers truly value, however, can be difficult to pin down and psychologically complicated. How can leadership teams actively manage value or devise ways to deliver more of it, whether functional (saving time, reducing cost) or emotional (reducing anxiety, providing entertainment)? Discrete choice analysis—which simulates demand for different combinations of product features, pricing, and other components—and similar research techniques are powerful and useful tools, but they are designed to test consumer reactions to preconceived concepts of value—the concepts that managers are accustomed to judging. Coming up with new concepts requires anticipating what else people might consider valuable.
The amount and nature of value in a particular product or service always lie in the eye of the beholder, of course. Yet universal building blocks of value do exist, creating opportunities for companies to improve their performance in current markets or break into new ones. A rigorous model of consumer value allows a company to come up with new combinations of value that its products and services could deliver. The right combinations, our analysis shows, pay off in stronger customer loyalty, greater consumer willingness to try a particular brand, and sustained revenue growth.
We have identified 30 “elements of value”—fundamental attributes in their most essential and discrete forms. These elements fall into four categories: functional, emotional, life changing, and social impact. Some elements are more inwardly focused, primarily addressing consumers’ personal needs. For example, the life-changing element motivation is at the core of Fitbit’s exercise-tracking products. Others are outwardly focused, helping customers interact in or navigate the external world. The functional element organizes is central to The Container Store and Intuit’s TurboTax, because both help consumers deal with complexities in their world.In our research we don’t accept on its face a consumer’s statement that a certain product attribute is important; instead we explore what underlies that statement. For example, when someone says her bank is “convenient,” its value derives from some combination of the functional elements saves time, avoids hassle, simplifies, and reduces effort. And when the owner of a $10,000 Leica talks about the quality of the product and the pictures it takes, an underlying life-changing element is self-actualization, arising from the pride of owning a camera that famous photographers have used for a century.
The elements of value approach extends Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs.”
Three decades of experience doing consumer research and observation for corporate clients led us to identify these 30 fundamental attributes, which we derived from scores of quantitative and qualitative customer studies. Many of the studies involved the well-known interviewing technique “laddering,” which probes consumers’ initial stated preferences to identify what’s driving them.
Our model traces its conceptual roots to the psychologist Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs,” which was first published in 1943. Then a faculty member at Brooklyn College, Maslow argued that human actions arise from an innate desire to fulfill needs ranging from the very basic (security, warmth, food, rest) to the complex (self-esteem, altruism). Almost all marketers today are familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy. The elements of value approach extends his insights by focusing on people as consumers—describing their behavior as it relates to products and services.It may be useful to briefly compare Maslow’s thinking with our model. Marketers have seen his hierarchy organized in a pyramid (although it was later interpreters, not Maslow himself, who expressed his theory that way). At the bottom of the pyramid are physiological and safety needs, and at the top are self-actualization and self-transcendence. The popular assumption has been that people cannot attain the needs at the top until they have met the ones below. Maslow himself took a more nuanced view, realizing that numerous patterns of fulfillment can exist. For example, rock climbers achieve self-actualization in unroped ascents of thousands of feet, ignoring basic safety considerations.Similarly, the elements of value pyramid is a heuristic model—practical rather than theoretically perfect—in which the most powerful forms of value live at the top. To be able to deliver on those higher-order elements, a company must provide at least some of the functional elements required by a particular product category. But many combinations of elements exist in successful products and services today.Most of these elements have been around for centuries and probably longer, although their manifestations have changed over time. Connects was first provided by couriers bearing messages on foot. Then came the Pony Express, the telegraph, the pneumatic post, the telephone, the internet, e-mail, Instagram, Twitter, and other social media sites.The relevance of elements varies according to industry, culture, and demographics. For example, nostalgia or integrates may mean little to subsistence farmers in developing countries, whereas reduces risk and makes money are vital to them. Likewise, throughout history, self-actualization has been out of reach for most consumers, who were focused on survival (even if they found fulfillment through spiritual or worldly pursuits). But anything that saved time, reduced effort, or reduced cost was prized.
Growing Revenue
To test whether the elements of value can be tied to company performance—specifically, a company’s customer relationships and revenue growth—we collaborated with Research Now (an online sampling and data collection company) to survey more than 10,000 U.S. consumers about their perceptions of nearly 50 U.S.-based companies. Each respondent scored one company—from which he or she had bought a product or service during the previous six months—on each element, using a 0–10 scale. When companies had major branded divisions such as insurance or banking, we conducted separate interviews focused on those divisions. We then looked at the relationships among these rankings, each company’s Net Promoter Score (NPS)—a widely used metric for customer loyalty and advocacy—and the company’s recent revenue growth.Our first hypothesis was that the companies that performed well on multiple elements of value would have more loyal customers than the rest. The survey confirmed that. Companies with high scores (defined as an 8 or above) on four or more elements from at least 50% of respondents—such as Apple, Samsung, USAA, TOMS, and Amazon—had, on average, three times the NPS of companies with just one high score, and 20 times the NPS of companies with none. More is clearly better—although it’s obviously unrealistic to try to inject all 30 elements into a product or a service. Even a consumer powerhouse like Apple, one of the best performers we studied, scored high on only 11 of the 30 elements. Companies must choose their elements strategically, as we will illustrate.Our second hypothesis was that companies doing well on multiple elements would grow revenue at a faster rate than others. Strong performance on multiple elements does indeed correlate closely with higher and sustained revenue growth. Companies that scored high on four or more elements had recent revenue growth four times greater than that of companies with only one high score. The winning companies understand how they stack up against competitors and have methodically chosen new elements to deliver over time (though most of them did not use our specific framework).Next we explored whether the elements of value could shed light on the astonishing market share growth of pure-play digital retailers. This, too, was confirmed empirically. Amazon, for instance, achieved high scores on eight mostly functional elements, illustrating the power of adding value to a core offering. It has chosen product features that closely correspond to those in our model. For example, in creating Amazon Prime, in 2005, the company initially focused on delivering reduces cost and saves time by providing unlimited two-day shipping for a flat $79 annual fee. Then it expanded Prime to include streaming media (provides access and fun/entertainment), unlimited photo storage on Amazon servers (reduces risk), and other features. Each new element attracted a large group of consumers and helped raise Amazon’s services far above commodity status. Prime has penetrated nearly 40% of the U.S. retail market, and Amazon has become a juggernaut of consumer value. That allowed the company to raise Prime’s annual fee to $99 in 2015—a large price increase by any standard.
Patterns of Value
To help companies think about managing the value side of the equation more directly, we wanted to understand how the elements translate to successful business performance. Are some of them more important than others? Do companies have to compete at or near the top of the pyramid to be successful? Or can they succeed by excelling on functional elements alone? What value do consumers see in digital versus omnichannel companies? We used our data to identify three patterns of value creation.Some elements do matter more than others.
Across all the industries we studied, perceived quality affects customer advocacy more than any other element. Products and services must attain a certain minimum level, and no other elements can make up for a significant shortfall on this one.After quality, the critical elements depend on the industry. In food and beverages, sensory appeal, not surprisingly, runs a close second. In consumer banking, provides access and heirloom (a good investment for future generations) are the elements that matter; in fact, heirloom is crucial in financial services generally, because of the connection between money and inheritance. The broad appeal of smartphones stems from how they deliver multiple elements, including reduces effort, saves time, connects, integrates, variety, fun/entertainment, provides access, and organizes. Manufacturers of these products—Apple, Samsung, and LG—got some of the highest value ratings across all companies studied.Which Elements Are Most Important.Consumers perceive digital firms as offering more value.
Well-designed online businesses make many consumer interactions easier and more convenient. Mainly digital companies thus excel on saves time and avoids hassles. Zappos, for example, scored twice as high as traditional apparel competitors did on those two elements and several others. Overall, it achieved high scores on eight elements—way ahead of traditional retailers. Netflix outperformed traditional TV service providers with scores three times as high on reduces cost, therapeutic value, and nostalgia. Netflix also scored higher than other media providers on variety, illustrating how effectively it has persuaded customers, without any objective evidence, that it offers more titles.Brick-and-mortar businesses can still win on certain elements.
Omnichannel retailers win on some emotional and life-changing elements. For example, they are twice as likely as online-only retailers to score high on badge value, attractiveness, and affiliation and belonging. Consumers who get help from employees in stores give much higher ratings to those retailers; indeed, emotional elements have probably helped some store-based retailers stay in business.Moreover, companies that score high on emotional elements tend to have a higher NPS, on average, than companies that spike only on functional elements. This finding is consistent with previous Bain analysis showing that digital technologies have been transforming physical businesses rather than annihilating them. The fusion of digital and physical channels is proving more powerful than either one alone. That accounts in part for why E*TRADE has invested in physical branches and why retailers such as Warby Parker and Bonobos have launched physical stores. (See “Digital-Physical Mashups,” by Darrell K. Rigby, HBR, September 2014.) These patterns demonstrate that there are many ways to succeed by delivering various kinds of value. Amazon expanded functional excellence in a mass market. Apple excels on 11 elements in the pyramid, several of them high up, which allows the company to charge premium prices. TOMS excels on four elements, and one of them is self-transcendence, because the company gives away one pair of shoes to needy people for every pair bought by a customer. This appeals to a select group of people who care about charitable giving.
