What Are “Emotional Priorities” and “Emotional Drivers” and Why do They Matter?

Conventional marketing theory teaches that buyers are rational, especially in high-stakes markets.

A given buyer values a certain set of features and benefits, and if these are offered up in an appealing way the buyer will buy whatever the marketer is selling.

That’s nice in theory, but advances in neuroscience have revealed that it doesn’t work that way at all.

First, you need to get the buyer to listen.

There are thousands of ways open a conversation that turn a buyer off, but only 2 or 3 that can get them to listen How can marketers do better than the occasional lucky guess?

To successfully open a conversation, marketers must first understand the buyer’s emotional priorities. These are the things that matter most to people as they look at themselves within the context of a category. Most of the time these emotional priorities are held closely and are not easily revealed.

More than 85% of all decisions are guided by these often-unspoken emotional priorities. Understanding the buyer’s unspoken emotional priorities is what makes buyers willing to listen – “OK, you get me, maybe this is something I should care about.”

Then, you need to get them to learn/understand/think differently, and act.

Once the buyer has chosen to listen, it is important to transition them to what will ignite the act of choosing.

These are the Emotional Drivers™ of brand choice: the most important things in the minds of customers/prospects as they face the reality of choosing and using the product.

Emotional Drivers include a variety of things (usually, 3 to 5) that relate to the potential buyer’s sense of self esteem, their sense of importance toward specific product features and benefits and personal benefits that they place their highest level of importance upon. All of these, together, make up the fundamental attraction or willingness to make any choice.

This is particularly important in pharmaceutical marketing, where the physician’s role is critical.

When brands do not know about a customer’s or prospect’s emotional priorities and how they connect to their emotional drivers, they often fall out of sync with the constantly changing ways customers decide and act.

As a result, sales suffer. Marketing investments are not optimized. Competitors gain footholds with customers your brand should have easily won.

To avoid these mistakes, it’s useful to understand how decisions happen inside the brain.

Emotional System First, Reason System Second

What drives a decision, choice, or behavior is the result of two brain systems acting together.

The first of these systems to fire is the Emotional System, which is located in the limbic region.

The second is the Reason System, which is supported by the prefrontal cortex.

Feel + Think = Do

The interaction of these two brain systems is what ultimately produces behavior. People would like to imagine that they react emotionally first, then arrive at a rational decision, but that’s not the way the brain actually works.

The Emotional System prioritizes by first sending a signal to the reason system through a neural pathway –then the two together formulate the decision. There are thousands of ways emotions and reasons together can set a context that turns a customer off but only 2 or 3 that can turn them on.

How can marketers do better than the occasional lucky guess? Ensuring that marketing has the best chance of producing a desirable decision is where “marketing neuroscience” and the proper understanding of Unspoken Emotional Priorities and Emotional Drivers® comes into play.

Unspoken Emotional Priorities and Emotional Drivers® are more complex than most marketers realize

In marketing – particularly when a brand owner thinks in terms of advertising – some marketers may make the mistake of thinking of emotions as one-dimensional. “This truck commercial is an optimistic ad”, “This print ad is a tear-jerker”, “This brochure is about fear of missing out on a good deal”.

Emotional Priorities and Emotional Drivers® are not one-dimensional at all. Think of them is a set of priorities that must be addressed in the correct order, with the correct combinations, and with the right degree of emphasis.

The right combination of Emotional Priorities and Emotional Drivers® enable marketers to confidently address what customers care most about personally and as they relate to the choice of the product or brand

In our decades of practice, we have often seen that what the marketing team has chosen as the most important priority turns out to be only 10% of what drives a decision. A different unspoken emotional priority might be four times more important to opening their mind and the right combination of two emotional drivers may be critical to closing the sale. What happens when the focus in marketing and sales starts with the wrong emotional priority? The customer’s brain clicks off before they consider how the product of brand may be the choice for them.

They can’t hear what you say – or may even want to push back -- because the conversation has started on entirely the wrong foot.

Understanding and updating changing Emotional Priorities and Emotional Drivers® is what enables marketers to stay in sync with how consumer decide and act.

Because high-stakes markets do not remain static, Brain Surgery remains engaged with the marketing team as the “emotional voice of the customer” in their head. We check back in with the market regularly to understand how it is evolving, so that the brand stays in sync with how customers and prospects decide and act. Understanding how decisions, choices, or behaviors are made in the brain directly impacts marketing’s ability to influence those decisions, choices, or behaviors.

Understanding the connection between Emotional Priorities and Emotional Drivers® is just one of the marketing neuroscience issues executives can benefit from learning about. In high-stakes markets, how much could it cost you to fall out of sync.