Managing the Emotional Aspect of Your Business

Today, the success of all businesses whatsoever, hinges on how much they are able to manage the emotional needs of their customers. You are in the motion business. Customers do business in pursuit of emotional experiences. And when they find it, they return to the same business and become devoted to the brand because of the way the business makes them feel. The real key to earnings is repeat customer. Emotion builds connection, consciously or unconsciously.

Science has partnered with the psychology of performance and has provided us with stacks of statistics that emotion drives our decision making, even in business. We make emotional choices and then back them up with logic, reason or data. That is to say, what we feel is more important than what we think. Although we might choose to indulge ourselves in the facts and try to convince ourselves that our decisions are based on logic. It’s really our unconscious emotional-side that keeps pulling us beyond our reason, demanding a connection between us and the business we patronize. Dale Carnegie was tight when he taught that, ‘When dealing with people let us remember we are dealing with creatures of logic but emotion.’ Whatsoever meets a man’s emotional need is the most important thing in his life at that point in time.

Our humanity is defined as the ability to involve ourselves emotionally in everything we do. Man, whether male or female is an emotional being. And that humanity is most evident in our feelings. Feelings are the way we personalize our thoughts, ideas, and reactions. People do things for their reasons (not your reason), and those reasons are emotionally aroused by the way they feel.

Emotional bonding is the single most important element you can integrate into your business in today’s business culture. Emotional connection always precedes economic ones, the way the heart comes before the head. If you ignore the former, you lose the later. Mind-share often comes before market-share. You can rarely move people into action unless you first move them with emotion.

‘The purpose of any business’, Scott McKain , a business executive said, ‘is to profitably create emotional connections that are so compelling to customers, that loyalty is assured.’ He also added, ‘Today’s customers are saying “good is not good enough”. If you want my business, amaze me. Knock me out. Make an emotional impression I won’t forget.’ Not only has the quality of ‘product-service’ changed in recent times, expectation of the people who buy these ‘product-services’ have changed. If you don’t understand and change the way you relate toy your clientele you are going to be out of business soon.

Everybody has a ‘product-service’; it is what you do beyond the ‘product-service’ that makes all the difference in business. How your customers feel about you in the marketplace can be much more important than what you are selling. I have come to realize that customers blend the facts about the quality of your product and delivery of your service with the feelings they have about the experience of doing business with you. ‘As times are changing, so is the standard desired by customers. No longer are they searching for excellence: now they are pursuing something that would make them go, wow! They want to experience a product or service that does more than simply satisfy them: they want to be amazed’. Those were the words of Tom Peters.

How much are you fulfilling your customer’s needs on the emotional stand point? The value of any business is measured by what it means to the buyers. People prefer and refer businesses that represent an amazing memory to them. Always remember that what people think about your business is not as important as what they feel about it. The devotion you get from your customer does not necessarily spring from your ‘product-service’. Loyalties develop when clientele feel emotionally engaged in the outcome they attain in a transaction. Whether they buy a product, bank in XYZ bank, shop in a certain store or use a salon. This even extends to ones place of religious worship. When customers feel good about your ‘product-service’, they tell their friends about it.

If you will ever track your clients’ loyalty, large sum of them came from emotional connection they have with you, more than the quality of your ‘product-service’. No one would care about you business that much, except they are emotionally linked to it. You can turn your business as a tool kit for touching you clients’ emotion while you serve them. This, however, requires some skills. Let me give you some tips:

See things from your customers’ private goggles. See what they see.
Pay attention to feelings than you would to their money. For the money to come, the feelings must be richly touched.
The primary mode of the emotion is non-verbal. We can hardly conceal our true emotions. Our faces most times tell what’s going on in us. Look at the faces of your customers. Make it a habit and you will learn a lot about what they feel about your business. Nothing could be so interesting in business like meting the emotional needs of your customers. I gave a client some ideas on how to manage their customers emotion, and the response have been highly positive. You too can achieve the same result.

The bottom line is that your customers are going to have an emotional experience because of their contact with your organization, whether you like it or not. Your responsibility and challenge is to provide them with the kind of emotional connection that will inspire loyalty; the more powerful the connection, the greater the success of your business. How are you factoring emotion into your business? You can as for professional help. It’s up to you to make your business happen.


Tony Ajah is a highly consulted Business Growth Strategist. His ideas have been helpful to businesses in Nigeria. He also serve as Creative Director, Smartspeakers Resources, a Lagos- based firm that is into soft skills development.
tony@smartspeakersng.org ajahxt@yahoo.co.uk 08051403056