Emotional benefit is felt through the heart and Rational benefit is felt through the brain.
As per Harvard Professor Gerald Zaltman, Emotion is what really drives purchasing behaviors, and also, decision-making in general, human beings are not as logical as we might imagine. And understanding this has significant implications for marketing, sales, and branding. The key is to highlight the emotional response a consumer will achieve by using the product.
Identifying the emotional benefit of your company/product to your customer, highlighting them throughout their interactions, learning how your customers feel, and helping them to achieve the desired state of emotion, will help in a delightful customer experience that will lead to Customer Loyalty.
Brand Strategist Lindsay Pedersen says Humans are emotional beings. We make decisions on a gut level more often than we’d like to admit. The rapidly expanding field of neuromarketing is based on research that shows we make decisions with our reptilian or “old” brain. This is the part of our brain that we rely on for survival, and it functions very quickly, below our consciousness. Then we use our neocortex or “thinking” brain to (much more slowly) rationalize the decision our old brain has already made. Emotional benefits appeal to the quick, instinctive reptilian brain, while rational/ functional benefits appeal to the slower, rational neocortex.
Therefore, purchase decision depends on the appeal towards customer’s emotions, which means, loyalty is based on the customer experience during interactions on various touchpoints with the brand. But the rational benefit depends on achieving the outcome, which is experienced by the customers only after the purchase of the product. This outcome of the rational benefit determines the advocacy of the product.
Customer Success Managers should note this, a customer wouldn’t recommend a product to anyone if they are not satisfied with the outcome of the purchase. But they may still continue to purchase (repurchase) and be a loyal customer if they are satisfied with emotional benefits.
This is precisely what Nutick BPromise CS tool does – helps you to identify/create the emotional and rational benefits, learn the customer’s perception through the surveys, gives insights on emotional and rational benefit satisfaction of your customers, and arriving at the impact it has on customer loyalty and advocacy. This you can measure on weekly basis, track them, identify which benefits are performing well and which are not and why. With the customer feedback, you receive and along with the insights you can address the issues, fix them, and work towards improving Loyalty and Advocacy, ultimately leading to Customer Success.
And when both emotional and rational benefits are satisfactory, it reduces customer churn and increases Customer Loyalty and Advocacy.
Quarter 1: Customers are happy with the Emotional Benefits so they continue to stay loyal and repeat purchases, but are not satisfied with the Rational Benefit so they may not recommend the product or the company to others
Quarter 2: Customers are happy with the Emotional Benefits so they continue to stay loyal and keep purchasing, and also satisfied with the Rational Benefit so they would recommend the product and the company to others
Quarter 3: Customers are not happy with the Emotional Benefits so they may not stay loyal and purchase, but they are satisfied with the Rational Benefit of the product/company so they might still recommend it to others
Quarter 4: Customers are not happy with the Emotional Benefits and also not satisfied with the Rational Benefits of the product/company so they might not stay loyal and purchase and also they may not advocate for others. This means customers could soon switch to the competitor product or company