emotions to outcomes
Howard Tiersky, the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Winning Digital Customers: The Antidote to Irrelevance which was listed by Forbes as “One of the ten most important business books of 2021.”
Howard was named by IDG as “One of The Top 10 Digital Transformation Influencers to Follow Today,” and by Enterprise Management 360° as “One of the Top 10 Digital Transformation Influencers That Will Change Your World.”
As an entrepreneur, Howard has launched two successful companies that help large brands transform to thrive in the digital age: FROM, The Digital Transformation Agency and Innovation Loft. Among his dozens of Fortune 1000 clients are Verizon, NBC, Universal Studios, JPMC, Morgan Stanley, the NBA, Visa, and digital leaders like Facebook, Spotify, and Amazon.
“ The #1 Driver of Business Outcomes.”
There's various data that supports this idea. For example, 80% of all consumer decisions are made emotionally, that sort of thing. There's a variety of studies, you've probably seen some of these studies, that support this idea of emotional decision making. For me personally, having used these principles as part of the work that I have done for 25 to 30 years, I’ve just seen it work over and over and over and over.
So, at a certain point it's like asking, how are you sure there’s gravity?
I mean, what more do you want to know?
“ Survive and Feel Better.”
In the end, what else is there in life but making sure we survive and the things that make us feel good?
That’s why we buy anything.
If we buy something, it's either to help us survive and therefore avoid the negative feelings of being in survival anxiety. Or to help us feel better.
And I would suggest to you, it's difficult to come up with any product or service that someone buys where the ultimate reason they're making that purchase is not for some form of those two things:
Survive and Feel Better.
“ get the best read of what’s happening emotionally.”
So, understanding what's making people unhappy and what's making people happy. We want to make sure we know what’s working well. Can we do even more of what people like? That's one way to create more positive emotions and to do less of the things that are causing negative emotions.
Of course, this type of research is always better to do in person. One of the things that we've lost recently is we used to do more than 80% of our research in person. Now it's mostly by Zoom because of COVID, but also because of course it's much less expensive.
Unfortunately, you don't see all the body language with remote research. You don't always see the posture. You don't always see, like my hands are off screen right now, so you can't see what I’m doing.
So that's a loss because the emotion is not only on the face, but also in how we interact and react within an environment.
A Researcher must observe people in their environment to be able to get the best read of what’s happening emotionally.
There are four primary places we look for emotion.
Words – language as verbal expression.
Tone of Voice – intonation and intensity.
Facial Expression – micro-expressions.
Body Language – posture and movement.
“ People have motivations to lie.”
First, it’s probably easier to get people to take those surveys because it's going to feel like less work. And second, you're going to get so much more information because if the AI can read your tone of voice, we can get that emotional content. And I just think that's going to be super valuable.
One of our concerns about surveys is that some people will lie on surveys depending on what the survey is about. People have motivations to lie, and if AI can detect authenticity, we have the potential to throw out some surveys, for example, or report back the data and say if you look at all the data, here's what it shows. But if we only look at people in the upper half of authenticity, we might get a different result.
So, I think these are all just really exciting opportunities to leverage AI emotional analysis to be even better at being able to understand and research these types of things.
“ the problem with corporate change.”
So, the question is, even if it's a little scary, how can we get people to see this more as the skydiving scenario? And I think it's by involvement, it's by giving people a voice. It's by including them in the change, helping them plan the change, giving them the feeling that they have some control over this change.