Do your communications hit the right emotional and rational note.

Do your communications hit the right emotional and rational note.

Aristotle said it first; neuroscience confirms it. To be effective, communications must work on an emotional and rational level. In fact, unless a message affects your customer emotionally, there is no way he or she can make a purchase decision. This is true no matter what you are selling: tractors, financial services, soda or cosmetics. Most marketers and agencies know this in their bones. The problem is that it?s hard to access emotions in either the strategy development or communications-testing phase.

?Lately we have done a lot of advertising testing work using Create/Debate groups, our version of focus groups. Both the marketers and agencies have found the process productive because:

• Participants have to capture their reactions in pictures, words and metaphors ? which requires them to use their right and left brains.
• Participants have to stand up and present their ideas ? and answer questions from other participants ? which lets you see how strongly they believe in and defend their point of view
• Research participants are so engaged that their reactions naturally
  focus on major messaging and ideas, not details and personal preferences.
• It?s fun and takes less time overall.

?Based on these experiences, here are some tips you can use in your qualitative research to ensure your work is impacting your customers on both the emotional/intuitive and rationale/logical level.

1. Avoid left-brain only avenues of inquiry. Language is a left-brain form of communication. So if all you are doing in groups is talking, you are only tapping into one part of the brain. ?You may also be picking up clues as to the person?s feelings and intentions via body language, tone and manner and that is helpful, of course. But there are tools (like collaging, drawing, music) that will help you tap into right brain insights more explicitly. That way, you will get deeper insights and your research participants will have more fun.

2. Whole brain thinking requires generating ideas (creative thinking) as well as evaluative/analytical thinking. Often in groups, we ask people what they think and why. It?s a great thing to do ? but it only lets us in on part of the story, since their replies are mostly analytical in nature.

?Instead, ask them to create a response by brainstorming together and, in small teams, build a story that requires them to generate ideas ? which makes the analytical phase that much more interesting.

If, for example, you are testing communications, let your groups see your work and then ask the smaller/sub teams to create collages that show how they feel about the work and what they will do as a result of it. The sheer act of working together and putting together a project that reflects their feelings helps them go beyond the obvious and dig deeper for how they truly feel and think.

?3. Presenting it to the rest of the group is the final piece of the puzzle. Ask the teams to present their ideas to the rest of the group and encourage the rest of the group to ask questions. It requires people to take a stand. And you can see for yourself how strong that stand is.

?This approach is designed to explicitly tap into the right brain (which works visually and metaphorically) as well as the left brain. It might sound a little ?out there? but it results in deeper participant engagement, more authentic feedback and ultimately stronger creative work. Every time.

?Call us for references or more ideas about how you can dig deeper in your communication research projects.

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Written by: Anne Manning on January 17, 2012.

About Anne Manning

Anne has a passion for new ideas. She?s had an eclectic career with one consistent underlying theme: inspiring her clients to break the barriers of routine thinking. Her background includes advertising, market research, group facilitation, management consulting and the art and science of creativity. In addition to her role as Founding Partner at Drumcircle, she is one of our lead facilitators and is deeply involved in the design and oversight of Drumcircle?s research projects and recommendations. View Anne's LinkedIn Profile

Source: http://www.drumcircleco.com/uncategorized/do-your-communications-hit-the-right-emotional-and-rational-note/

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