How to advertise customer emotions without invading privacy

It is probably not difficult to understand that our customers’ purchasing behavior is strongly intertwined with moods.

There’s a reason we call shopping therapeutic. Buying things we want sends a serotonin rush to the brain that can temporarily make us feel better when we are stressed, depressed, or anxious. Moreover, according to much-cited research by Gerald Zaltman, 95% of purchasing decisions are made unconsciously and driven by emotions – so it’s no surprise that advertisers have been interested in understanding and evoking certain states of mind for generations.

With more and more data on internal moods becoming available, the stakes are higher when we consider how to act on this sensitive consumer information. For example, how far should brands go to use emotional data to encourage purchases?

Let’s see where we stand and how brands can take a human-centric approach to using this sensitive information.

Related: 5 insights into human behavior that will boost your sales and marketing

How we measure emotions

Let’s start with how we gauge emotions. Until recently, our data on feelings was based on consumer self-reports, as it is impossible to embody another person’s emotional experience. Self-reporting involves consumers answering direct questions about how they feel at a given time or in a given context. Usually this is done through market research surveys.

Neuroscience has progressed to the point where we can accurately predict emotional states without relying on consumer overt confessions. This type of emotional assessment may prove to be even more accurate than direct consumer reporting, as many people struggle to predict how they will feel in certain contexts.

Technology that assesses activity in our brains is becoming more sophisticated and capable of predicting mood states. While most of this innovation takes place in research labs, we are getting closer to realizing this technology as a marketing tool.

Neuroscience and wearables

The art of shoppingan unconscious shopping experience between art seller Saatchi and eBay, is one of the most direct campaigns that aimed to use this technology in shopping.

At the experiential retail event, attendees browsed an art gallery while wearing headsets designed to track a consumer’s mental engagement. When the software suggested viewers were inspired, eBay added similar items to the customer’s shopping cart.

While the activation was interesting, in our current environment it’s far-fetched to have consumers voluntarily and consistently wear mind-tracking headsets. Although, it may become more common as more consumers use augmented and virtual reality.

Today, wearables such as fitness trackers and smartwatches are becoming more ubiquitous and mood data can be collected indirectly or from consumer self-assessment. The devices can assess everything from our heart rate and breathing patterns to our mindfulness activity. This can indicate or correlate with stress levels or provide more direct mood data on apps like Calm and Halo that encourage emotional reporting.

Related: 4 neuromarketing hacks to reach more people and maximize results

Inferring emotional data

There are other ways to gauge consumer mood, and some have troubling histories.

Meta, formerly Facebook, was famously under the microscope for running a large-scale emotion experiment aimed at understanding whether emotions spread through networks.

It actively manipulated the algorithm of nearly 700,000 users without their informed consent, to feed them positive or negative content and gauge the apparent mood in their resulting posts. Among other things, the company was interested in how emotions can make the site more or less attractive.

The more engaged users are on the platform, the more valuable they are to Meta’s advertisers. Critics worried that the company wanted to understand how it could manipulate emotions to bolster its bottom line and increase purchases for its advertisers without clearly considering the impact on consumers.

Meta isn’t the only tech company making actionable conclusions about emotions. Search engines such as Google following emotional effects by, among other things, using software to assess language for positive and negative sentiments during search.

Combined with the rest of their consumer data, such as browsing and purchase histories, these tech giants really have the power to understand, contextualize, and leverage consumer emotion without the use of neurological devices.

Related: If you want to win over customers, appeal to their emotions

How do we use this data?

Marketers are curious about the influence of mood on purchases and are therefore interested in creating purchase paths that are aligned with certain feelings. Payment providers are also paying attention. In fact, in their latest Future of payments research paper, Worldpay from FIS identified personalization, including emotional engagement, as a trend that payment providers are capitalizing on.

Creating payment paths that leverage consumers’ emotional information may sound disturbing. But it’s worth noting that consumers are increasingly expecting these kinds of personalized experiences from brands, as long as they contribute to the consumer’s journey.

When an experience provides convenience to a consumer and helps the brand engage with them in a meaningful way, the consumer can feel supported and improve emotional engagement and loyalty.

Balancing the use of emotional data to provide mutual benefit for brand and consumer while respecting consumers’ rights and privacy is tricky. Therefore, we need to think deeply about creating consumer protection as we move into the future.

Related: Personalization: A Perspective on the Future of Targeting

Where do we go from here?

There is no shortage of data and we will only get better at detecting and responding to emotional states in different contexts. As advertisers and marketers, we need to think about how all this emotional data is applied.

We’ve already seen social media companies exploit negative emotional states like anxiety and depression to push users into a buying path of aspirational products in categories like beauty and fitness (what’s even more troubling is that the algorithms are likely contributing to the negative emotional state, but that’s a talk for another day). We’ve seen the same algorithms promote negative headlines that are likely to elicit engagement, resulting in exacerbated political polarization and wider negative societal consequences.

As an advertising community, we need to implement this guarantees to protect consumers. These safeguards should come from regulators, but also from individual brands. Creating an ethical playbook prior to capturing the use of emotional data in the purchasing journey, conducting thought experiments for secondary and tertiary effects of using mood-based information, and defining and acting in accordance with the A brand’s values ​​can help to ensure that marketers are responsible brokers of mood data.

It is worth remembering that understanding emotions can also have powerful positive consequences. As humans, we are emotional beings and brands that can meet consumers where they are in their internal experiences are likely to create better and more meaningful connections. It is imperative for brands to think about how they use emotional information, not only to build lasting relationships with consumers, but also to adopt a human-centered approach to innovation.