Putting the Elements to Work
These patterns are intriguing in their own right, and they illuminate how some companies have chosen to navigate upheaval in their industries. Ultimately, however, the elements must prove their usefulness in solving business challenges, particularly growing revenue. Companies can improve on the elements that form their core value, which will help set them apart from the competition and meet their customers’ needs better. They can also judiciously add elements to expand their value proposition without overhauling their products or services.Companies have begun to use our method in several practical ways, instilling a “hunt for value” mentality in their employees. Although many successful entrepreneurs have instinctively found ways to deliver value as part of their innovation process, that becomes harder as companies grow. The leaders of most large organizations spend less time with customers, and innovation often slows. The elements can help them identify new value once again.Some companies have refined their product designs to deliver more elements. Vanguard, for instance, added a low-fee, partly automated advice platform to its core investment services in order to keep its clients better informed and, in many cases, to reduce risk. A chainsaw manufacturer that felt undifferentiated used the elements of value to identify specific ways of making future products distinctive. It focused on quality (defined as the results of using its products), saves time, and reduces cost. These three elements had the greatest effect on customer satisfaction and loyalty, and the company was able to build competitive advantage with them.Other companies have used the elements to identify where customers perceive strengths and weaknesses. They start by understanding which elements are the most important for their industry and how they stack up on those relative to competitors. If a company trails in the crucial elements, it should improve on them before attempting to add new ones. A large consumer bank found that although it fared relatively well on avoids hassles and saves time, it did not score well on quality. The bank did extensive research into why its quality ratings were low and launched initiatives to strengthen anti-fraud operations and enhance the mobile app experience.The broadest commercial potential of the elements of value model currently lies in developing new types of value to provide. Additions make the most sense when the organization can deliver them while using its current capabilities and making a reasonable investment, and when the elements align with the company’s brand.Sometimes selecting an additional element is fairly straightforward: Acronis and other software providers added cloud backup and storage services to reinforce their brand promise of reduces risk for computer users. Another key element in cloud backup is provides access, because users can reach their files from any computer, tablet, or smartphone connected to the internet.It’s not always so obvious which elements to add, however. One financial services company recognized that if it could attract more consumers to its retail banking business, it might be able to cross-sell insurance, investment advice, and other products. But how could it do that? The company arrived at the best answer through three largely qualitative research stages followed by a fourth, highly quantitative stage.Structured listening.
Working with Bain, the company interviewed current and prospective customers across the United States, individually and in groups. The goal was to understand consumers’ priorities for a checking account, their frustrations, their compromises, and their reasons for using multiple institutions for banking services.“Ideation” sessions.
We then used the elements to explore where improvements in value might resonate with consumers. Bain’s survey data had identified the elements that tend to reinforce customer advocacy in consumer banking, among them provides access, heirloom, and reduces anxiety. Those insights, combined with the consumer research, informed ideation sessions with a project team consisting of people from all customer-touching departments across the bank, not just marketers.The sessions explored which elements might be used to form the nucleus of a new offering. For example, provides access and connects held appeal, because the bank might be able to provide access to mutual funds or connect consumers with financial planners. In the end, however, the team decided that neither element was feasible in this business, primarily for reasons of cost. Instead it developed 12 checking-account concepts that were built around reduces cost, makes money, and reduces anxiety. Reduces cost highlighted low fees, while reduces anxiety emphasized automatic savings. Reduces anxiety was particularly important, because most of the targeted consumers were living paycheck to paycheck and struggling to save money.Customer-centric design of prototype concepts.
Each concept approved by the project team contained a different mix of product features, fees, and levels of customer service. Many of these new concepts could be delivered through an improved smartphone app that would increase customer engagement with the bank. Almost all the targeted consumers used smartphones for financial services (consistent with our earlier observations on the many elements of value delivered by these devices).
It was my sister’s 20th wedding anniversary recently and I was excited to get her a meaningful present to celebrate the milestone. Gifting the perfect present was important to me because I hadn’t seen her in almost two years due to the pandemic. So, I sought advice on gift ideas from people and browsed websites, video platforms, and social media for inspiration. But I ended up confused by the various sources of information. How could I be sure I’d bought the right gift? And could I rely on the delivery service to get the gift to her on time or at all? I needed a source of trustworthy information to help me decide with confidence.
As it turns out, I’m not the only shopper who feels inundated with choice and unsure about purchase decisions. Google’s latest research shows that people experience a wide range of emotions during their buying journey.1 From curiosity and confusion to clarity and conviction, people often struggle to find trusted touchpoints that will guide them along the nonlinear customer journey.
To make purchase decisions with confidence and assurance, shoppers have turned to Search as their number one touchpoint for relevant information.2 Another critical driver of purchase decisions and customer preference is brand presence. When brands provide relevant and trustworthy content online, they increase consumer preference by more than 70%.
People want to shop with clarity and brands can help guide shoppers toward their purchase decisions. To cultivate consumer trust and shape better customer journeys, brands need to first understand the emotions that drive consumer buying behavior. Here, we share three key consumer insights from our latest research that brands can use to develop Search marketing strategies which help people shop with confidence and ease.
Emotions drive decision-making
The customer journey is marked by emotions and people want to feel certainty and confidence before they make a purchase. When they’re skeptical, they want to feel convinced. When they’re confused, they want clarity. People search for information to attain that emotional resolution. In our study, 57% of respondents said they research before making a purchase to feel confident in what they’re purchasing, and 69% said they research to ensure they get the right product or service they need.
This need for emotional resolution drives people to all sources for information: social media, site aggregators, review websites, stores, or family and friends. It’s unsurprising then that 81% of consumers buy products or services from brands that provide information which makes them feel empowered about their purchase decisions.
Search is the top touchpoint for shoppers in their emotional customer journey. It organizes and contextualizes the information available online, and it connects shoppers to other online touchpoints. Seventy-three percent of those who use online touchpoints in their research access one or more touchpoints via a search engine.
As people explore and evaluate their options, brands can help them feel empowered by providing them with useful information, such as clear product specifications, genuine product reviews, or information from experts. Responsive search ads can play an instrumental role in this. The Google Ads machine learning solution uses headlines and descriptions provided by marketers to create combinations of ads that match unique Search queries. This speeds up how people find information and increases conversions for brands by an average of 7%.
People are also finding it more important than before to have sources they can trust in their customer journey, reinforcing the need for brands to build up their credibility. Compared with before COVID-19, 87% of people say it’s now more important to find a trusted source of information.6 Eighty-five percent also say they will purchase from brands that provide trusted information, and 63% won’t buy from brands that provide irrelevant information.
Google’s investment in new technologies and rigorous processes over the years has improved the relevance and quality of Search algorithms and results. The improvements make it easier for people to discover what they need and filter for more authoritative sources. Brands can leverage Search to build customer trust by creating reliable and relevant online content, such as informative landing pages and clear product descriptions, which Search then delivers to potential customers.
The paradox of choice
Researching all relevant information about a product or service is important for consumers to attain emotional resolution about their purchase decision, but an information overload in the process can actually impede decision-making. In our study, 94% of people say it’s important to research before making a purchase.8 Yet at the same time, 80% of respondents who have difficulty making purchase decisions say it’s because they are given too much information or too many options.9 This is where brands can step in to help.
To ease shoppers out of choice paralysis, brands should be present at the right moment to guide shoppers in their search. In our study, 84% of people say they will purchase from a brand that provides helpful information when they’re exploring options.
Brands can use machine learning to provide personalized and relevant information for people researching online. With broad match keywords and Smart Bidding, brands can make sure their ads reach more relevant search queries and drive purchase decisions. Brands that use broad match keywords and Smart Bidding strategies together have seen an increase in conversions of up to 25%.
The purchase journey is an emotional one for customers and brands can support people in their shopping experience. With Search being a top touchpoint in the customer journey, brands can help people feel empowered throughout the process by being present, reliable, relevant, and informative on Search.
Sales organizations use a variety of strategies to attract, engage and convert customers. Each customer is unique, so it s important that organizations understand how to develop strategies that appeal to all types of customers. Emotional selling may be an effective strategy for creating a sales environment that focuses on how different each customer is and how to best serve them. In this article, we define emotional selling, list the benefits of using this technique, discuss methods of emotional selling and provide tips to help you use this strategy successfully.
What is emotional selling?
Emotional selling is a sales management strategy that focuses on a customer s emotional experience. It may relate to their feelings that motivate them to purchase a product or service, or it may relate to convincing them that a product or service may make them feel a certain way. Regardless of the approach, the focus of this sales strategy is on the customer, not the product.
Emotional selling relies on uncovering someone s motivation for purchase. This involves making genuine connections with customers about their feelings, needs and wants. It requires identifying and honing in on their specific feelings to deliver a positive experience. Common emotions that affect buying decisions include:
Altruism: A customer may purchase an item for the altruistic experience of feeling like their purchase contributed to a larger net positive.
Envy: A customer motivated by envy may make a purchase because of their perceived competition with others.
Fear: A customer may make a purchase out of fear that s based on a rational or irrational concern they have, motivating them to make a purchase quickly.
Greed: A customer may purchase something because they want what someone else already has.
Pride: A customer may purchase an item if they hope to feel a sense of pride because someone else may respect them or think they re smart based on the item they bought.
Shame: A customer motivated by shame may purchase something because they re concerned about how they may look or feel if they don t buy it.
Emotional selling requires excellent emotional intelligence skills. Emotional intelligence refers to the ability to listen to others and understand their thoughts and feelings. This is essential for forming connections with others. If salespeople have high emotional intelligence, they re able to better understand the needs of their customers, identify their concerns and provide recommendations that appeal to their emotional values.
Benefits of emotional selling
Here are some of the benefits of emotional selling:
Builds customer loyalty: Effective emotional selling creates strong relationships between customers and salespeople as well as between customers and the products or services. This may provide customers with a reason to return to the store, increasing customer loyalty.
Challenges salespeople: Sales professionals may feel uninspired by talking about the same products every day. However, emotional selling challenges them to find new ways about the same products or services each day by making them relevant to individual customers.
Improves organizational communication: Emotional intelligence is essential for successful emotional selling. Having an emotionally intelligent workforce may improve communication throughout the organization because everyone understands one another better.
Increases customer confidence: This strategy focuses on the customer s needs and how they will feel once they have the product or service. This creates an emotional connection between the customer in the product, helping them feel confident about and invested in their purchase.
Justifies emotional purchases: Emotional selling may help you determine why a customer wants to buy something, even if they re not sure what they want to buy and simply feel like buying something. It allows you to create a connection with them that validates their emotional purchase decisions they may not make otherwise.
Leads to more recommendations: Customers generally feel valued and heard after engaging in emotional selling. They may tell others about their experience, encouraging them to shop with the organization and generating more customer referrals.
Provides a personalized shopping experience: Emotional selling, particularly in physical retail stores, focuses on the individual customer and their feelings. This creates a personalized shopping experience, which may lead to the customer feeling positively about the company.
When customers evaluate a product or service, they weigh its perceived value against the asking price. Marketers have generally focused much of their time and energy on managing the price side of that equation, since raising prices can immediately boost profits. But that’s the easy part: Pricing usually consists of managing a relatively small set of numbers, and pricing analytics and tactics are highly evolved.
