Emotional Intelligence

By Meabh Quoirin, CEO & Co-Owner, Foresight Factory (Formerly Future Foundation) I predict 2017 will be the year of EQ. The macro socio-cultural and political conditions are ripe, the science is ready, but perhaps most importantly the consumer is hungry for it. Never has the simple adage ‘facts tell, stories sell, carried so much weight (thank you, Mr President Elect). Perhaps the simple shift towards a greater proportion of time spent in front of screens has sufficiently boosted our conscious desire for more emotional, ‘offline style’ interactions, particularly across our social networking spaces. Or maybe it’s just the undeniable pressure on today’s marketer to deliver products and messages that replicate not just people’s true needs, but their very personal identity – even their personality. The signals for understanding, tracking & matching people’s moods are getting very interesting indeed. But this will be a tricky game to play. Needless to say pigeon-holing people by personality is pretty well impossible, at this stage at least, and likely to be just an frustrating and limited as any other classic segmentation. And so the race for – what I like to call – personality proxies – is on. Who can best play the brand as personality game? Prepare for a range of branding shifts, immersive tech led product experiences, and some highly experimental marcomms coming your way, sometime very soon….. The brand balance It’s quite clear that for brands this represents something of a seismic realisation. It’s no longer a question of deciding on an aspirational emotive positioning (the sense of self-satisfaction that pervades male-focused car advertising, for example). Marketers need to balance credible consistency in their brand tone, with an ability to detect and respond to the emotional signals that different consumers send at different moments. A person with a high EQ doesn’t adopt the same conversational style with everyone they meet – they have an instinct for picking up on a person’s current feelings and deeper motivations and expressing their personality in a way that fits. Given that two thirds of global consumers now welcome brands who reflect their own personality, style, taste – across all categories from the mundane to the highly engaging – so marketing simply must tune in to these different kinds of emotional intelligence. One of the most interesting and controversial elements of emotional science is of course getting behind the consumer curtain of social norms and closer to their true desires and opinions. It will be critical to get a reading on both conscious and non-conscious responses. Something as simple as the cascade of emojis, the semi-conscious emotional responses to messages posted across the Twitter sphere, can be a hugely valuable insight into the emotion your brand elicits, versus those of your competitors. A pretty binary signal, but one that we believe is being wrongly overlooked – not least because we’ve forecast a huge rise in the volume of emoji use over the next 2 years. We can also expect exciting immersive signals to illuminate our dark […]

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