People are happy when they get what they need. In the context of marketing, this means delivering product attributes and benefits that meet consumers' and shoppers’ needs, which is the focus of marketing today. While making people happy certainly contributes to a brand being liked and trusted, it doesn’t go far enough. Delivering emotional meaning is how brands will build real competitive advantage in the future. Meaning involves “understanding one’s life beyond the here and now.” For a brand to be meaningful, it must reflect consumers' and shoppers’ emotional truths relevant to the brand and its category.

1. THE POWER OF EMOTIONAL MEANING:
FINDING THE INSIGHTS CRITICAL TO ACHIEVING
COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE IN THE FUTURE
Christopher Brace and Prisca Tsai

2. Our society has experienced an important shift, one that has significant implications for insight teams: we’ve
moved from a need-based to a want-based society. While it is a need that brings us to a particular category (e.g.
toothpaste, coffee, insurance, banking, investment services, etc.), when faced with a multitude of options that all
appear similar, it is an emotional want that drives our brand choice. Having all our basic human needs satisfied,
we naturally gravitate towards higher forms of satisfaction: emotional wants. The sense of happiness consumers
and shoppers once felt from having their needs fulfilled is no longer enough; they now strive for something more
substantial – emotional meaning. One might think that it’s out of a brand’s scope to provide something that self-
actualizing, but that’s exactly why researchers need to change our thinking about how marketing relates to the
world around us. The mission for marketing must evolve from generating transactions that sell goods and services,
to building emotional relationships that are then leveraged to sell goods and services. The strength and depth of
these relationships is how brands will differentiate themselves in the future.
Brands have a choice: seek to be meaningful and play a significant, ongoing role in the lives of consumers and
shoppers, or remain in a transactional relationship, only remembered when needed. Evolving from delivering
happiness (i.e. meeting rational needs through product attributes) to delivering emotional meaning (i.e. meeting
emotional wants through emotional truths) is how a brand will create real competitive advantage in the future.
The success of this advantage relies heavily upon an insight team’s ability to identify the emotional truths held
by consumers and shoppers relevant to the category and brand. This requires a new approach to research, a
methodology that gets beyond people’s consciously rationalized explanation of their behaviors and uncovers the
emotional truths that are the real triggers of their consumption and purchase behaviors.

3. The plethora of neuroscience research available today has provided us a much better understanding of how humans
make their decisions. It has been proven over and over again that whenever we are faced with a choice, it is our
emotional wiring (i.e. emotional truths) that’s most often activated first. Emotional truths reside in the nonconscious
part of our brain, which is capable of processing 11 million/bits of stimuli per second. Comparatively, the conscious
mind only processes at a paltry 40 bits/second. A whirlwind of activity occurs in our nonconscious mind before
our conscious mind is activated. Yet the vast majority of our research dollars are spent probing the 40 bits/second
rather than the 11 million bits/second which is where the real drivers of consumption and purchase behaviors reside.
Because the emotional truths reside in our nonconscious mind, they cannot be accessed via the direct questioning
of most standard methodologies. If you ask a respondent a question like “Why do you use my brand over another?”
they can only tell you the answer provided by their conscious mind. The processes of our nonconscious mind are
completely hidden from us.
Today, we identify past and current behaviors and then, through facilitated dialogue, attempt to link them to
emotion. While this process of laddering does result in emotional insight, it does not penetrate the nonconscious
emotional triggers of our behaviors. For this, we need a new methodology.
Syntegrate Consulting has developed a proprietary methodology we call Emotional Trigger Qualitative Research.
It’s specifically designed to get beneath consumers and shoppers’ conscious rationalization of their behaviors to
uncover the nonconscious emotional truths that are the real triggers of their consumption and purchase decisions.
Our methodology is based on three simple human truths:
Because a person’s deeply held truths are most easily revealed through the stories they tell, we use “facilitated
storytelling” instead of the traditional “facilitated dialogue.” To maximize the effectiveness of the storytelling, we
conduct the research using friendship dyads: two people who share a close emotional relationship and ideally,
the same recruiting specifications. This level of connection allows the respondents to feel more comfortable and
vulnerable, deepening the quality of the storytelling.
HOW CONSUMERS/SHOPPERS MAKE THEIR DECISIONS
A NEW RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
1. Emotional truths consist of people’s beliefs and attitudes about themselves, others, and the world around them.
2. People reveal their nonconscious emotional truths through the stories they tell.
3. People are most comfortable telling these stories to trusted and loved friends or family members.
Subconscious:
(11 million bits/second)
Conscious:
(40 bits/second)
Decision

