How to Use Emotion Over Features to Sell #614

Most ecommerce teams are incredibly good at the rational stuff. Product pages. Checkout flows. Abandoned cart sequences. Free shipping thresholds. Everything is designed to squeeze a little more conversion out of customers who are already close to buying.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: that’s not where the decision is made. Buying decisions are emotional first, and rational second. The features, specs and pricing comparisons don’t create the decision. They justify it after the fact.

In today's Playbook:

• Why most ecommerce brands over-invest in features instead of emotion
• The difference between cognitive vs emotional brands, and why it matters
• How to identify your brand’s emotional default
• Why you can’t create emotion, only amplify what already exists
• How emotional storytelling at the top of funnel drives higher conversion without discounts

Connect with Nick
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i=change’s main episode

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

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SPEAKER_02 2:59

After 10 years at Nike, it was kind of the reason why I it was time for me to go. And it was simply because they were taking back those global directives and saying, right, here's the objective, go and implement it into the marketplace, as opposed to saying, here's what we need to achieve, you go and influence that. And so it did feel like you lost a bit of that, I don't know if control is the right word, but that ability to shape and shift and decide, you know, what were the right stores, what were the right locations, who are the consumers that we're speaking to in order to deliver those objectives. And fundamentally, my objective, my job at Adidas and Nike was to make sure consumers missed out, you know, and that wasn't to not around like exclusion, but to drive desire. So by taking the approach of understanding is this culturally right first, meant that we would go tastemakers, early adopters, down into general market, which then meant we would get the return from a revenue perspective in time. And that, you know, was a whole seed ignite scale mentality. And my job was to kind of understand the best way to do that with a consumer that doesn't like to be sold to, you know, they dig their heels in. And more so now than ever before, there's more consumers doing it, but they sniff out as soon as you push, you know, as soon as they see right through marketing. And so we kind of went through this process where if the tastemakers, those trendsetters kind of adopted what we were doing, a new silhouette or so forth that we want to introduce into the market, we knew that the next step was what we would call an early adopter. So early adopters don't set trends, but they pick up on them really quickly. And we knew that once we got it past the early adopters, then it had the legs to really drive revenue in our marketplace once we moved it through into more being more accessible to the general market.

SPEAKER_00 4:52

So for our listeners who don't know Nick Gray, they don't know all this amazing work that you've been doing, would you explain yourself as like obviously not an agency, you're not a consultant, but you're basically this like brand therapist, this coach that comes in. Sometimes you're even like a essentially a fractional CMO, right? IGU Global basically comes in and says, like, who the hell are you if you've lost your way? Like you could be a massive brand like Nike, Westfield, and you're essentially like re-anchoring them. Is that correct? For our listeners who are just hearing about this for the first time, how do you say, explain what you are and who needs you?

SPEAKER_02 5:31

Yeah. So like a fractional CMO, we we do play in that that role, but in time, right? So fundamentally, as a CMO kind of comes in and makes an existing system work really well, whether it's for growth, optimization, so forth. What we do is we step maybe one step higher than that. We're better than them. No, no, I'm kidding. No, no, no, I'm not. I'm just kidding. Well, what we do first is we kind of make sure that we are clear in order to make the best decisions for that system. And it the bottom line is that, you know, humans make decisions with emotion first. You know, trust is built on emotion. And so if we are not really clear around the emotional default of a brand or business first, then it can influence depending on the decisions that you're making, right? So, you know, we work on this premises.

SPEAKER_01 6:23

Is that hard for you to position yourself though? Because if you think about it is like brand, and and I'm picking up on this in everything you're saying, is that brand is every decision you make from how you show up color-wise, logo-wise, all the stuff that we kind of come to immediately versus what products you stock, versus what physical locations, where you open those physical locations. Everything is saying something about who you are and who you're for to drive that desire. So is it hard for you then to be lumped into a marketing category when it's essentially every decision you're making?

SPEAKER_02 6:55

Yeah. So we will play in that space. And like to cut a long story short, we work with anyone, but we have to have clarity on whether the mindset is right in the first place, right? So if you are there just focused on a fundamental CMO objective, then we're probably not the right business for you. But what we tend to focus on first, and it happens in different ways. A lot of businesses approach me when they're pinballing, right? So when they're like, oh my God, we're maybe we need to add this category, or is our social media doing the same thing that needs to do in retail? And they're creating all this cognitive dissonance, which is confusing the consumer across their ecosystem, right? Or what we would traditionally call it an omnichannel. And so what we always find ourselves doing is going this way first to get that clarity, right? And the reason that that's so important is, you know, you'll hear me talk about this a lot, is there's kind of two camps in retail. You're either a cognitive default or you're an emotional default. A cognitive default is simply when a customer is making an automatic decision, right? Where do I go for my shopping colts? Where do I get my home tech product from, JB Hi-Fi? And it's a really short equation in people's heads and a really hard camp to be in and stay in. But if you're not in that camp, then you're in the emotional default. And what that means is that a consumer is making a buying decision based on a feeling or emotion attached to that brand or business. And so the problem is, is that if we're not clear on that, double down on that, and anchor to that, what that actually ends up doing is confusing consumers. And that's what impacts doubt, puts doubt, you know, and you've done it yourself. You know, you've gone to a website or into a store and you've gone, is this the right store for me? I'm not quite sure, you know. And as soon as there's doubt in your mind, then what that does is impact trust. No different to a relationship. And it's very hard to repair.

