There was this initial posting on affectivedesign.org, which I found – like the whole blog – really interesting:
Hotel News has an article about how brands need to respond to customers? emotional needs to build and sustain brand loyalty. The article focuses on three key points, paraphrased below?
1. Deliver what you Promise:
Don’t fail to manage and meet the expectations that you set for your customers/users.
2. Seize the Opportunity to “WOW”:
Identify opportunities to provide unexpected, added value to your customers or users and empower them to act on that opportunity independently. In simpler terms, surprise them with a great experience that is more than they expect.
3. Know your Emotional Touch Points:
Identify the key points where there are opportunities to build the customer relationship. These may be so-called ?pain points? in your current process, or areas where a little something extra can add value.
A quote from the article.
Welcome to the dawn of the “emotion economy,”where every marketer worth their weight in cappuccino is desperately trying to create the bond between customer and company that causes customers to act? well, emotionally.
How can this be? A brand is not a person. It can’t respond emotionally to a customer. And yet, we hear marketers and designers speaking about establishing an emotional “relationship” with customers. A relationship requires two people or “actors”. So what is this relationship really about; who are the “actors”?
One is obviously the customer or user of the product, brand or service. The other is the perceived personality of the product, brand or service. This is communicated through the marketing, service delivery and the product itself (including the interface form and function).
The fundamentals of this idea are the same for any type of product, brand or service. Humans attribute a human personality to most things in their environment. Design theorists like Donald Norman have attributed this to evolution. In the environment where we evolved, if something responded to you, it was either human or animal. Judgments could be made about the intent of the human or animal?s from its appearance (i.e., posture, facial expressions, size) the quality of the sounds it made (i.e. tone, pitch volume), what was said (for humans), and its behaviour (i.e. approach, attack, avoid, retreat, ignore, etc.)
With products, brands and services, automobiles offer an obvious example of product personalities. There are vehicles that seem to have friendly personalities, (e.g. Volkswagen Beetle) and vehicles that seem to have aggressive personalities (e.g. the Hummer). Some vehicles focus on safety (i.e. Volvo) and ideally, the marketing for these vehicles supports this particular personality.
Thinking of product personalities is equally important for user experience, human-computer interaction and interaction design. For your next project, think of the service, website, product or application you are developing as a person. And if that product was a person, what would you think of them?
Getting back to the three points, if a person fails to deliver what they promise, feelings of distrust and a lack of confidence in future promises may be the result. When it comes to seizing the opportunity to WOW, there?s a saying that?s often used to describe how people form impressions of each other when they first meet. ?You never get a second chance to make a first impression.? Similarly, we all encounter pain points with various people. We often expect people to understand our needs without it being necessary for us to explain what those needs are. Friends and partners who fail to instinctively pick up on our emotional cues of frustration, or anger, often become former-friends. We expect people to notice our pain points and respond to them by altering their behaviour. The same is true of products, brands and services.
AK wrote ranting reply on not-to-compare-products-with-friends.
Since I liked the reply as much as the initial text, I will try to mediate here. Also because I think that both are right:
One:Deliver what you Promise
Trevor says that we need our friends to deliver what they promise we get a feeling of distrust and loose our confidence. People do not always deliver what they promise. As AK poiunts out pretty well, they rarely do but it does not matter since we forgive them. I say, the truth lies in between: Friends do deliver things they promise, however the promises are usually more abstract: Things like best intentions, the willingness to try to deliver what was promised, the intention to trust and the intention to forgive. That is what I promise my friends to deliver and as long as we mutually deliver those things they will (hopefully) be friends.
Two:Seize the Opportunity to “WOW”
AK counters that the first impression is usually not the one making our friendships last, but it is the affection on the long run. It would be simple now to pull the “wow” effect one abstraction layer up, so I will instead – for the sake of the argument – rather say that a “wow” effect usually exists with friends. With all my friends there is something I do admire, there is always something that is special about them except of the longlasting caring. Ok, you may counter that every person has this special thing that makes them different, but my good friends are the only group where I dare to say that I know them well enough to be name the “wow” thing with all of them.
Three:Know your Emotional Touch Points
This round I’d say that it goes more to Trevor, when he says that people can instinctively pick up experiential needs. We often enough pick them up wrongly and sometimes even after years we still misinterpret our friends (or better halves’) expressions, but we still do by far better than with random people. And again this point should IMHO be seen more from the what-can-I-bring-into-it perspective which is that with my friends I try and (I dare to boast) succeed in knowing the emotional touch points; rather than expecting them to knowing mine.