4. One of the biggest challenges insight teams face is making sure their studies are immediately actionable against the
brand’s prioritized growth initiatives. All too often, research summaries are disseminated to the broader team, but
rather than being activated, they’re filed in a drawer.
At Syntegrate, we start by clarifying how the research will be applied to strategy and the specific behavioral and
emotional insights needed to drive growth. Here are three ways clients have used this research in the past.
ACTIVATING YOUR EMOTIONAL TRUTHS
1. Brand Positioning: Everything the brand does and says must emanate from an emotional territory
as defined by your emotional truths. Rather than the traditional target, category context, benefits
and attributes approach, your positioing must tell an emotionally compelling story.
2. Consumer and Shopper Communications: Based on your growth strategy, target, and insights,
your communications need to tell the aspects of your compelling story most relevant to overcoming
consumer and shopper hurdles.
3. Tactical Planning: Identify the touchpoints that best tell your story. Rather than pursuing the
newest shiny-object tactic, use your emotional story as the basis for making stronger choices.
The social sciences have known for decades that the human decision-
making process is triggered by emotion. And while marketers may
recognize this, we continue to rely on rational benefits and attributes.
Why? Because it’s easier than building an emotional connection.
Connecting emotionally is not merely having an entertaining campaign,
it’s fulfilling people’s yearning for something deeper – a validation of
their emotional beliefs. In order for brands to achieve true competitive
advantage in the future, it is imperative that they evolve from delivering
happiness through product features and benefits to bringing real
meaning through emotional truths. But this evolution cannot happen
without the right methodology or without insight teams’ commitment to
the process. There is enough in-market proof today to demonstrate that
this shift produces a better return on investment (See insert, “The ROI
of Emotional Truths”).

5. Christopher Brace founded Syntegrate Consulting in 2006 and as CEO leads all client
projects. He can be reached at brace@syntegrate-consulting.com.
Prisca Tsai is a Strategist at Syntegrate Consulting and leads the qualitative
research projects and all research integration work for clients. She can be reached
at prisca@syntegrate-consulting.com.
Syntegrate Consulting is an insight-based strategic consulting firm that specializes in
helping clients build better brands, communications, and go-to-market strategies that
create new value in the marketplace through syntegration: the bringing together of
dissimilar research, knowledge, insights, and people to create something completely new.
Please visit our website at www.syntegrate-consulting.com.
It seems every function within marketing today is trying to calculate some type of measurement to quantifiably
prove its contribution to the business. For researchers, calculating the return on insights has been discussed, but no
one has found a way to do it. Emotional truths are an absolute necessity if brands are going to bring real meaning
to the lives of consumers and shoppers. It will be the responsibility of research and insight teams to identify these
truths, providing the opportunity to finally quantitatively prove the value of their contribution. As it turns out, there
is substantial evidence that leveraging emotional truths to bring meaning to the lives of consumers and shoppers
yields a higher return on investment than solely meeting a need. For example1
:
• 33% of people with an intimate connection to a brand are willing to pay a 20% premium.2
• Meaningful brands gain an average of 46% more share of wallet.3
• Ads that are emotionally charged (i.e. above average neuro-testing scores) deliver a 23% lift in sales.4
• Meaningful brands outperform the stock market by 133%.5
• Consumers/shoppers who are emotionally bonded to a brand are 53% more valuable than those who are
just highly satisfied.6
- In the Hospitality industry, these consumers spend 46% more per year.7
- In the Consumer Electronics industry, they spend an average of $84 more per shopping trip.8
Even with all of this evidence there is ample white space to be filled. Only 20% of brands worldwide are seen as
having a meaningful impact on people’s lives. In the U.S., only 9% of brands have a perceived meaningful impact,
compared to 27% in Latin America and 39% in Asia. At the industry level, great opportunities exist within financial
services, consumer packaged goods, apparel, and travel and leisure as those categories fall within the poorest
performing industries.
THE ROI OF EMOTIONAL TRUTHS
1. We acknowledge that across studies, the definition of meaning may vary slightly. But the common denominator to all
these studies remains the deep and meaningful emotional connection that is achieved between a brand and consumers/shoppers.
2. Gallup State of the American Consumer Report, June 2014
3. Havas Meaningful Brands Study, 2015
4. Nielsen Consumer Neuroscience Study, 2016
5. Havas Meaningful Brands Study, 2015
6. The New Science of Customer Emotions, HBR, November 2015
7. Gallup State of the American Consumer Report, June 2014
8. Ibid.
9. Meaningful Brands Outperform Markets, But Remain Rare, The Holmes Report, June 2013