SPEAKER_01 8:49

What Nick is describing isn't a brand philosophy exercise. It's the mechanism behind why some brands grow without pushing and others push harder and harder for diminishing returns. Here are three things worth taking back into your business from this conversation. Number one, know your emotional default before you execute anything. Nick makes a distinction that I think cuts through a lot of confusion about what brand actually means in an e-commerce context. He talks about two types of brands: cognitive defaults and emotional defaults. A cognitive default is when a customer makes an automatic, almost unconscious choice. Where do I get my groceries, Kohl's? Where do I buy my home tech, JB Hi-Fi? It's a short equation in people's heads and it's a very hard position to earn and maintain. An emotional default is very different. It's when a customer makes a buying decision based on a feeling attached to your brand. And the problem that most e-commerce brands have is that they're trying to compete as cognitive defaults on convenience, price, speed without ever establishing the emotional layer that makes people actually care. The exercise that Nick uses to find that emotional layer is very much worth stealing. Ask yourself, if your brand were a car, what car would it be? If it were a sports personality, who would it be? It sounds almost too simple. But what it forces you to do is identify the emotional personality your brand needs to be consistent around everywhere. And consistency, as we know, is what builds brand trust. Inconsistency creates doubt. And once a customer doubts whether your brand is right for them, that's a very, very hard thing to repair. Lesson two, you can't invent an emotion. You can only amplify one that already exists. This was the insight that Mike Halligan from Scratch Pet Food pulled out of an intensive study of the copyright classic breakthrough advertising. And it reframes the whole job of emotional marketing. Most brands approach it from the inside out. And here's what we want people to feel about us. Here's the story we want to tell. Here's the emotion that we're trying to create. And then they brief an agency and they wonder why it doesn't land. The more useful starting point is from the outside in. What do your customers already feel? What emotional state are they in before they even encounter your brand? What are they worried about, excited by, proud of? Your job isn't to introduce a new emotion. It's to find the one that's already there and show up in a way that resonates with it. And the practical version of this is probably simpler than most people think. Go into your reviews, go into your post-purchase surveys, look at the actual language your customers use to describe their experience, not the language your marketing team uses to describe your product. Those words are your brief because they're already emotionally true in a way that anything written from scratch, pun intended, probably isn't. Number three, emotional investment at the top of the funnel does the conversion work at the bottom. Here's where this gets really interesting for anyone who lives by conversion metrics. Nick worked with a brand that made a deliberate decision to stop pulling conversion levers and instead focus on loading the top of the funnel with emotionally strong storytelling. No extra discounts, no new gift with purchase mechanic, just a sustained investment in making people feel something before they were even anywhere near a buying decision. The outcome was triple-digit growth within 12 months. Of course, it's a big spin and you don't always expect that result. However, there is a data point from a different direction that I think is worth mentioning here. Jeremy Meltzer from iEqual Change shared a campaign that Buy Charlotte ran for International Day of the Girl. Instead of a discount, the brand doubled its charitable donation from$1 to$2. That EDM drove a 33% lift in conversions compared to their standard product and promotional emails. No price incentive, just emotional alignment between what the brand stood for and what the customer wanted to feel about spending their money. 33% from an email with no discount, just emotion and connection. So the thing worth asking yourself is where in your funnel are you actually trying to create emotion? If the honest answer is mostly at the point of purchase through urgency mechanics and social proof, you're probably working harder than you need to at the bottom while leaving a lot, a lot of potential desire untouched right up at the top of the funnel. Now, Nick's framework isn't complicated, but it does require a different kind of discipline to what most e-commerce teams spend their time on. It means doing work that's harder to measure and harder to justify with managers and in weekly performance reviews. Because it could take longer and it's not as tangible. But the brands that invest in it early end up in a position where conversion almost takes care of itself in a magical kind of way because the customer already decided before they hit that product page. They'd already made their decision. Features get your brand considered, emotion gets it chosen. If you want to go deeper on this topic, whether that's figuring out your emotional default or building the kind of brand narrative that does the heavy lifting before the sale, jump into the Ad to Cart community. There are hundreds of e commerce professionals in there every day working through exactly these questions. You can join for free over on adducart.com.au. That's the playbook for this week. I'll see you Friday.