The Marketing Executives Group International

By John L. Schinnerer, Ph.D. and Shirley Knight

On average, companies change CMOs every two years. Is this a function of unrealistic expectations, unclear job requirements, or something more fundamental? Perhaps the solution is as simple as accurately measuring that which truly bonds consumers to brands – emotional engagement.

The task of linking consumer behavior to brands and marketing efforts is a difficult one with which the best Chief Marketing Officers’ grapple daily. Solutions such as self-report surveys, focus groups, and in-depth interviews suffer from a critical disconnect between their results and consumers’ real world behavior. This ongoing challenge has put Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) into the unenviable position where their best efforts are not measureable, and as a result their job security is never assured.

“The CMO’s Dilemma”

In his Gallup Management Journal article “The Chief Marketing Officer’s Dilemma,” William McEwen looks at some of the difficulties of the CMO position – rapid turnover, high pressure expectations, and a poorly defined job.  The CMO position faces inherent difficulties in the sense that customer engagement depends upon

a) Communicating the brand promise – (by establishing a share of the mind of the consumer)

b) Delivering upon the company’s brand promise – (which resides in the hands of employees over whom the CMO has little control) 

Gallup’s Proposed Solution

The solution to the dilemma is two pronged. First, CMOs must be capable of recognizing and understanding the entire breadth of their brand –“look at the world from the customer’s point of view.”  Second, senior executives must design more comprehensive, well-defined objectives and accountability measures for their CMOs.

However, the solution proposed by Mr. McEwen falls short of the target.  The assessment of the problem and its respective solutions are much broader than McEwen suggests. For a more accurate and actionable understanding of engagement, branding and profitability, one needs to incorporate a broader view of the mind to include both the rational mind and the emotional mind.

Rational vs. Emotional Mind

From a neuromarketing perspective, there are at least two parts to the human mind – the rational and the emotional.

The rational mind is reasonable, logical, and linear. The rational mind is excellent at developing levelheaded explanations for behavior.  For example, the rational mind has convinced consumers (and economists) that people make rational buying decisions. The rational mind is so good at creating the illusion that it is in control that scientists didn’t even discover the emotional mind until a few decades ago.

The emotional mind, on the other hand, is associative, largely subconscious, irrational and intense. The emotional mind is quicker, more powerful and has greater endurance that the rational mind. This is largely due to the fact that the emotional mind evolved millions of years before the rational mind. Research now confirms the emotional mind is a more powerful driver of behavior. Consumers buy with the emotional mind and explain the purchase (to their spouse, for instance) with the rational mind.

The Importance of Fully Engaged Customers

Galluphas shown that “profitable growth is directly dependent on the degree to which a company’s customers are ‘fully engaged.’”  Gallup defines “fully engaged customers” as “strongly emotionally attached and attitudinally loyal.” On the other hand, actively disengaged customers are “completely detached from your company…they may become virulently antagonistic toward your company or brand…they’re always eager to tell others exactly how they feel.” Engagement it seems, is the purview of the emotional mind

The inevitability of negative customer-employee interactions and subsequent drops in customer engagement make it imperative that the CMO find a way to accurately quantify and measure emotional engagement.  With an accurate method to lay out the conscious and subconscious emotions that consumers feel when they interact with the brand, the CMO has a fighting chance to ensure customers return again and again for the same “feel good” experience.

Emotions and the Subconscious Drive Behavior

Emotions and the subconscious are the primary driving forces behind consumer behavior, including buying behavior. In the absence of any ability to accurately identify the emotions behind behavior ad the predictive value that information would have, there are no real benchmarks against which the CMO’s performance could be gauged.

The creator of the most successful mass-communication ad campaigns for Avis and Volkswagen, William Bernbach, said, “You can say the right thing about a product, and nobody will listen.  You’ve got to say it in such a way that people will feel it in their gut. Because if they don’t feel it, nothing will happen.”

The value of brand equity is not so much in the rational, conscious mind as it is in the emotional, subconscious mind. It’s not how consumers think about a company or its offerings. It’s how they feel about it. And oftentimes, they’re not even consciously aware of how they feel – which is why self-report research is often inconclusive and ineffective.

The one company which has best delivered on the promise of measuring emotional engagement is Resonance Technologies. Resonance has developed a fast, inexpensive, online, technique which enables accurate and reliable measurement of the emotional mind. This information is as essential as it is unprecedented and as such it makes sense that Resonance’s tool be standard for every company that wants to reach consumers at a gut level.

Delivering On Brand Promise

The second part of the CMO’s dilemma, delivering upon the brand’s promise, also has an essential emotional component to it. This should come as no surprise as we are still dealing with humans who are quintessentially emotional beings.  It is well understood that employee satisfaction is positively linked to profitability.  The more engaged employees are, the better their interactions with customers; the better the interactions with customers, the more loyalty generated; and customer loyalty equals profit.

To truly leverage employee engagement, find out how employees really feel about the customer base in general. If a call center representative thinks of and, more importantly, feels that customers are like incapable, annoying children, their interactions will obviously suffer. If a call center rep sees the customers as sources of innovative ideas who are in genuine need of help, their interactions will flourish and the brand will gain new champions as a result of their positive exchanges.

Even though delivery of the brand promise is outside the CMO’s purview, she can still influence her colleagues who oversee delivery by acquiring and sharing a deeper, more accurate, understanding of a) how the consumer perceives the brand and b) how the consumer wants to experience the brand. In this way, the CMO provides the company with the necessary hard data to create the finest possible customer experience. Such information in the hands of senior management would be a powerful driver of organizational change and brand enhancement as it creates positive guidelines for promotion and delivery.

Measuring the emotional responses of consumers is an aspect of market research that is just now coming to the fore, creating new and necessary tools for the marketing toolbox.  As McEwen suggested in his article, CMO’s need to look at the world from their customer’s point of view, and senior management need to design more comprehensive, well-defined objectives and accountability measures for their CMO’s.  Recognizing the role of emotions and measuring emotional responses provides competitive advantage for the firm as well as job security for the CMO.

By John L. Schinnerer, Ph.D. and Shirley Knight