The vast majority of people won’t tell their true feelings towards your product. But the truth is customer’s emotion is crucial to marketing. 

People act emotionally rather than rationally 

At our core, we are not rational beings who occasionally act emotionally. Rather, we are emotional beings who occasionally act rationally. Emotions evoked by products enhance the pleasure of buying, owning and using them. For marketers, focusing on establishing emotional connections in any communication is crucial, given our modern understanding of emotion. 

The emotional quality of products is becoming more and more important in today's marketplace, which is full of look-a-like products in terms of technical characteristics, quality and price. In some purchase decisions, emotional responses may even become a decisive factor. 

People lie, hardware does not 

Earlier marketers had to rely only on surveys and focus groups to gather consumer insight. The real challenge was to figure out if this self-reported data matches the reality. New technologies and neuroscience allow for a more reliable emotions measurement technique. 

Hardware became available outside scientific labs. More so, they became affordable and easy (well, easier) to use. Tools available today in neuroscience leave us better equipped than ever to measure emotion. 

Neuromarketing technologies include your basic webcam for emotions measurement, a headset for electroencephalography (EEG), biometrics (which includes traditional psycho-physiological measures like skin conductance response, heart rate, and respiration). Each method has value and it requires experience and expertise to know the strengths and limitations of each. 

All of these market-ready solutions allow measuring emotions without invasive procedures. It may look like science fiction but neuroscience can be used with existing methodologies and business processes to better understand and react to consumer behaviors and needs. 

And the last piece of truth… 

One technology is no panacea – combine, mix and match. 

No one technology has all of the answers. However, when combined together these technologies can help you understand consumers better than they understand themselves. The holy grail of consumer research is to figure out how to accurately measure emotions. And so address the challenge that is fundamental: get a deeper understanding of emotional response in messaging, imagery or other creative content to capture the hearts and minds of consumers.