Emotionomics
Book

Emotionomics

Leveraging Emotions for Business Success

Dan Hill
Kogan Page, 2009
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Recommendation

Facial coding, which is based on psychologist Paul Ekman’s Facial Action Coding System (FACS), has a sleek and shiny high-tech feel. Indeed, the approach that Dan Hill and his research consultancy firm developed involves eye tracking, video recording, tabulation of “emotional data sets,” elaborate scoring systems and comprehensive analyses. Yet, 19th-century scientists Charles Darwin and Guillaume Duchenne studied facial coding and applied their findings in their work. Since prehistoric times, humans have intuitively understood how to read each other’s faces. Hill and his colleagues have updated this ancient art to enable companies to determine accurately what consumers and employees truly feel about them and their products – which is different from what they tell researchers. getAbstract recommends Hill’s groundbreaking book to executives and managers in all fields, but especially to human resources and marketing professionals.

Summary

Getting Around the “Say-Feel Gap”

People make most decisions with their hearts, not their heads. To put it another way, “emotions drive reason more than reason drives emotion.” Indeed, feelings always precede rational thought. So, although people claim to prize rationality, modern-day humans are much closer to their Stone Age ancestors than they like to admit. “Visual imagery and other nonverbal forms of communication” greatly outweigh formal reasoning in most people’s thought processes. Fully conscious, rational thought accounts for “less than .0005% of mental activity.”

Learn to read your customers’ and staff members’ emotions to increase sales, profits, and customer and employee satisfaction. Your primary business goal should be to deliver “a unique emotional value proposition.” To create this kind of “emotional buy-in,” you must first overcome the say-feel gap. This is the chasm between what people claim and what they truly feel, which determines what they do: buy your product, shop at your store, work diligently at your firm and so on. Test subjects often provide responses they “think others will give.” Such responses, including those concerning product choice...

About the Author

Dan Hill is the president of a consultancy firm that helps global companies measure and manage emotions through specialized research tools such as eye tracking and facial coding.

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