What consumers truly value, however, can be difficult to pin down and psychologically complicated. How can leadership teams actively manage value or devise ways to deliver more of it, whether functional (saving time, reducing cost) or emotional (reducing anxiety, providing entertainment)? Discrete choice analysis—which simulates demand for different combinations of product features, pricing, and other components—and similar research techniques are powerful and useful tools, but they are designed to test consumer reactions to preconceived concepts of value—the concepts that managers are accustomed to judging. Coming up with new concepts requires anticipating what else people might consider valuable.
The amount and nature of value in a particular product or service always lie in the eye of the beholder, of course. Yet universal building blocks of value do exist, creating opportunities for companies to improve their performance in current markets or break into new ones. A rigorous model of consumer value allows a company to come up with new combinations of value that its products and services could deliver. The right combinations, our analysis shows, pay off in stronger customer loyalty, greater consumer willingness to try a particular brand, and sustained revenue growth.
We have identified 30 “elements of value”—fundamental attributes in their most essential and discrete forms. These elements fall into four categories: functional, emotional, life changing, and social impact. Some elements are more inwardly focused, primarily addressing consumers’ personal needs. For example, the life-changing element motivation is at the core of Fitbit’s exercise-tracking products. Others are outwardly focused, helping customers interact in or navigate the external world. The functional element organizes is central to The Container Store and Intuit’s TurboTax, because both help consumers deal with complexities in their world.In our research we don’t accept on its face a consumer’s statement that a certain product attribute is important; instead we explore what underlies that statement. For example, when someone says her bank is “convenient,” its value derives from some combination of the functional elements saves time, avoids hassle, simplifies, and reduces effort. And when the owner of a $10,000 Leica talks about the quality of the product and the pictures it takes, an underlying life-changing element is self-actualization, arising from the pride of owning a camera that famous photographers have used for a century.
The elements of value approach extends Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs.”
Three decades of experience doing consumer research and observation for corporate clients led us to identify these 30 fundamental attributes, which we derived from scores of quantitative and qualitative customer studies. Many of the studies involved the well-known interviewing technique “laddering,” which probes consumers’ initial stated preferences to identify what’s driving them.
Our model traces its conceptual roots to the psychologist Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs,” which was first published in 1943. Then a faculty member at Brooklyn College, Maslow argued that human actions arise from an innate desire to fulfill needs ranging from the very basic (security, warmth, food, rest) to the complex (self-esteem, altruism). Almost all marketers today are familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy. The elements of value approach extends his insights by focusing on people as consumers—describing their behavior as it relates to products and services.It may be useful to briefly compare Maslow’s thinking with our model. Marketers have seen his hierarchy organized in a pyramid (although it was later interpreters, not Maslow himself, who expressed his theory that way). At the bottom of the pyramid are physiological and safety needs, and at the top are self-actualization and self-transcendence. The popular assumption has been that people cannot attain the needs at the top until they have met the ones below. Maslow himself took a more nuanced view, realizing that numerous patterns of fulfillment can exist. For example, rock climbers achieve self-actualization in unroped ascents of thousands of feet, ignoring basic safety considerations.Similarly, the elements of value pyramid is a heuristic model—practical rather than theoretically perfect—in which the most powerful forms of value live at the top. To be able to deliver on those higher-order elements, a company must provide at least some of the functional elements required by a particular product category. But many combinations of elements exist in successful products and services today.Most of these elements have been around for centuries and probably longer, although their manifestations have changed over time. Connects was first provided by couriers bearing messages on foot. Then came the Pony Express, the telegraph, the pneumatic post, the telephone, the internet, e-mail, Instagram, Twitter, and other social media sites.The relevance of elements varies according to industry, culture, and demographics. For example, nostalgia or integrates may mean little to subsistence farmers in developing countries, whereas reduces risk and makes money are vital to them. Likewise, throughout history, self-actualization has been out of reach for most consumers, who were focused on survival (even if they found fulfillment through spiritual or worldly pursuits). But anything that saved time, reduced effort, or reduced cost was prized.
Growing Revenue
To test whether the elements of value can be tied to company performance—specifically, a company’s customer relationships and revenue growth—we collaborated with Research Now (an online sampling and data collection company) to survey more than 10,000 U.S. consumers about their perceptions of nearly 50 U.S.-based companies. Each respondent scored one company—from which he or she had bought a product or service during the previous six months—on each element, using a 0–10 scale. When companies had major branded divisions such as insurance or banking, we conducted separate interviews focused on those divisions. We then looked at the relationships among these rankings, each company’s Net Promoter Score (NPS)—a widely used metric for customer loyalty and advocacy—and the company’s recent revenue growth.Our first hypothesis was that the companies that performed well on multiple elements of value would have more loyal customers than the rest. The survey confirmed that. Companies with high scores (defined as an 8 or above) on four or more elements from at least 50% of respondents—such as Apple, Samsung, USAA, TOMS, and Amazon—had, on average, three times the NPS of companies with just one high score, and 20 times the NPS of companies with none. More is clearly better—although it’s obviously unrealistic to try to inject all 30 elements into a product or a service. Even a consumer powerhouse like Apple, one of the best performers we studied, scored high on only 11 of the 30 elements. Companies must choose their elements strategically, as we will illustrate.Our second hypothesis was that companies doing well on multiple elements would grow revenue at a faster rate than others. Strong performance on multiple elements does indeed correlate closely with higher and sustained revenue growth. Companies that scored high on four or more elements had recent revenue growth four times greater than that of companies with only one high score. The winning companies understand how they stack up against competitors and have methodically chosen new elements to deliver over time (though most of them did not use our specific framework).Next we explored whether the elements of value could shed light on the astonishing market share growth of pure-play digital retailers. This, too, was confirmed empirically. Amazon, for instance, achieved high scores on eight mostly functional elements, illustrating the power of adding value to a core offering. It has chosen product features that closely correspond to those in our model. For example, in creating Amazon Prime, in 2005, the company initially focused on delivering reduces cost and saves time by providing unlimited two-day shipping for a flat $79 annual fee. Then it expanded Prime to include streaming media (provides access and fun/entertainment), unlimited photo storage on Amazon servers (reduces risk), and other features. Each new element attracted a large group of consumers and helped raise Amazon’s services far above commodity status. Prime has penetrated nearly 40% of the U.S. retail market, and Amazon has become a juggernaut of consumer value. That allowed the company to raise Prime’s annual fee to $99 in 2015—a large price increase by any standard.
Patterns of Value
To help companies think about managing the value side of the equation more directly, we wanted to understand how the elements translate to successful business performance. Are some of them more important than others? Do companies have to compete at or near the top of the pyramid to be successful? Or can they succeed by excelling on functional elements alone? What value do consumers see in digital versus omnichannel companies? We used our data to identify three patterns of value creation.Some elements do matter more than others.
Across all the industries we studied, perceived quality affects customer advocacy more than any other element. Products and services must attain a certain minimum level, and no other elements can make up for a significant shortfall on this one.After quality, the critical elements depend on the industry. In food and beverages, sensory appeal, not surprisingly, runs a close second. In consumer banking, provides access and heirloom (a good investment for future generations) are the elements that matter; in fact, heirloom is crucial in financial services generally, because of the connection between money and inheritance. The broad appeal of smartphones stems from how they deliver multiple elements, including reduces effort, saves time, connects, integrates, variety, fun/entertainment, provides access, and organizes. Manufacturers of these products—Apple, Samsung, and LG—got some of the highest value ratings across all companies studied.Which Elements Are Most Important.Consumers perceive digital firms as offering more value.
Well-designed online businesses make many consumer interactions easier and more convenient. Mainly digital companies thus excel on saves time and avoids hassles. Zappos, for example, scored twice as high as traditional apparel competitors did on those two elements and several others. Overall, it achieved high scores on eight elements—way ahead of traditional retailers. Netflix outperformed traditional TV service providers with scores three times as high on reduces cost, therapeutic value, and nostalgia. Netflix also scored higher than other media providers on variety, illustrating how effectively it has persuaded customers, without any objective evidence, that it offers more titles.Brick-and-mortar businesses can still win on certain elements.
Omnichannel retailers win on some emotional and life-changing elements. For example, they are twice as likely as online-only retailers to score high on badge value, attractiveness, and affiliation and belonging. Consumers who get help from employees in stores give much higher ratings to those retailers; indeed, emotional elements have probably helped some store-based retailers stay in business.Moreover, companies that score high on emotional elements tend to have a higher NPS, on average, than companies that spike only on functional elements. This finding is consistent with previous Bain analysis showing that digital technologies have been transforming physical businesses rather than annihilating them. The fusion of digital and physical channels is proving more powerful than either one alone. That accounts in part for why E*TRADE has invested in physical branches and why retailers such as Warby Parker and Bonobos have launched physical stores. (See “Digital-Physical Mashups,” by Darrell K. Rigby, HBR, September 2014.) These patterns demonstrate that there are many ways to succeed by delivering various kinds of value. Amazon expanded functional excellence in a mass market. Apple excels on 11 elements in the pyramid, several of them high up, which allows the company to charge premium prices. TOMS excels on four elements, and one of them is self-transcendence, because the company gives away one pair of shoes to needy people for every pair bought by a customer. This appeals to a select group of people who care about charitable giving.
