Decoding the Emotional DNA of Market Research Insights

Priscilla McKinney: I am so excited to introduce to you Ryan Baum. He is the CEO of Psyclone. What a great brand name. You know, I just love great brand names. They are a premier psychological science research firm specializing in consumer and political behavior. We're going to talk about both of those things today. They are really well known about working with emotion driven analytics. They combine expertise in data, psychology, and business strategy. I mean, that is an amazing crossroads. And he delivers deep insights to help organizations get through really complex markets and societal trends. So Ryan, thank you so much for joining me on Ponderings from the Perch.

Ryan Baum: Thank you for having me.

Priscilla McKinney: So as a cultural anthropologist, I am very interested in what humans are doing and feeling and thinking and how we always say that we're so logical, but yet we're very motivated by all of our emotions. So can you talk a little bit about what your company does to identify the emotional DNA, you call it, of brands and products? And how do you go about even decoding such an amazing thing? You talk a lot about these emotional foot... You talk a lot about these emotional fingerprints and how they can lead to an emotional blueprint, but tell us a little bit behind the curtain on that subject.

Ryan Baum: Yeah, sure. So here at Psyclone, we're a team of researchers and psychologists and we really only do one thing and that's understanding consumers at a deep psychological level. I guess the best way to really describe this before we even really get into emotions within psychological science, there's the big three, which most people know there's thinking, there's feeling, and then there's the behaving aspect of it. And once you understand those three things, you really understand everything. And so under the thinking part, there's, you know, what are people's attitudes, perceptions and beliefs towards things. Then there's the feeling part. And so, of course, this is the emotional part. And this is one thing that Psyclone really dives deep into. And not that it's the most important pillar, but it's just as important as the other ones. And there are many ways to look at emotions and especially in academic research, there's a lot of debate on what's even considered an emotion. And so we really dig deep into emotion. And there's basic emotions which you could get through things like facial expression, for example. But to really understand detailed emotions, like for example, you can't get at every emotion through a facial expression. For example, nostalgic or hopefulness or optimism and even basic emotions for example sadness, of course, you know, we could tell through facial expression sometimes when somebody is feeling sad they could be crying but most of the time when we're feeling sad, we're not showing any facial expression at all. And then the last pillar is behavior. So we want to understand why are people behaving in certain ways? Why are they not? What could be done to inspire people to behave in specific ways? And so that's in a large part what we're doing here.

Priscilla McKinney: So it's such an interesting combination between data science and psychological expertise. That might not be a place where a lot of people see a good combination. But when companies are facing really complicated business challenges, they need both of those. So how do you go about deciding when to look more at the numbers or to dig deeper into the human psyche behind those numbers? What's your balance? What are you thinking?

Ryan Baum: Yeah, mean, so the numbers, numbers are numbers. mean, and so, you know, within science, you kind of have to separate those two variables. So to understand what's true, you have to explore, have to, you have to understand what is actually, you know, happening. And when do we, what's psychology good for? Well, that's to understand the why behind things. And So if we want to understand why people are thinking, feeling and behaving towards things, that's when we want to get into the emotions and really understanding the why and understanding things from different angles. sometimes the... know, the data and the statistics that we look at, it's looking at, you know, general KPIs, like it could be purchase intent, it could be voting behaviors, it could be consideration, it could be engagement. And then to really understand the why behind those things, that's where the psychology comes in. just... asking people, for example, open-ended questions and then later quantifying those kinds of things. So it all goes hand in hand, but they are, I would consider those two separate variables for the most part.

Priscilla McKinney: Sorry, I had a little blip in there. So it captured what you're saying. Let's just give it one second. You mentioned voter behavior. And actually, one of the reasons I asked you on Ponderings from the Perch was because of an article I read about some work that you did with Gazelle Global about looking at some voting behavior, what was going on. I'm going to put the link to that article in our show notes. But can you give us a little snippet of what was so important, what was going on psychologically in that study?

Ryan Baum: sure, Yeah. Sure.

Ryan Baum: Yeah, so we did a post-election study. It was a post-mortem study on the the twenty twenty four U.S. election. And so we wanted to understand what it is that drove voting behaviors. And in that particular study, I forgot exactly how many emotions we tested. I think it was like eighty one, eighty two, eighty three emotions that we looked at. And in addition to that, we don't want to separate emotions from voting behaviors and over the course of that study was a multiple-phase study we uncovered a hundred and seventy four drivers of voting behaviors and what people may not realize is that it goes much deeper than what we would call surface level Issues so when we ask people open-endedly, why did you vote for Donald Trump? Why did you vote for Kamala Harris? The responses are usually things like immigration women's rights and surface level type issues but the truth is that it goes much much deeper and when we correlated those 174 drivers with voting behaviors, it's the surface level issues aside from Economy was a top issue But most of the issues they were closer towards the bottom of the list but two of the top ones that were at the top of the list were identity. So this particular candidate has an identity that aligns with my own and that was very interesting. So we wanted to understand you know what is it about people's identity and what we learned was is that There's usually one identity-based driver that's going to resonate with somebody. And that identity-based driver is going to be what determines if they're going to vote one way or the other. And we have another.

