Resources You Can Use: Women, Brand Relationships and Emotionomics
Two very interesting resources crossed my path recently, so I wanted to share them with you.
1) Barbara Olsen wrote a great article on exploring women’s brand relationships for the Women’s Voices for Change blog (a blog worth knowing about - as well). In it she writes of how, and perhaps why, women’s consumer behavior may change at middle age. Here’s a clip:
“The interviews revealed that many of us are stigmatized by early events
that recede beneath our consciousness, and we continue during our later
years to try to satisfy the unresolved issues that happened long ago in
our daily consumption of market products. This internal dialogue frames
a significant portion of our consumer behavior as we try to
reconstitute the puzzle of our past in the legacy of our life themes.”
Olsen also includes a few quick profiles of women she talked with during her research, such as the example of a middle-aged woman who was put in an orphanage for a year at age five during her father’s breakdown - and who finds herself attracted to “comfort” brands. (Fascinating stuff. Go read it yourself.)
2) Dan Hill, the author of Body of Truth: Leveraging What Consumers Can’t or Won’t Say (Wiley, 2003), just published his latest book, Emotionomics: Winning Hearts and Minds (Adams, 2007). I had the chance to read a review copy a few months back and quickly started citing it in presentations. Take the gender-related “say/feel gap,” for instance. Dan writes that:
“… men tend to have a lower percentage of positive verbal response than women. In other words, they’re less inclined to ‘make nice.’ Second, men end to have a higher percentage of positive facial coding activity than women. In other words, they’re emotionally promiscuous - less choosy than their more discriminating female colleagues.”
And, Dan also writes of something that we’d all find intriguing about now - no gender about it: Is “green-ness” a real value or is it less imperative than we’d like to think. He looks at the example of a car advertisement that emphasized environmental awareness and family safety. Here’s what he found:
“While people claimed that the environmentally conscious ad had greater Impact, emotional data captured through facial coding revealed a large enough drop-off of interest that safety was actually slightly ahead in both Appeal and Impact.”
Read Emotionomics for more if this is the sort of stuff that is right up your alley (how could it not be?)
August 27th, 2007 at 12:35 am
Now this is a good example of “influence”. Here I was thinking that Dan’s book sounded interesting but wondered if anyone else had read it. Your recommendation tips the balance for me … sort of like a personal tipping point where authority outrates volume.