Putting the Elements to Work
These patterns are intriguing in their own right, and they illuminate how some companies have chosen to navigate upheaval in their industries. Ultimately, however, the elements must prove their usefulness in solving business challenges, particularly growing revenue. Companies can improve on the elements that form their core value, which will help set them apart from the competition and meet their customers’ needs better. They can also judiciously add elements to expand their value proposition without overhauling their products or services.Companies have begun to use our method in several practical ways, instilling a “hunt for value” mentality in their employees. Although many successful entrepreneurs have instinctively found ways to deliver value as part of their innovation process, that becomes harder as companies grow. The leaders of most large organizations spend less time with customers, and innovation often slows. The elements can help them identify new value once again.Some companies have refined their product designs to deliver more elements. Vanguard, for instance, added a low-fee, partly automated advice platform to its core investment services in order to keep its clients better informed and, in many cases, to reduce risk. A chainsaw manufacturer that felt undifferentiated used the elements of value to identify specific ways of making future products distinctive. It focused on quality (defined as the results of using its products), saves time, and reduces cost. These three elements had the greatest effect on customer satisfaction and loyalty, and the company was able to build competitive advantage with them.Other companies have used the elements to identify where customers perceive strengths and weaknesses. They start by understanding which elements are the most important for their industry and how they stack up on those relative to competitors. If a company trails in the crucial elements, it should improve on them before attempting to add new ones. A large consumer bank found that although it fared relatively well on avoids hassles and saves time, it did not score well on quality. The bank did extensive research into why its quality ratings were low and launched initiatives to strengthen anti-fraud operations and enhance the mobile app experience.The broadest commercial potential of the elements of value model currently lies in developing new types of value to provide. Additions make the most sense when the organization can deliver them while using its current capabilities and making a reasonable investment, and when the elements align with the company’s brand.Sometimes selecting an additional element is fairly straightforward: Acronis and other software providers added cloud backup and storage services to reinforce their brand promise of reduces risk for computer users. Another key element in cloud backup is provides access, because users can reach their files from any computer, tablet, or smartphone connected to the internet.It’s not always so obvious which elements to add, however. One financial services company recognized that if it could attract more consumers to its retail banking business, it might be able to cross-sell insurance, investment advice, and other products. But how could it do that? The company arrived at the best answer through three largely qualitative research stages followed by a fourth, highly quantitative stage.Structured listening.
Working with Bain, the company interviewed current and prospective customers across the United States, individually and in groups. The goal was to understand consumers’ priorities for a checking account, their frustrations, their compromises, and their reasons for using multiple institutions for banking services.“Ideation” sessions.
We then used the elements to explore where improvements in value might resonate with consumers. Bain’s survey data had identified the elements that tend to reinforce customer advocacy in consumer banking, among them provides access, heirloom, and reduces anxiety. Those insights, combined with the consumer research, informed ideation sessions with a project team consisting of people from all customer-touching departments across the bank, not just marketers.The sessions explored which elements might be used to form the nucleus of a new offering. For example, provides access and connects held appeal, because the bank might be able to provide access to mutual funds or connect consumers with financial planners. In the end, however, the team decided that neither element was feasible in this business, primarily for reasons of cost. Instead it developed 12 checking-account concepts that were built around reduces cost, makes money, and reduces anxiety. Reduces cost highlighted low fees, while reduces anxiety emphasized automatic savings. Reduces anxiety was particularly important, because most of the targeted consumers were living paycheck to paycheck and struggling to save money.Customer-centric design of prototype concepts.
Each concept approved by the project team contained a different mix of product features, fees, and levels of customer service. Many of these new concepts could be delivered through an improved smartphone app that would increase customer engagement with the bank. Almost all the targeted consumers used smartphones for financial services (consistent with our earlier observations on the many elements of value delivered by these devices).
It was my sister’s 20th wedding anniversary recently and I was excited to get her a meaningful present to celebrate the milestone. Gifting the perfect present was important to me because I hadn’t seen her in almost two years due to the pandemic. So, I sought advice on gift ideas from people and browsed websites, video platforms, and social media for inspiration. But I ended up confused by the various sources of information. How could I be sure I’d bought the right gift? And could I rely on the delivery service to get the gift to her on time or at all? I needed a source of trustworthy information to help me decide with confidence.
As it turns out, I’m not the only shopper who feels inundated with choice and unsure about purchase decisions. Google’s latest research shows that people experience a wide range of emotions during their buying journey.1 From curiosity and confusion to clarity and conviction, people often struggle to find trusted touchpoints that will guide them along the nonlinear customer journey.
To make purchase decisions with confidence and assurance, shoppers have turned to Search as their number one touchpoint for relevant information.2 Another critical driver of purchase decisions and customer preference is brand presence. When brands provide relevant and trustworthy content online, they increase consumer preference by more than 70%.
People want to shop with clarity and brands can help guide shoppers toward their purchase decisions. To cultivate consumer trust and shape better customer journeys, brands need to first understand the emotions that drive consumer buying behavior. Here, we share three key consumer insights from our latest research that brands can use to develop Search marketing strategies which help people shop with confidence and ease.
Emotions drive decision-making
The customer journey is marked by emotions and people want to feel certainty and confidence before they make a purchase. When they’re skeptical, they want to feel convinced. When they’re confused, they want clarity. People search for information to attain that emotional resolution. In our study, 57% of respondents said they research before making a purchase to feel confident in what they’re purchasing, and 69% said they research to ensure they get the right product or service they need.
This need for emotional resolution drives people to all sources for information: social media, site aggregators, review websites, stores, or family and friends. It’s unsurprising then that 81% of consumers buy products or services from brands that provide information which makes them feel empowered about their purchase decisions.
Search is the top touchpoint for shoppers in their emotional customer journey. It organizes and contextualizes the information available online, and it connects shoppers to other online touchpoints. Seventy-three percent of those who use online touchpoints in their research access one or more touchpoints via a search engine.
As people explore and evaluate their options, brands can help them feel empowered by providing them with useful information, such as clear product specifications, genuine product reviews, or information from experts. Responsive search ads can play an instrumental role in this. The Google Ads machine learning solution uses headlines and descriptions provided by marketers to create combinations of ads that match unique Search queries. This speeds up how people find information and increases conversions for brands by an average of 7%.
People are also finding it more important than before to have sources they can trust in their customer journey, reinforcing the need for brands to build up their credibility. Compared with before COVID-19, 87% of people say it’s now more important to find a trusted source of information.6 Eighty-five percent also say they will purchase from brands that provide trusted information, and 63% won’t buy from brands that provide irrelevant information.
Google’s investment in new technologies and rigorous processes over the years has improved the relevance and quality of Search algorithms and results. The improvements make it easier for people to discover what they need and filter for more authoritative sources. Brands can leverage Search to build customer trust by creating reliable and relevant online content, such as informative landing pages and clear product descriptions, which Search then delivers to potential customers.
The paradox of choice
Researching all relevant information about a product or service is important for consumers to attain emotional resolution about their purchase decision, but an information overload in the process can actually impede decision-making. In our study, 94% of people say it’s important to research before making a purchase.8 Yet at the same time, 80% of respondents who have difficulty making purchase decisions say it’s because they are given too much information or too many options.9 This is where brands can step in to help.
To ease shoppers out of choice paralysis, brands should be present at the right moment to guide shoppers in their search. In our study, 84% of people say they will purchase from a brand that provides helpful information when they’re exploring options.
Brands can use machine learning to provide personalized and relevant information for people researching online. With broad match keywords and Smart Bidding, brands can make sure their ads reach more relevant search queries and drive purchase decisions. Brands that use broad match keywords and Smart Bidding strategies together have seen an increase in conversions of up to 25%.
The purchase journey is an emotional one for customers and brands can support people in their shopping experience. With Search being a top touchpoint in the customer journey, brands can help people feel empowered throughout the process by being present, reliable, relevant, and informative on Search.
Sales organizations use a variety of strategies to attract, engage and convert customers. Each customer is unique, so it s important that organizations understand how to develop strategies that appeal to all types of customers. Emotional selling may be an effective strategy for creating a sales environment that focuses on how different each customer is and how to best serve them. In this article, we define emotional selling, list the benefits of using this technique, discuss methods of emotional selling and provide tips to help you use this strategy successfully.
What is emotional selling?
Emotional selling is a sales management strategy that focuses on a customer s emotional experience. It may relate to their feelings that motivate them to purchase a product or service, or it may relate to convincing them that a product or service may make them feel a certain way. Regardless of the approach, the focus of this sales strategy is on the customer, not the product.
Emotional selling relies on uncovering someone s motivation for purchase. This involves making genuine connections with customers about their feelings, needs and wants. It requires identifying and honing in on their specific feelings to deliver a positive experience. Common emotions that affect buying decisions include:
Altruism: A customer may purchase an item for the altruistic experience of feeling like their purchase contributed to a larger net positive.
Envy: A customer motivated by envy may make a purchase because of their perceived competition with others.
Fear: A customer may make a purchase out of fear that s based on a rational or irrational concern they have, motivating them to make a purchase quickly.
Greed: A customer may purchase something because they want what someone else already has.
Pride: A customer may purchase an item if they hope to feel a sense of pride because someone else may respect them or think they re smart based on the item they bought.
Shame: A customer motivated by shame may purchase something because they re concerned about how they may look or feel if they don t buy it.
Emotional selling requires excellent emotional intelligence skills. Emotional intelligence refers to the ability to listen to others and understand their thoughts and feelings. This is essential for forming connections with others. If salespeople have high emotional intelligence, they re able to better understand the needs of their customers, identify their concerns and provide recommendations that appeal to their emotional values.
Benefits of emotional selling
Here are some of the benefits of emotional selling:
Builds customer loyalty: Effective emotional selling creates strong relationships between customers and salespeople as well as between customers and the products or services. This may provide customers with a reason to return to the store, increasing customer loyalty.
Challenges salespeople: Sales professionals may feel uninspired by talking about the same products every day. However, emotional selling challenges them to find new ways about the same products or services each day by making them relevant to individual customers.
Improves organizational communication: Emotional intelligence is essential for successful emotional selling. Having an emotionally intelligent workforce may improve communication throughout the organization because everyone understands one another better.
Increases customer confidence: This strategy focuses on the customer s needs and how they will feel once they have the product or service. This creates an emotional connection between the customer in the product, helping them feel confident about and invested in their purchase.
Justifies emotional purchases: Emotional selling may help you determine why a customer wants to buy something, even if they re not sure what they want to buy and simply feel like buying something. It allows you to create a connection with them that validates their emotional purchase decisions they may not make otherwise.
Leads to more recommendations: Customers generally feel valued and heard after engaging in emotional selling. They may tell others about their experience, encouraging them to shop with the organization and generating more customer referrals.
Provides a personalized shopping experience: Emotional selling, particularly in physical retail stores, focuses on the individual customer and their feelings. This creates a personalized shopping experience, which may lead to the customer feeling positively about the company.
When customers evaluate a product or service, they weigh its perceived value against the asking price. Marketers have generally focused much of their time and energy on managing the price side of that equation, since raising prices can immediately boost profits. But that’s the easy part: Pricing usually consists of managing a relatively small set of numbers, and pricing analytics and tactics are highly evolved.
