Product Emotions Everywhere

To recognize the relevance of emotion in products other than trucks, let’s ask a basic question: Why do people buy things? It is an essential question to business, a basic concept that may seem simple to answer. Yet many companies do not truly understand why customers are willing to spend extra for one product when it accomplishes the same tasks as a cheaper alternative. Why are customers fanatically loyal to one product yet indifferent to another?

So why do people buy things? Customers purchase products both for what the product does for them, namely, “product functions,” and also for how the product makes them feel, what we call “product emotions.” Consider cars, for example. People require transportation. One function of cars is to provide the ability to move us from place to place. Customers also buy and use cars to fulfill emotional desires in addition to functional needs. Some want to feel well taken care of, so they especially enjoy luxury cars replete with comfort features such as leather seats, high-end audio, and cup holders that keep their morning coffee warm. Some want to feel “green” with a car that reduces the carbon footprint, even at added cost. These non-functional attributes create emotional value in the vehicle, fulfilling emotional wants. People buy products that make them feel better or safer or prouder.

Consider an example of a smaller product that you might use every day. When the iPhone came out in 2007, other products such as the Palm Treo already met all of the core functional deliverables of the iPhone. But the iPhone, with its ease of use, sexy interface, and beautiful aesthetic, led people to feel empowered, joyful, and well cared for. The iPhone also overcame the significant impediment of being relegated to a single service provider. Consumers have been amazingly willing to leave their existing service providers to become iPhone users.

The iPhone initially succeeded not because of its functionality but because of its product emotions: the emotions people felt when they saw, touched, and used the product, and the way they integrated it into their lives and lifestyles. The result was love. One iPhone owner recently told us, “It’s not perfect, but I love it.” Similar phrases of love are echoed in various ways among iPhone customers and by Apple customers in general.

A Product Only for Emotion

Possibly the ultimate “how it makes me feel” product is music. There is no functional need fulfilled by music; music is all about emotion. Music makes you feel happy or melancholy, energetic or restful. Music can connect you to memories and experiences. Remember the school dance when you first heard “Free Bird,” or the time on the beach listening to Bob Marley, or the Bach minuet they played at your wedding? The desire to hear music and feel those emotions results in an industry valued in tens of billions of dollars.

The emotion of music is integral to many experiences such as movies, where the suspense, happiness, and romance are foretold and amplified through music. How menacing would Darth Vader be without the deep repetitive horns in minor key announcing Vader’s presence? Close your eyes when you listen, and you feel Vader even without seeing him. Or how exciting would Indiana Jones’ escape-from-certain-death be without the contrasting upbeat, energetic, and frenetic iconic tune in major key? The musical pieces for these two movies were written by the same composer, John Williams, who clearly understands how to use music to create, mold, and direct a range of emotions.

Emotion and the Senses

Any product that elicits an emotional response must reach a customer through one or more of the five senses. To experience a product is to touch, use, see, feel, or taste it. Every time we touch, use, see, feel, or taste the product, we react to that experience with emotion, feel something inside that makes us enjoy or resent or desire or abhor the experience. Products that are not perceived by any of the senses will not directly convey emotion. For example, engine parts will have a purely functional role if they are never touched or seen or smelled or heard by a person, even though the engine as a whole produces a hum and vibration that excites the driver.

Any product with which a person interacts has the potential to deliver emotion. With music, the sense of hearing is all that is needed to capture the core product emotion. Yet emotions, positive or negative, can be amplified when delivered to more senses, such as adding a visual element to the music. Classic album artwork is, at times, revered to the level of the music itself. Music videos, which combine the visual and the auditory, are today core to the music industry. The encounter with sound, art, and motion work in concert, providing at its best a heightened emotional experience through a perfect blend of the senses.

FIGURE 1.2A Webkinz stuffed animals (well-loved collection of Ben and Joshua Cagan).

Or take a simple stuffed animal, which reaches customers through its visual appearance and quality of touch. Both elements, the appearance and the feel, can be manipulated in sync to achieve emotional goals. The fur of an aggressive-looking stuffed tiger might feel bristly, while the fur of a cuddly-looking tiger feels soft.