Ryan Baum: We did a follow-up study on this and there's going to be a write-up on that as well. But what we found is that, you know, for example, I have a friend who I personally voted for Kamala Harris. He voted for Trump. But if you go issue by issue, we agree on many of the issues. There's very little daylight. And the identity-based driver that was most important to me was one that really aligns with you know, what's happening, know, values that other people on the left might, might align with. And then my friend, his top value was one that aligned with what people on the right would align with. it's really not the actual values, but it's the order in which we place these values. And it just tells us so much about what's going on. And so in this follow up study, we identified 17 identity based values. So we didn't ask somebody, why did you vote for Kamala Harris or why did you vote for Donald Trump, but we what we asked was over the course of your life What are the kinds of things that you look for in candidates? And this is what distilled out of these open-ended questions and then we went ahead and we quantified it later and It's the order in which The order in which they they rank these values and and these values by the way, they did go across party lines, so Candid so people felt very strongly about all of the, they strongly resonated with all of the values that we tested. So it really went both ways.

Priscilla McKinney: It's not surprising to me that in this kind of decision in a political environment there are a lot of really emotional decisions going on and that doesn't surprise me about identity although that is very clarifying. But you and I also overlap in the B2B space and that's where people can make the mistake to think, but now if we're making a B2B decision, say I'm buying a new network system for my company, I'm not using my emotion to make this decision. know that that is just not true. So most people do think that those B2B decisions are purely rational, but you study this emotion driven data and you know that there are patterns that are happening even when people are making million dollar purchasing decisions that are absolutely emotion based. So tell us a little bit about that.

Ryan Baum: Right, and so in B2B type studies, mean... We get that a lot on our end. Are you really feeling emotion if you're buying insurance or toilet paper or whatever it is? It seems like a functional decision. But the truth is, if you're buying insurance, also have a trust, for example, is an emotion. Indifference is an emotion. And so there are many emotions that that fall under that. And just going a little bit deeper on that. And you may have heard the name Antonio Demasio, who is a famous neuroscientist. and he did a lot of studies but what he found is that his patients, he studies people who have damage to the region of the brain that's associated with processing emotions and his patients, let's just give a generic example, if you ask one of his patients would you rather have chocolate ice cream or vanilla or strawberry, most of us could answer that instantaneously or maybe within a few seconds. People with damage to the region of the brain, could take hours to make that decision if they're even able to make that decision at all. So we know from neuroscientific studies that we can't even make decisions without emotion. of course, you know, there is the rational part of everything. So it's not like all decisions. So one thing that we hear that we've heard through the years over and over again is that, you know, it's a system one type decision. And system one means is that it's like a system, you know, it's a it's an intuitive decision. You really don't have to think about it. System two means that it's a rational decision. And this was all these terms were coined by Daniel Kahneman, who was also a world famous psychologist. And unfortunately, within the past year or two, he's passed. But the truth is, is that all of the decisions we make, at least most of them, there is a component of both. But as Kahneman does point out, it's our system one that really drives the train. So we are emotional creatures, but we do think rationally as well. And that is why humans have evolved to be the top priming. So both are important.

Priscilla McKinney: Yeah. can make a simple argument for, I buy this laundry detergent because it's better or there's a price point. I can say all these things and I have engaged my rational brain. On the other hand, I happen to know that it smells like my mom's house. And so it's not a clear divide between system one and system two. I may be making a very complicated decision in maybe an intuitive or split second, but there is emotion involved in that.

Ryan Baum: Yeah, yeah. And also, if it smells like your mom's house, using that example, there is an emotion in there, which is nostalgia. So, yeah.

Priscilla McKinney: I think that's important. Yeah, yeah. really hard to track. So okay, let's talk a little bit about what we do with this. What does this mean for brands? So you're out there capturing emotional intelligence tracking and you know how people are feeling towards brands and you know that is shifting over time. I just don't envy some of these brands having to deal with how volatile the market is and how quickly these emotions can change. So what do you think are the early warning signs that should be watching for in terms of the emotional changes of buyers.

Ryan Baum: Yeah, so emotions are very important because they do pick up things sometimes earlier than like a KPI like consideration or you know purchase intent or something like that because maybe if somebody's feeling a little bit let's say that you have you're interviewing a big population of people and let's say that anxiety for example is coming through or pessimism or something like that. Those are these are all good measures to it just gives us more measures you know as to what's going. on. so, you know, so, you know, these emotions are, you know, absolutely critical because it, you know, it's kind of the tremors in there, you know, and whereas like the big KPIs, I would say, more, you know, the, know, the, you know, the bigger earthquake shocks. But, but, you know, it does give us, you know, forewarning into things that could happen in the future. So.