What consumers truly value, however, can be difficult to pin down and psychologically complicated. How can leadership teams actively manage value or devise ways to deliver more of it, whether functional (saving time, reducing cost) or emotional (reducing anxiety, providing entertainment)? Discrete choice analysis—which simulates demand for different combinations of product features, pricing, and other components—and similar research techniques are powerful and useful tools, but they are designed to test consumer reactions to preconceived concepts of value—the concepts that managers are accustomed to judging. Coming up with new concepts requires anticipating what else people might consider valuable.
The amount and nature of value in a particular product or service always lie in the eye of the beholder, of course. Yet universal building blocks of value do exist, creating opportunities for companies to improve their performance in current markets or break into new ones. A rigorous model of consumer value allows a company to come up with new combinations of value that its products and services could deliver. The right combinations, our analysis shows, pay off in stronger customer loyalty, greater consumer willingness to try a particular brand, and sustained revenue growth.
We have identified 30 “elements of value”—fundamental attributes in their most essential and discrete forms. These elements fall into four categories: functional, emotional, life changing, and social impact. Some elements are more inwardly focused, primarily addressing consumers’ personal needs. For example, the life-changing element motivation is at the core of Fitbit’s exercise-tracking products. Others are outwardly focused, helping customers interact in or navigate the external world. The functional element organizes is central to The Container Store and Intuit’s TurboTax, because both help consumers deal with complexities in their world.In our research we don’t accept on its face a consumer’s statement that a certain product attribute is important; instead we explore what underlies that statement. For example, when someone says her bank is “convenient,” its value derives from some combination of the functional elements saves time, avoids hassle, simplifies, and reduces effort. And when the owner of a $10,000 Leica talks about the quality of the product and the pictures it takes, an underlying life-changing element is self-actualization, arising from the pride of owning a camera that famous photographers have used for a century.
The elements of value approach extends Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs.”
Three decades of experience doing consumer research and observation for corporate clients led us to identify these 30 fundamental attributes, which we derived from scores of quantitative and qualitative customer studies. Many of the studies involved the well-known interviewing technique “laddering,” which probes consumers’ initial stated preferences to identify what’s driving them.
Our model traces its conceptual roots to the psychologist Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs,” which was first published in 1943. Then a faculty member at Brooklyn College, Maslow argued that human actions arise from an innate desire to fulfill needs ranging from the very basic (security, warmth, food, rest) to the complex (self-esteem, altruism). Almost all marketers today are familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy. The elements of value approach extends his insights by focusing on people as consumers—describing their behavior as it relates to products and services.It may be useful to briefly compare Maslow’s thinking with our model. Marketers have seen his hierarchy organized in a pyramid (although it was later interpreters, not Maslow himself, who expressed his theory that way). At the bottom of the pyramid are physiological and safety needs, and at the top are self-actualization and self-transcendence. The popular assumption has been that people cannot attain the needs at the top until they have met the ones below. Maslow himself took a more nuanced view, realizing that numerous patterns of fulfillment can exist. For example, rock climbers achieve self-actualization in unroped ascents of thousands of feet, ignoring basic safety considerations.Similarly, the elements of value pyramid is a heuristic model—practical rather than theoretically perfect—in which the most powerful forms of value live at the top. To be able to deliver on those higher-order elements, a company must provide at least some of the functional elements required by a particular product category. But many combinations of elements exist in successful products and services today.Most of these elements have been around for centuries and probably longer, although their manifestations have changed over time. Connects was first provided by couriers bearing messages on foot. Then came the Pony Express, the telegraph, the pneumatic post, the telephone, the internet, e-mail, Instagram, Twitter, and other social media sites.The relevance of elements varies according to industry, culture, and demographics. For example, nostalgia or integrates may mean little to subsistence farmers in developing countries, whereas reduces risk and makes money are vital to them. Likewise, throughout history, self-actualization has been out of reach for most consumers, who were focused on survival (even if they found fulfillment through spiritual or worldly pursuits). But anything that saved time, reduced effort, or reduced cost was prized.
Growing Revenue
To test whether the elements of value can be tied to company performance—specifically, a company’s customer relationships and revenue growth—we collaborated with Research Now (an online sampling and data collection company) to survey more than 10,000 U.S. consumers about their perceptions of nearly 50 U.S.-based companies. Each respondent scored one company—from which he or she had bought a product or service during the previous six months—on each element, using a 0–10 scale. When companies had major branded divisions such as insurance or banking, we conducted separate interviews focused on those divisions. We then looked at the relationships among these rankings, each company’s Net Promoter Score (NPS)—a widely used metric for customer loyalty and advocacy—and the company’s recent revenue growth.Our first hypothesis was that the companies that performed well on multiple elements of value would have more loyal customers than the rest. The survey confirmed that. Companies with high scores (defined as an 8 or above) on four or more elements from at least 50% of respondents—such as Apple, Samsung, USAA, TOMS, and Amazon—had, on average, three times the NPS of companies with just one high score, and 20 times the NPS of companies with none. More is clearly better—although it’s obviously unrealistic to try to inject all 30 elements into a product or a service. Even a consumer powerhouse like Apple, one of the best performers we studied, scored high on only 11 of the 30 elements. Companies must choose their elements strategically, as we will illustrate.Our second hypothesis was that companies doing well on multiple elements would grow revenue at a faster rate than others. Strong performance on multiple elements does indeed correlate closely with higher and sustained revenue growth. Companies that scored high on four or more elements had recent revenue growth four times greater than that of companies with only one high score. The winning companies understand how they stack up against competitors and have methodically chosen new elements to deliver over time (though most of them did not use our specific framework).Next we explored whether the elements of value could shed light on the astonishing market share growth of pure-play digital retailers. This, too, was confirmed empirically. Amazon, for instance, achieved high scores on eight mostly functional elements, illustrating the power of adding value to a core offering. It has chosen product features that closely correspond to those in our model. For example, in creating Amazon Prime, in 2005, the company initially focused on delivering reduces cost and saves time by providing unlimited two-day shipping for a flat $79 annual fee. Then it expanded Prime to include streaming media (provides access and fun/entertainment), unlimited photo storage on Amazon servers (reduces risk), and other features. Each new element attracted a large group of consumers and helped raise Amazon’s services far above commodity status. Prime has penetrated nearly 40% of the U.S. retail market, and Amazon has become a juggernaut of consumer value. That allowed the company to raise Prime’s annual fee to $99 in 2015—a large price increase by any standard.
Patterns of Value
To help companies think about managing the value side of the equation more directly, we wanted to understand how the elements translate to successful business performance. Are some of them more important than others? Do companies have to compete at or near the top of the pyramid to be successful? Or can they succeed by excelling on functional elements alone? What value do consumers see in digital versus omnichannel companies? We used our data to identify three patterns of value creation.Some elements do matter more than others.
Across all the industries we studied, perceived quality affects customer advocacy more than any other element. Products and services must attain a certain minimum level, and no other elements can make up for a significant shortfall on this one.After quality, the critical elements depend on the industry. In food and beverages, sensory appeal, not surprisingly, runs a close second. In consumer banking, provides access and heirloom (a good investment for future generations) are the elements that matter; in fact, heirloom is crucial in financial services generally, because of the connection between money and inheritance. The broad appeal of smartphones stems from how they deliver multiple elements, including reduces effort, saves time, connects, integrates, variety, fun/entertainment, provides access, and organizes. Manufacturers of these products—Apple, Samsung, and LG—got some of the highest value ratings across all companies studied.Which Elements Are Most Important.Consumers perceive digital firms as offering more value.
Well-designed online businesses make many consumer interactions easier and more convenient. Mainly digital companies thus excel on saves time and avoids hassles. Zappos, for example, scored twice as high as traditional apparel competitors did on those two elements and several others. Overall, it achieved high scores on eight elements—way ahead of traditional retailers. Netflix outperformed traditional TV service providers with scores three times as high on reduces cost, therapeutic value, and nostalgia. Netflix also scored higher than other media providers on variety, illustrating how effectively it has persuaded customers, without any objective evidence, that it offers more titles.Brick-and-mortar businesses can still win on certain elements.
Omnichannel retailers win on some emotional and life-changing elements. For example, they are twice as likely as online-only retailers to score high on badge value, attractiveness, and affiliation and belonging. Consumers who get help from employees in stores give much higher ratings to those retailers; indeed, emotional elements have probably helped some store-based retailers stay in business.Moreover, companies that score high on emotional elements tend to have a higher NPS, on average, than companies that spike only on functional elements. This finding is consistent with previous Bain analysis showing that digital technologies have been transforming physical businesses rather than annihilating them. The fusion of digital and physical channels is proving more powerful than either one alone. That accounts in part for why E*TRADE has invested in physical branches and why retailers such as Warby Parker and Bonobos have launched physical stores. (See “Digital-Physical Mashups,” by Darrell K. Rigby, HBR, September 2014.) These patterns demonstrate that there are many ways to succeed by delivering various kinds of value. Amazon expanded functional excellence in a mass market. Apple excels on 11 elements in the pyramid, several of them high up, which allows the company to charge premium prices. TOMS excels on four elements, and one of them is self-transcendence, because the company gives away one pair of shoes to needy people for every pair bought by a customer. This appeals to a select group of people who care about charitable giving.