I’d call the match a draw. ;)
And now for my addition to the whole thing. Being highly interested in the topic I guess I need to have something to add. This would be that I think that trying to create affective user experiences is a valuable thing and will make our interactions better, I think that we need to be aware of the limitations. So far a product cannot interact on emotional level, but only express itself emotionally. While for computational screen-bound products it might by now be possible to do this interaction, the real challenge comes with hardware and then with services. Trying to make a multi-channel experience affective will be a pretty hard task, but an interesting challenge. Due to the cost-benefit balance we might draw the line somewhere there in the near future.
Yes, I know, this posting just scratches the surface and cries for a deeper debate. Who’s up for it? :)
me! me! me! lol shall continue the debate once i finish filling in yet more divorce papers…
I wrote the post this morning, and even as I was posting it, felt that some of the conclusions were not properly qualified, or explained as well as they could be.
Problem 1:
I failed to draw parameters around the notion of “relationship”, which I would say has different dimensions in time. I tend to think that for most products and services, that the initial encounter is the thing we need to master first in emotional terms, since it might be the last chance we get to positively affect a customer or user. And even that intial encounter has several phases in time which roughly equate to how something looks, the conversation it makes with you (in whatever form), and it’s behaviour (what it does).
AK is right in many of her criticisms. As a relationship evolves over time, social actors have different emotional needs than in their initial encounter. Our friends may let us down occasionally, but they probably didn’t the very first time we met them. Now obviously, some people put up with more than others. This is another area where personality comes in. If I’m a forgiving person, the psychology says that I will be more attracted to a device that is like me, or like what I aspire to be.
In any case, realizing that I had been properly critiqued, I removed that section of the post. I don’t think that changes the fact that people attribute personality to brands, products and services or judge them by rules normally reserved for people. Pick up Reeves and Nass – The Media Equation, or BJ Fogg – Persuasive Technology. They apply this idea to media (photos, computers, etc). It’s a lot easier with interactive devices, but occurs to some degree for most things.
Hmm, adressing your “Problem 1″ I would say that I find the friends metaphor pretty well suitable. I mean obviously we need to see that friends are – if we want to translate correctly – the products/services that we like and use. From that point of view I think that the odds for new services and new people entereing our life are pretty much the same. The thing that differs those tow would probably be the factor of technophobia/technophilia…. Some people prefer interacting with machines, some prefer humans. Some even prefer interacting with systems. ;)
And then, humans have also this huge advantage of being much much much better in affective interaction than artefacts or systems are. So that definitely skews the metaphor, but I think it is still valid. A system has exactly the same first imression, first interaction, etc. pp. life-cycle.
I like your argument about the changing emotional needs. It is one thing that products probably won’t really be able to replicate – unless we talk about the incontinence of my cell phone’s battery. But services (like banks – thanks to good experience blog for a steady flow of inspiration on that one) can change their needs (and thereby their emotional dimension). So can services that first are targeted to small customers try to express reliability; but when the market focus changes to bigger investors, the expression might change to flexibility. But yes, I guess this is a far-off argument. ;)
And yes, people attribute things and systems with emotions and the even better part is that we even are more efficient if the system reflects our current affective state (Nass et al.: Increasing
safety in cars by matching driver emotion and car voice emotion). So can we use this to the advantage in non-interactive devices? Will it help to have a toothbrush that looks glad? Or will we just get annoyed when we are grumpy in the morning and there is this oh-so-glad toothbrush? I personally believe that yes, it would help humans to have more humanised technology around us. But as always, we need to handle things with care and think about it, when we use those techniques.
I’m sorry to see that my blog entry resulted in Trevor editing his blog entry, which was never the intention, and a shame, as it was (as evident), very thought provoking. Before I read your article, I never really thought about product/brand relationships and real life relationships.
I agree with him that people genderise, personify and form attachments to products and brands. It happens everyday, from children with their teddy bears, to the big boys with their cars ;).