Priscilla McKinney: Yeah, I do think in marketing, everybody's asking us more for forecasting and a little bit less of the rear view mirror of what actually happened. And sometimes KPIs really feel to me often like, well, look backwards, but that doesn't help you set up for success in business. And I'm going to kind of come back to what you talked about earlier about the political side and let's talk about it a little different way. We know in that political environment, things are incredibly polarized. You're seeing this and that study. really went through that. But it's not just politics where polarization is happening. It's also happening in consumer loyalty. So tell me a little bit about some of the psychological patterns that you're seeing repeat from political behavior that is divisive but is coming into branding and consumer behavior where it is becoming divisive. Brands are being associated with certain maybe extreme views. So how do brands navigate this? What are you seeing about that?

Ryan Baum: So this again it all comes down to identity. mean you know identity is really where you know everything stems and going back to neuroscience for it you know for example there's a there's a neuroscientist her name is Emily Falk and she's at Penn and she has a neuroscience lab. And what she talks about is that when the region of the brain that's associated with identity or self-reflection, we could tell with almost 80, 90 percent certainty whether somebody is actually going to purchase something because it's part of their identity. It's the me part of the brain. And so the overlap between, you know, between consumer and political, that's where really the overlap lies. for example, one of our clients, Nike, we know that when we ask people, why did you purchase the pair of shoes you did, the overwhelming reason people give if you ask open-endedly is because the shoes are comfortable. once you actually went once we actually run correlations, it's much more identity based. It has a lot more, like for example, younger people care much more about how their shoes look. Older people care more about being active and able-bodied. And the actual number one driver is feeling athletic. And when we think about this from an evolutionary perspective, being athletic has tremendous evolutionary advantages, right? It helps us find food. It helps us evade predators. So identity plays a tremendous role in both politics and consumer research.

Priscilla McKinney: you see this so easily in my own life. You know, I look at an Android and an iPhone and I have seen how you know the Android has gotten better and better and better. I think I just can never see myself as an Android person. I'm an iPhone person and this is an identity as opposed to an evaluation of a product. And I think a lot of people do that without thinking about it. They don't realize it. Now I realize it but that doesn't mean I've changed my behavior. I still have some kind of identity and even I don't fully understand it. But let me just tell I have four older sisters and four of us really ganged up on the one who was an android to get her to get over to an iPhone. Now I can't abandon it. I've like totally harassed over becoming an iPhone user. But this is just a funny view where we can start seeing in our own lives that we are not immune to this kind of behavior and this kind of view of the world. So you and I also talk with a lot of people about health of brands.

Ryan Baum: Ha ha!

Priscilla McKinney: you look at trackers and you and I both know that traditional trackers really often miss the full story of consumer relationships. I mentioned this idea about it sometimes brand trackers also being just a rear-view mirror. That can be one criticism. But what do you think is the biggest misconception that market researchers have about measuring consumer sentiment and what they miss about bringing that emotional DNA into ongoing tracking of a brand's health.

Ryan Baum: Yeah, so everything is rooted in emotions. so, for example, on one side you have emotions and on the other side you have functional type attributes. And the reason why we ask about the emotions is to get at different angles. And in every in any given study, when we already mentioned that, like for the political study, we had 124, 174 drivers of voting behaviors. But I would say on average in our studies, we have anywhere from 100 to 200 drivers of could be purchase intent or whatever it is and Emotions as far as tracking we always tell our clients that You know, it really depends on the context. So most of our clients for intelligence tracking studies, we only recommend tracking emotions once, maybe twice a year because emotions towards things don't change as much as one would think. So it's not like, you know, we have clients where we're doing, you know, rolling three month trackers on specific attributes, but it's what comes from these emotions. The functional attributes is what really because when we start working with clients for example, we ask them how many attributes are you tracking, how many functional attributes are you tracking in your tracker? And usually the response we get is somewhere along the lines of 20, 30, 40, maybe 50. And the truth is if we're only testing let's say 40 functional attributes, and let's say only 25 % of those are actionable, that's only 10 things that we could do right now to increased purchase intent and in our view that's just not enough. Maybe it's because we are also academic but we want to get many more than that. you know let's say that we have one hundred and seventy five different attributes and I'm just throwing a number out there. Let's say that forty seven of these are actionable. Our team for example could do a write up and say you know these are the things that we could do right now to increase purchase intent from first to last and we would never get a list of 174 different drivers of voting behaviors if we didn't understand the emotional drivers because that is where all of this stems from.

Priscilla McKinney: Right, right. Well, I can see you're saying, I might do this and want a lot of them because I'm an academic, but I would say any brand is wanting many more options and opportunities in order to improve their share in the marketplace. And so why turn away from new opportunities, new nuances in order to understand the consumer, especially in this incredibly volatile environment? Please be sure to go look at that political study. I'll be sure to list it in the show notes. It was an incredibly interesting write-up. Ryan, thank you so much for sharing your expertise. Obviously, what we can see from your perspective is that if we're not really engaging and really understanding and delving into the emotional side of consumer behavior, we are really missing the whole point.

Ryan Baum: Yes, well, thank you. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

Priscilla McKinney: From all the peeps here at Little Bird Marketing, have a great day and happy marketing.