Putting the Elements to Work
These patterns are intriguing in their own right, and they illuminate how some companies have chosen to navigate upheaval in their industries. Ultimately, however, the elements must prove their usefulness in solving business challenges, particularly growing revenue. Companies can improve on the elements that form their core value, which will help set them apart from the competition and meet their customers’ needs better. They can also judiciously add elements to expand their value proposition without overhauling their products or services.Companies have begun to use our method in several practical ways, instilling a “hunt for value” mentality in their employees. Although many successful entrepreneurs have instinctively found ways to deliver value as part of their innovation process, that becomes harder as companies grow. The leaders of most large organizations spend less time with customers, and innovation often slows. The elements can help them identify new value once again.Some companies have refined their product designs to deliver more elements. Vanguard, for instance, added a low-fee, partly automated advice platform to its core investment services in order to keep its clients better informed and, in many cases, to reduce risk. A chainsaw manufacturer that felt undifferentiated used the elements of value to identify specific ways of making future products distinctive. It focused on quality (defined as the results of using its products), saves time, and reduces cost. These three elements had the greatest effect on customer satisfaction and loyalty, and the company was able to build competitive advantage with them.Other companies have used the elements to identify where customers perceive strengths and weaknesses. They start by understanding which elements are the most important for their industry and how they stack up on those relative to competitors. If a company trails in the crucial elements, it should improve on them before attempting to add new ones. A large consumer bank found that although it fared relatively well on avoids hassles and saves time, it did not score well on quality. The bank did extensive research into why its quality ratings were low and launched initiatives to strengthen anti-fraud operations and enhance the mobile app experience.The broadest commercial potential of the elements of value model currently lies in developing new types of value to provide. Additions make the most sense when the organization can deliver them while using its current capabilities and making a reasonable investment, and when the elements align with the company’s brand.Sometimes selecting an additional element is fairly straightforward: Acronis and other software providers added cloud backup and storage services to reinforce their brand promise of reduces risk for computer users. Another key element in cloud backup is provides access, because users can reach their files from any computer, tablet, or smartphone connected to the internet.It’s not always so obvious which elements to add, however. One financial services company recognized that if it could attract more consumers to its retail banking business, it might be able to cross-sell insurance, investment advice, and other products. But how could it do that? The company arrived at the best answer through three largely qualitative research stages followed by a fourth, highly quantitative stage.Structured listening.
Working with Bain, the company interviewed current and prospective customers across the United States, individually and in groups. The goal was to understand consumers’ priorities for a checking account, their frustrations, their compromises, and their reasons for using multiple institutions for banking services.“Ideation” sessions.
We then used the elements to explore where improvements in value might resonate with consumers. Bain’s survey data had identified the elements that tend to reinforce customer advocacy in consumer banking, among them provides access, heirloom, and reduces anxiety. Those insights, combined with the consumer research, informed ideation sessions with a project team consisting of people from all customer-touching departments across the bank, not just marketers.The sessions explored which elements might be used to form the nucleus of a new offering. For example, provides access and connects held appeal, because the bank might be able to provide access to mutual funds or connect consumers with financial planners. In the end, however, the team decided that neither element was feasible in this business, primarily for reasons of cost. Instead it developed 12 checking-account concepts that were built around reduces cost, makes money, and reduces anxiety. Reduces cost highlighted low fees, while reduces anxiety emphasized automatic savings. Reduces anxiety was particularly important, because most of the targeted consumers were living paycheck to paycheck and struggling to save money.Customer-centric design of prototype concepts.
Each concept approved by the project team contained a different mix of product features, fees, and levels of customer service. Many of these new concepts could be delivered through an improved smartphone app that would increase customer engagement with the bank. Almost all the targeted consumers used smartphones for financial services (consistent with our earlier observations on the many elements of value delivered by these devices).
It was my sister’s 20th wedding anniversary recently and I was excited to get her a meaningful present to celebrate the milestone. Gifting the perfect present was important to me because I hadn’t seen her in almost two years due to the pandemic. So, I sought advice on gift ideas from people and browsed websites, video platforms, and social media for inspiration. But I ended up confused by the various sources of information. How could I be sure I’d bought the right gift? And could I rely on the delivery service to get the gift to her on time or at all? I needed a source of trustworthy information to help me decide with confidence.
As it turns out, I’m not the only shopper who feels inundated with choice and unsure about purchase decisions. Google’s latest research shows that people experience a wide range of emotions during their buying journey.1 From curiosity and confusion to clarity and conviction, people often struggle to find trusted touchpoints that will guide them along the nonlinear customer journey.
To make purchase decisions with confidence and assurance, shoppers have turned to Search as their number one touchpoint for relevant information.2 Another critical driver of purchase decisions and customer preference is brand presence. When brands provide relevant and trustworthy content online, they increase consumer preference by more than 70%.
People want to shop with clarity and brands can help guide shoppers toward their purchase decisions. To cultivate consumer trust and shape better customer journeys, brands need to first understand the emotions that drive consumer buying behavior. Here, we share three key consumer insights from our latest research that brands can use to develop Search marketing strategies which help people shop with confidence and ease.
Emotions drive decision-making
The customer journey is marked by emotions and people want to feel certainty and confidence before they make a purchase. When they’re skeptical, they want to feel convinced. When they’re confused, they want clarity. People search for information to attain that emotional resolution. In our study, 57% of respondents said they research before making a purchase to feel confident in what they’re purchasing, and 69% said they research to ensure they get the right product or service they need.
This need for emotional resolution drives people to all sources for information: social media, site aggregators, review websites, stores, or family and friends. It’s unsurprising then that 81% of consumers buy products or services from brands that provide information which makes them feel empowered about their purchase decisions.
Search is the top touchpoint for shoppers in their emotional customer journey. It organizes and contextualizes the information available online, and it connects shoppers to other online touchpoints. Seventy-three percent of those who use online touchpoints in their research access one or more touchpoints via a search engine.
As people explore and evaluate their options, brands can help them feel empowered by providing them with useful information, such as clear product specifications, genuine product reviews, or information from experts. Responsive search ads can play an instrumental role in this. The Google Ads machine learning solution uses headlines and descriptions provided by marketers to create combinations of ads that match unique Search queries. This speeds up how people find information and increases conversions for brands by an average of 7%.
People are also finding it more important than before to have sources they can trust in their customer journey, reinforcing the need for brands to build up their credibility. Compared with before COVID-19, 87% of people say it’s now more important to find a trusted source of information.6 Eighty-five percent also say they will purchase from brands that provide trusted information, and 63% won’t buy from brands that provide irrelevant information.
Google’s investment in new technologies and rigorous processes over the years has improved the relevance and quality of Search algorithms and results. The improvements make it easier for people to discover what they need and filter for more authoritative sources. Brands can leverage Search to build customer trust by creating reliable and relevant online content, such as informative landing pages and clear product descriptions, which Search then delivers to potential customers.
The paradox of choice
Researching all relevant information about a product or service is important for consumers to attain emotional resolution about their purchase decision, but an information overload in the process can actually impede decision-making. In our study, 94% of people say it’s important to research before making a purchase.8 Yet at the same time, 80% of respondents who have difficulty making purchase decisions say it’s because they are given too much information or too many options.9 This is where brands can step in to help.
To ease shoppers out of choice paralysis, brands should be present at the right moment to guide shoppers in their search. In our study, 84% of people say they will purchase from a brand that provides helpful information when they’re exploring options.
Brands can use machine learning to provide personalized and relevant information for people researching online. With broad match keywords and Smart Bidding, brands can make sure their ads reach more relevant search queries and drive purchase decisions. Brands that use broad match keywords and Smart Bidding strategies together have seen an increase in conversions of up to 25%.
The purchase journey is an emotional one for customers and brands can support people in their shopping experience. With Search being a top touchpoint in the customer journey, brands can help people feel empowered throughout the process by being present, reliable, relevant, and informative on Search.
Sales organizations use a variety of strategies to attract, engage and convert customers. Each customer is unique, so it s important that organizations understand how to develop strategies that appeal to all types of customers. Emotional selling may be an effective strategy for creating a sales environment that focuses on how different each customer is and how to best serve them. In this article, we define emotional selling, list the benefits of using this technique, discuss methods of emotional selling and provide tips to help you use this strategy successfully.
What is emotional selling?
Emotional selling is a sales management strategy that focuses on a customer s emotional experience. It may relate to their feelings that motivate them to purchase a product or service, or it may relate to convincing them that a product or service may make them feel a certain way. Regardless of the approach, the focus of this sales strategy is on the customer, not the product.
Emotional selling relies on uncovering someone s motivation for purchase. This involves making genuine connections with customers about their feelings, needs and wants. It requires identifying and honing in on their specific feelings to deliver a positive experience. Common emotions that affect buying decisions include:
Altruism: A customer may purchase an item for the altruistic experience of feeling like their purchase contributed to a larger net positive.
Envy: A customer motivated by envy may make a purchase because of their perceived competition with others.
Fear: A customer may make a purchase out of fear that s based on a rational or irrational concern they have, motivating them to make a purchase quickly.
Greed: A customer may purchase something because they want what someone else already has.
Pride: A customer may purchase an item if they hope to feel a sense of pride because someone else may respect them or think they re smart based on the item they bought.
Shame: A customer motivated by shame may purchase something because they re concerned about how they may look or feel if they don t buy it.
Emotional selling requires excellent emotional intelligence skills. Emotional intelligence refers to the ability to listen to others and understand their thoughts and feelings. This is essential for forming connections with others. If salespeople have high emotional intelligence, they re able to better understand the needs of their customers, identify their concerns and provide recommendations that appeal to their emotional values.
Benefits of emotional selling
Here are some of the benefits of emotional selling:
Builds customer loyalty: Effective emotional selling creates strong relationships between customers and salespeople as well as between customers and the products or services. This may provide customers with a reason to return to the store, increasing customer loyalty.
Challenges salespeople: Sales professionals may feel uninspired by talking about the same products every day. However, emotional selling challenges them to find new ways about the same products or services each day by making them relevant to individual customers.
Improves organizational communication: Emotional intelligence is essential for successful emotional selling. Having an emotionally intelligent workforce may improve communication throughout the organization because everyone understands one another better.
Increases customer confidence: This strategy focuses on the customer s needs and how they will feel once they have the product or service. This creates an emotional connection between the customer in the product, helping them feel confident about and invested in their purchase.
Justifies emotional purchases: Emotional selling may help you determine why a customer wants to buy something, even if they re not sure what they want to buy and simply feel like buying something. It allows you to create a connection with them that validates their emotional purchase decisions they may not make otherwise.
Leads to more recommendations: Customers generally feel valued and heard after engaging in emotional selling. They may tell others about their experience, encouraging them to shop with the organization and generating more customer referrals.
Provides a personalized shopping experience: Emotional selling, particularly in physical retail stores, focuses on the individual customer and their feelings. This creates a personalized shopping experience, which may lead to the customer feeling positively about the company.