I think the biggest differences between friends and products is the communication of feelings. With friends, when they upset you, you (should) tell them so, or as quite rightly mentioned by Trevor and njyo, they pick up on the fact, and both parties adapt their behaviours in an attempt to resolve the situations. In contrast, when a product upsets you, it is never aware of this, and never will be. Even when you kick your PC in frustration, the programme that the cause of the frustration is unaware of your emotional state. In another example, when you do something wrong to a product, it will tell you that it did not like what you did to it by forms of error messages or just not working, but most products, in its current state, will not adapt its behaviour to resolve the situation. It just waits for you to adapt in the correct manner. So far, I believe it is unrealistic to say that products can interact on a emotional level due to the fact that products do not provide a feedback system for you to let them know how you feel, and then a adaptive system to work around problems based on those feelings.
I also wanted to comment on njyo’s comment about the wow factor. For me, the wow factor makes me interested in the person, not make them loyal to them. The wow factor makes me intrigued about the person and want to spend time with them to get to know them. However, it is me spending time with them, getting to know their personality, their values, beliefs and behaviours that loyality depends on. Indeed, I have met people that blew me away when I met them, and have since hold loyality with them, but I was not loyal to them instantly. It was only through sharing experiences, thoughts, time, etc that made me loyal to them. On the other hand, I have met people that made no impression on me whatsoever on first meet, but have since become very good friends.
Please feel free to refute, I am enjoying this discussion :)
A second thought on this “affective sevices” actually is the feasibility. When we keep in mind that we usually do not tend to get along with every personality, we should also assume that affective products will fit to everybody. Meaning that some people will probably dislike products because they do not match. While with artefacts this effect should still be manageable by creating multiple different products with different affective expressions (like the different angel, devil, sitting, diving rubber ducks) or products that can adapt to different expression; for services this might be too much of an effort. If a service includes a web page, hotline and other channels it will probably cost too much resources to create multiple sets of channels that are trimmed to different affective expressions. So there it still might be better to try to stick to something neutral or something just generally amicable.
Guys, I just realised we left out a big advantage that human have over products.
The ability to love and show love. (yeah I know I’m getting all girly and squishy).
This actually gives us a huge advantage in maintaining loyalty, particularly in situation where a situation is reaching the threashold of loyalty. For example, you forgive your parents for hurting you, because you know that they love you. well, I do. I remain loyal to them, because at the end of the day, I know they love me. In contrast, if a product annoys me, I have no guilt in moving to another product or brand (as I have done this week), because it doesn’t love me.
This of course creats the intresting question of what if we make artifacts display “love” to their users? would the artificial love be enough to keep the users loyal, or would the lack of mutual expression and mingling of this feeling of “love” be enough to wake up the user to the fact that the product doesn’t really love them, and thus lessen the loyalty?
Any suggestions?
Ok, first, the short one on the “wow” factor. Eye-candy on a new and shiny MacBook might be a good example. That’s a “wow” factor but afetr a while you’ll still fancy it but not every time watch so closely. Still, as you said, it is not the reason for your (hopefully) growing loyalty. The loyalty comes – as you state – from spending time, growing reliability, getting to know. But the “wow” factor is still there and having an important role. It is important for me to feel this respect when I think about my friends. This respect does not only base on their loyality but also on me feeling proud of them.
The “wow” factor in the initial post on the other hand was probably more referring to the easiest way to differentiate yourself (or your product) from the competition. Imagining to pick one person out of a party with whom you would want talk the rest of the evening, you’d probably pick the one where the whole impression (with focus on your intentions) had the biggest “wow”. SImple as that. ;)
Second, on the thing about products (computers) not being able to interact: Yes, the computer cannot react on you kicking it. YET. Developing ways to give machines a possibility to perceive the emotional component in an interaction and developing ways for the computer to have an own emotional life will create products that can interact on emotional level (like HAL in Stanley Kubrick’s Space Odyssey). The big question is, if we are able to develop that. It seems like the former should be less of a difficulty than the latter. Especially the question if a machine that cannot feel itself will be able to ever understand what it is to feel is an interesting and philosophical one.
This should also “answer” your question on love. Similarily there is an interesting debate on the question if computers can be creative. One place to hop into that one is the book “Wired Life” by Charles Jonscher.
…ooops, this turned aout to be the shorter one. ;)
were we not sitting in a oh-so-interesting talk couple of weeks ago when the guy said “google isn’t aware of you”. I think that’s the crucial thing, until products can become AWARE, we have no hope in them interacting with the users on a emotional level.
wait… that’s what you said…. it’s getting way too late for this!! lol