Beyond visual appearance and physical sensation, how can a company that makes toys give a turbo-boost to the simple stuffed animal, already the ultimate emotional connection for young children? Toy manufacturers have found ways to add technology to stuffed animals, connecting with more senses. Tickle-Me-Elmos that talk and vibrate remained popular for a decade, with hordes of people standing in line for holiday purchases.

And yet, as much as the extra technology in Elmo offers the surprise and joy for the first weeks or months, few children carry that Elmo or any other tech-laden toy with them through every night, every car ride, every visit to the store, every doctor’s office for comfort, as they do with their favorite, simple stuffed animal. How can a company create a more ongoing stream of emotions for the traditional stuffed animal?

FIGURE 1.2B Screenshots from webkinz.com, which depict the virtual version of the physical stuffed animals in their room, and provide games for kids to play.

In 2005, Ganz, a Canadian company headquartered in Woodbridge, Ontario, added a whole new dimension of sensory experience to stuffed animals, merging the ultimate “lovie” with the ultimate game forum to create Webkinz. Webkinz are soft, adorable, stuffed animals—cuddly koalas, plush pugs, cute kittens—that can be loved and dragged around like any other stuffed animal. Open the tag on its collar and go on the Internet to www.webkinz.com, type in a code, and a virtual version of the animal appears. A child sets up a user name that associates with the code, names their animal, and they can spend hours upon hours playing games (some educational), looking for gems, cooking, buying virtual clothes and toys for their pet with virtual dollars they earn playing games, and tending for the well-being of their pet.

With in two years and without advertising, over a million Webkinz users were registered. In what had been a declining industry, Webkinz sales have continued to grow steeply, reaching a broad range of children, most of whom have more than one Webkinz pet. Webkinz are a somewhat new craze, but unlike Cabbage Patch dolls and other crazes that are static, Webkinz have a dynamic element that expands the interactive pleasure of the stuffed animal experience with the exploration of new games, accessories, and actions, in addition to the basic stuffed animal that itself connects emotionally to the children.

All Ganz needs to do to keep kids coming back for more is to update activities on its website. Kids connect to Webkinz in a deep and emotional way, expressing joy, love, enthusiasm and more, and the cost margin for Ganz is minimal, producing low-cost physical toys and creating, maintaining, and updating a website.

Emotions and the Web

The web world is filled with all kinds of products that provide services and also connect emotionally with customers. Amazon and eBay satisfy the desire for non-invasive shopping for anything and everything you might want, with the ability to window-shop from the comfort of your home. With its maps, Google offers the adventure of exploration by providing directions in the physical world, and Google Maps echoes the experience with enjoyable exploration of the software itself: street views, user images, Wikipedia data, data overlays, and more.

Facebook and YouTube facilitate emotion by connecting people to one another and encouraging us to talk about whatever we want to talk about, typically issues or items about which we feel strongly (again, emotion). All of these products connect to our lives via the capabilities that the products enable, and how much they mean to all the individuals who use them, and have feelings about them.

Examples Abound

Think of other emotion-laden products that stand out. KitchenAid’s Pro Line toasters, waffle makers, coffee makers, and contemporary-styled dishwashers integrate into the kitchen environment, creating a professional-styled kitchen that projects one’s love of and skill for food. BMW cars excite customers and project speed, luxury, and wealth, while Honda cars promote confidence, social responsibility, and practicality. Harley and Indian Motorcycles connote freedom, Americana, and fun. Because these products fulfill both the emotional yearning of consumers as well as utilitarian function, they generate significant margins.

Once you begin to see the value of product emotions, examples abound. Emotion is core to any consumer or business relationship. The fact that customers seek to fulfill both functional needs (“what it does for me”) and emotional desires (“how it makes me feel”) is true for every physical or virtual product, service, or strategy—a computer, a hospital visit, express package delivery, a kitchen blender, a vacation cruise.

It is also true for business products. When one thinks of business-to-business (B-to-B) products, one usually thinks about capability—the functionality that is required or enabled. It may not seem like emotion really matters for products found in utilitarian functional environments. Upcoming chapters will demonstrate the importance of product emotions such as trust, security, and empowerment in multiple B-to-B companies, because it turns out that whenever people are involved, emotion matters. Regardless of context, customers buy products for both what the product does for them and how the product makes them feel. There is great opportunity for business-based products to deliberately evoke emotion, to be built not just to perform but also be built to love.