When customers evaluate a product or service, they weigh its perceived value against the asking price. Marketers have generally focused much of their time and energy on managing the price side of that equation, since raising prices can immediately boost profits. But that’s the easy part: Pricing usually consists of managing a relatively small set of numbers, and pricing analytics and tactics are highly evolved.
What consumers truly value, however, can be difficult to pin down and psychologically complicated. How can leadership teams actively manage value or devise ways to deliver more of it, whether functional (saving time, reducing cost) or emotional (reducing anxiety, providing entertainment)? Discrete choice analysis—which simulates demand for different combinations of product features, pricing, and other components—and similar research techniques are powerful and useful tools, but they are designed to test consumer reactions to preconceived concepts of value—the concepts that managers are accustomed to judging. Coming up with new concepts requires anticipating what else people might consider valuable.
The amount and nature of value in a particular product or service always lie in the eye of the beholder, of course. Yet universal building blocks of value do exist, creating opportunities for companies to improve their performance in current markets or break into new ones. A rigorous model of consumer value allows a company to come up with new combinations of value that its products and services could deliver. The right combinations, our analysis shows, pay off in stronger customer loyalty, greater consumer willingness to try a particular brand, and sustained revenue growth.
We have identified 30 “elements of value”—fundamental attributes in their most essential and discrete forms. These elements fall into four categories: functional, emotional, life changing, and social impact. Some elements are more inwardly focused, primarily addressing consumers’ personal needs. For example, the life-changing element motivation is at the core of Fitbit’s exercise-tracking products. Others are outwardly focused, helping customers interact in or navigate the external world. The functional element organizes is central to The Container Store and Intuit’s TurboTax, because both help consumers deal with complexities in their world.In our research we don’t accept on its face a consumer’s statement that a certain product attribute is important; instead we explore what underlies that statement. For example, when someone says her bank is “convenient,” its value derives from some combination of the functional elements saves time, avoids hassle, simplifies, and reduces effort. And when the owner of a $10,000 Leica talks about the quality of the product and the pictures it takes, an underlying life-changing element is self-actualization, arising from the pride of owning a camera that famous photographers have used for a century.
The elements of value approach extends Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs.”
Three decades of experience doing consumer research and observation for corporate clients led us to identify these 30 fundamental attributes, which we derived from scores of quantitative and qualitative customer studies. Many of the studies involved the well-known interviewing technique “laddering,” which probes consumers’ initial stated preferences to identify what’s driving them.
Our model traces its conceptual roots to the psychologist Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs,” which was first published in 1943. Then a faculty member at Brooklyn College, Maslow argued that human actions arise from an innate desire to fulfill needs ranging from the very basic (security, warmth, food, rest) to the complex (self-esteem, altruism). Almost all marketers today are familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy. The elements of value approach extends his insights by focusing on people as consumers—describing their behavior as it relates to products and services.It may be useful to briefly compare Maslow’s thinking with our model. Marketers have seen his hierarchy organized in a pyramid (although it was later interpreters, not Maslow himself, who expressed his theory that way). At the bottom of the pyramid are physiological and safety needs, and at the top are self-actualization and self-transcendence. The popular assumption has been that people cannot attain the needs at the top until they have met the ones below. Maslow himself took a more nuanced view, realizing that numerous patterns of fulfillment can exist. For example, rock climbers achieve self-actualization in unroped ascents of thousands of feet, ignoring basic safety considerations.Similarly, the elements of value pyramid is a heuristic model—practical rather than theoretically perfect—in which the most powerful forms of value live at the top. To be able to deliver on those higher-order elements, a company must provide at least some of the functional elements required by a particular product category. But many combinations of elements exist in successful products and services today.Most of these elements have been around for centuries and probably longer, although their manifestations have changed over time. Connects was first provided by couriers bearing messages on foot. Then came the Pony Express, the telegraph, the pneumatic post, the telephone, the internet, e-mail, Instagram, Twitter, and other social media sites.The relevance of elements varies according to industry, culture, and demographics. For example, nostalgia or integrates may mean little to subsistence farmers in developing countries, whereas reduces risk and makes money are vital to them. Likewise, throughout history, self-actualization has been out of reach for most consumers, who were focused on survival (even if they found fulfillment through spiritual or worldly pursuits). But anything that saved time, reduced effort, or reduced cost was prized.
Growing Revenue
To test whether the elements of value can be tied to company performance—specifically, a company’s customer relationships and revenue growth—we collaborated with Research Now (an online sampling and data collection company) to survey more than 10,000 U.S. consumers about their perceptions of nearly 50 U.S.-based companies. Each respondent scored one company—from which he or she had bought a product or service during the previous six months—on each element, using a 0–10 scale. When companies had major branded divisions such as insurance or banking, we conducted separate interviews focused on those divisions. We then looked at the relationships among these rankings, each company’s Net Promoter Score (NPS)—a widely used metric for customer loyalty and advocacy—and the company’s recent revenue growth.Our first hypothesis was that the companies that performed well on multiple elements of value would have more loyal customers than the rest. The survey confirmed that. Companies with high scores (defined as an 8 or above) on four or more elements from at least 50% of respondents—such as Apple, Samsung, USAA, TOMS, and Amazon—had, on average, three times the NPS of companies with just one high score, and 20 times the NPS of companies with none. More is clearly better—although it’s obviously unrealistic to try to inject all 30 elements into a product or a service. Even a consumer powerhouse like Apple, one of the best performers we studied, scored high on only 11 of the 30 elements. Companies must choose their elements strategically, as we will illustrate.Our second hypothesis was that companies doing well on multiple elements would grow revenue at a faster rate than others. Strong performance on multiple elements does indeed correlate closely with higher and sustained revenue growth. Companies that scored high on four or more elements had recent revenue growth four times greater than that of companies with only one high score. The winning companies understand how they stack up against competitors and have methodically chosen new elements to deliver over time (though most of them did not use our specific framework).Next we explored whether the elements of value could shed light on the astonishing market share growth of pure-play digital retailers. This, too, was confirmed empirically. Amazon, for instance, achieved high scores on eight mostly functional elements, illustrating the power of adding value to a core offering. It has chosen product features that closely correspond to those in our model. For example, in creating Amazon Prime, in 2005, the company initially focused on delivering reduces cost and saves time by providing unlimited two-day shipping for a flat $79 annual fee. Then it expanded Prime to include streaming media (provides access and fun/entertainment), unlimited photo storage on Amazon servers (reduces risk), and other features. Each new element attracted a large group of consumers and helped raise Amazon’s services far above commodity status. Prime has penetrated nearly 40% of the U.S. retail market, and Amazon has become a juggernaut of consumer value. That allowed the company to raise Prime’s annual fee to $99 in 2015—a large price increase by any standard.
Patterns of Value
To help companies think about managing the value side of the equation more directly, we wanted to understand how the elements translate to successful business performance. Are some of them more important than others? Do companies have to compete at or near the top of the pyramid to be successful? Or can they succeed by excelling on functional elements alone? What value do consumers see in digital versus omnichannel companies? We used our data to identify three patterns of value creation.Some elements do matter more than others.
Across all the industries we studied, perceived quality affects customer advocacy more than any other element. Products and services must attain a certain minimum level, and no other elements can make up for a significant shortfall on this one.After quality, the critical elements depend on the industry. In food and beverages, sensory appeal, not surprisingly, runs a close second. In consumer banking, provides access and heirloom (a good investment for future generations) are the elements that matter; in fact, heirloom is crucial in financial services generally, because of the connection between money and inheritance. The broad appeal of smartphones stems from how they deliver multiple elements, including reduces effort, saves time, connects, integrates, variety, fun/entertainment, provides access, and organizes. Manufacturers of these products—Apple, Samsung, and LG—got some of the highest value ratings across all companies studied.Which Elements Are Most Important.Consumers perceive digital firms as offering more value.
Well-designed online businesses make many consumer interactions easier and more convenient. Mainly digital companies thus excel on saves time and avoids hassles. Zappos, for example, scored twice as high as traditional apparel competitors did on those two elements and several others. Overall, it achieved high scores on eight elements—way ahead of traditional retailers. Netflix outperformed traditional TV service providers with scores three times as high on reduces cost, therapeutic value, and nostalgia. Netflix also scored higher than other media providers on variety, illustrating how effectively it has persuaded customers, without any objective evidence, that it offers more titles.Brick-and-mortar businesses can still win on certain elements.
Omnichannel retailers win on some emotional and life-changing elements. For example, they are twice as likely as online-only retailers to score high on badge value, attractiveness, and affiliation and belonging. Consumers who get help from employees in stores give much higher ratings to those retailers; indeed, emotional elements have probably helped some store-based retailers stay in business.Moreover, companies that score high on emotional elements tend to have a higher NPS, on average, than companies that spike only on functional elements. This finding is consistent with previous Bain analysis showing that digital technologies have been transforming physical businesses rather than annihilating them. The fusion of digital and physical channels is proving more powerful than either one alone. That accounts in part for why E*TRADE has invested in physical branches and why retailers such as Warby Parker and Bonobos have launched physical stores. (See “Digital-Physical Mashups,” by Darrell K. Rigby, HBR, September 2014.) These patterns demonstrate that there are many ways to succeed by delivering various kinds of value. Amazon expanded functional excellence in a mass market. Apple excels on 11 elements in the pyramid, several of them high up, which allows the company to charge premium prices. TOMS excels on four elements, and one of them is self-transcendence, because the company gives away one pair of shoes to needy people for every pair bought by a customer. This appeals to a select group of people who care about charitable giving.
Putting the Elements to Work
These patterns are intriguing in their own right, and they illuminate how some companies have chosen to navigate upheaval in their industries. Ultimately, however, the elements must prove their usefulness in solving business challenges, particularly growing revenue. Companies can improve on the elements that form their core value, which will help set them apart from the competition and meet their customers’ needs better. They can also judiciously add elements to expand their value proposition without overhauling their products or services.Companies have begun to use our method in several practical ways, instilling a “hunt for value” mentality in their employees. Although many successful entrepreneurs have instinctively found ways to deliver value as part of their innovation process, that becomes harder as companies grow. The leaders of most large organizations spend less time with customers, and innovation often slows. The elements can help them identify new value once again.Some companies have refined their product designs to deliver more elements. Vanguard, for instance, added a low-fee, partly automated advice platform to its core investment services in order to keep its clients better informed and, in many cases, to reduce risk. A chainsaw manufacturer that felt undifferentiated used the elements of value to identify specific ways of making future products distinctive. It focused on quality (defined as the results of using its products), saves time, and reduces cost. These three elements had the greatest effect on customer satisfaction and loyalty, and the company was able to build competitive advantage with them.Other companies have used the elements to identify where customers perceive strengths and weaknesses. They start by understanding which elements are the most important for their industry and how they stack up on those relative to competitors. If a company trails in the crucial elements, it should improve on them before attempting to add new ones. A large consumer bank found that although it fared relatively well on avoids hassles and saves time, it did not score well on quality. The bank did extensive research into why its quality ratings were low and launched initiatives to strengthen anti-fraud operations and enhance the mobile app experience.The broadest commercial potential of the elements of value model currently lies in developing new types of value to provide. Additions make the most sense when the organization can deliver them while using its current capabilities and making a reasonable investment, and when the elements align with the company’s brand.Sometimes selecting an additional element is fairly straightforward: Acronis and other software providers added cloud backup and storage services to reinforce their brand promise of reduces risk for computer users. Another key element in cloud backup is provides access, because users can reach their files from any computer, tablet, or smartphone connected to the internet.It’s not always so obvious which elements to add, however. One financial services company recognized that if it could attract more consumers to its retail banking business, it might be able to cross-sell insurance, investment advice, and other products. But how could it do that? The company arrived at the best answer through three largely qualitative research stages followed by a fourth, highly quantitative stage.Structured listening.
Working with Bain, the company interviewed current and prospective customers across the United States, individually and in groups. The goal was to understand consumers’ priorities for a checking account, their frustrations, their compromises, and their reasons for using multiple institutions for banking services.“Ideation” sessions.
We then used the elements to explore where improvements in value might resonate with consumers. Bain’s survey data had identified the elements that tend to reinforce customer advocacy in consumer banking, among them provides access, heirloom, and reduces anxiety. Those insights, combined with the consumer research, informed ideation sessions with a project team consisting of people from all customer-touching departments across the bank, not just marketers.The sessions explored which elements might be used to form the nucleus of a new offering. For example, provides access and connects held appeal, because the bank might be able to provide access to mutual funds or connect consumers with financial planners. In the end, however, the team decided that neither element was feasible in this business, primarily for reasons of cost. Instead it developed 12 checking-account concepts that were built around reduces cost, makes money, and reduces anxiety. Reduces cost highlighted low fees, while reduces anxiety emphasized automatic savings. Reduces anxiety was particularly important, because most of the targeted consumers were living paycheck to paycheck and struggling to save money.Customer-centric design of prototype concepts.
Each concept approved by the project team contained a different mix of product features, fees, and levels of customer service. Many of these new concepts could be delivered through an improved smartphone app that would increase customer engagement with the bank. Almost all the targeted consumers used smartphones for financial services (consistent with our earlier observations on the many elements of value delivered by these devices).
It was my sister’s 20th wedding anniversary recently and I was excited to get her a meaningful present to celebrate the milestone. Gifting the perfect present was important to me because I hadn’t seen her in almost two years due to the pandemic. So, I sought advice on gift ideas from people and browsed websites, video platforms, and social media for inspiration. But I ended up confused by the various sources of information. How could I be sure I’d bought the right gift? And could I rely on the delivery service to get the gift to her on time or at all? I needed a source of trustworthy information to help me decide with confidence.
As it turns out, I’m not the only shopper who feels inundated with choice and unsure about purchase decisions. Google’s latest research shows that people experience a wide range of emotions during their buying journey.1 From curiosity and confusion to clarity and conviction, people often struggle to find trusted touchpoints that will guide them along the nonlinear customer journey.
To make purchase decisions with confidence and assurance, shoppers have turned to Search as their number one touchpoint for relevant information.2 Another critical driver of purchase decisions and customer preference is brand presence. When brands provide relevant and trustworthy content online, they increase consumer preference by more than 70%.
People want to shop with clarity and brands can help guide shoppers toward their purchase decisions. To cultivate consumer trust and shape better customer journeys, brands need to first understand the emotions that drive consumer buying behavior. Here, we share three key consumer insights from our latest research that brands can use to develop Search marketing strategies which help people shop with confidence and ease.
Emotions drive decision-making
The customer journey is marked by emotions and people want to feel certainty and confidence before they make a purchase. When they’re skeptical, they want to feel convinced. When they’re confused, they want clarity. People search for information to attain that emotional resolution. In our study, 57% of respondents said they research before making a purchase to feel confident in what they’re purchasing, and 69% said they research to ensure they get the right product or service they need.
This need for emotional resolution drives people to all sources for information: social media, site aggregators, review websites, stores, or family and friends. It’s unsurprising then that 81% of consumers buy products or services from brands that provide information which makes them feel empowered about their purchase decisions.
Search is the top touchpoint for shoppers in their emotional customer journey. It organizes and contextualizes the information available online, and it connects shoppers to other online touchpoints. Seventy-three percent of those who use online touchpoints in their research access one or more touchpoints via a search engine.
As people explore and evaluate their options, brands can help them feel empowered by providing them with useful information, such as clear product specifications, genuine product reviews, or information from experts. Responsive search ads can play an instrumental role in this. The Google Ads machine learning solution uses headlines and descriptions provided by marketers to create combinations of ads that match unique Search queries. This speeds up how people find information and increases conversions for brands by an average of 7%.
People are also finding it more important than before to have sources they can trust in their customer journey, reinforcing the need for brands to build up their credibility. Compared with before COVID-19, 87% of people say it’s now more important to find a trusted source of information.6 Eighty-five percent also say they will purchase from brands that provide trusted information, and 63% won’t buy from brands that provide irrelevant information.
Google’s investment in new technologies and rigorous processes over the years has improved the relevance and quality of Search algorithms and results. The improvements make it easier for people to discover what they need and filter for more authoritative sources. Brands can leverage Search to build customer trust by creating reliable and relevant online content, such as informative landing pages and clear product descriptions, which Search then delivers to potential customers.
The paradox of choice
Researching all relevant information about a product or service is important for consumers to attain emotional resolution about their purchase decision, but an information overload in the process can actually impede decision-making. In our study, 94% of people say it’s important to research before making a purchase.8 Yet at the same time, 80% of respondents who have difficulty making purchase decisions say it’s because they are given too much information or too many options.9 This is where brands can step in to help.
To ease shoppers out of choice paralysis, brands should be present at the right moment to guide shoppers in their search. In our study, 84% of people say they will purchase from a brand that provides helpful information when they’re exploring options.
Brands can use machine learning to provide personalized and relevant information for people researching online. With broad match keywords and Smart Bidding, brands can make sure their ads reach more relevant search queries and drive purchase decisions. Brands that use broad match keywords and Smart Bidding strategies together have seen an increase in conversions of up to 25%.
The purchase journey is an emotional one for customers and brands can support people in their shopping experience. With Search being a top touchpoint in the customer journey, brands can help people feel empowered throughout the process by being present, reliable, relevant, and informative on Search.
Sales organizations use a variety of strategies to attract, engage and convert customers. Each customer is unique, so it s important that organizations understand how to develop strategies that appeal to all types of customers. Emotional selling may be an effective strategy for creating a sales environment that focuses on how different each customer is and how to best serve them. In this article, we define emotional selling, list the benefits of using this technique, discuss methods of emotional selling and provide tips to help you use this strategy successfully.
What is emotional selling?
Emotional selling is a sales management strategy that focuses on a customer s emotional experience. It may relate to their feelings that motivate them to purchase a product or service, or it may relate to convincing them that a product or service may make them feel a certain way. Regardless of the approach, the focus of this sales strategy is on the customer, not the product.
Emotional selling relies on uncovering someone s motivation for purchase. This involves making genuine connections with customers about their feelings, needs and wants. It requires identifying and honing in on their specific feelings to deliver a positive experience. Common emotions that affect buying decisions include:
Altruism: A customer may purchase an item for the altruistic experience of feeling like their purchase contributed to a larger net positive.
Envy: A customer motivated by envy may make a purchase because of their perceived competition with others.
Fear: A customer may make a purchase out of fear that s based on a rational or irrational concern they have, motivating them to make a purchase quickly.
Greed: A customer may purchase something because they want what someone else already has.
Pride: A customer may purchase an item if they hope to feel a sense of pride because someone else may respect them or think they re smart based on the item they bought.
Shame: A customer motivated by shame may purchase something because they re concerned about how they may look or feel if they don t buy it.
Emotional selling requires excellent emotional intelligence skills. Emotional intelligence refers to the ability to listen to others and understand their thoughts and feelings. This is essential for forming connections with others. If salespeople have high emotional intelligence, they re able to better understand the needs of their customers, identify their concerns and provide recommendations that appeal to their emotional values.
Benefits of emotional selling
Here are some of the benefits of emotional selling:
Builds customer loyalty: Effective emotional selling creates strong relationships between customers and salespeople as well as between customers and the products or services. This may provide customers with a reason to return to the store, increasing customer loyalty.
Challenges salespeople: Sales professionals may feel uninspired by talking about the same products every day. However, emotional selling challenges them to find new ways about the same products or services each day by making them relevant to individual customers.
Improves organizational communication: Emotional intelligence is essential for successful emotional selling. Having an emotionally intelligent workforce may improve communication throughout the organization because everyone understands one another better.
Increases customer confidence: This strategy focuses on the customer s needs and how they will feel once they have the product or service. This creates an emotional connection between the customer in the product, helping them feel confident about and invested in their purchase.
Justifies emotional purchases: Emotional selling may help you determine why a customer wants to buy something, even if they re not sure what they want to buy and simply feel like buying something. It allows you to create a connection with them that validates their emotional purchase decisions they may not make otherwise.
Leads to more recommendations: Customers generally feel valued and heard after engaging in emotional selling. They may tell others about their experience, encouraging them to shop with the organization and generating more customer referrals.
Provides a personalized shopping experience: Emotional selling, particularly in physical retail stores, focuses on the individual customer and their feelings. This creates a personalized shopping experience, which may lead to the customer feeling positively about the company.