Creating Passionate Users

You're emotional. Deal with it.

No matter how enlightened and politically correct we've become, most people still tend to believe that when making decisions, men are less driven by emotions than women. Men use left-brained (metaphorically speaking) logical, rational thought. Men are persuaded to buy or act based on thinking, not feeling, while women do the opposite. You know, that whole Mars and Venus thing.

This wouldn't be so bad if those left-brained characteristics weren't seen as being more... virtuous.

Newsflash: emotions are sick and tired of being treated like second-class brain citizens! They're taking back their rightful place in the world, thanks to the work of brave neuroscientists like Joseph LeDoux and Antonio Damsio (author of Descarte's Error). These two, and a handful of others, withstood the mocking of their peers ("Wait... let me get this straight...you're basing your career on studying emotions [laughs hysterically, spits coffee out of nose]. That is hilarious! Oh, Antonio, you almost got me on that one... ha-ha-ha." But thanks to their strength of character, and scientific abilities, they've finally started to offer honest-to-goodness, left-brain-compatible, bonafide scientific evidence of how crucial--and pervasive--emotions are in our lives.

You're all making decisions emotionally. You can deny it all you want, but you should be grateful for emotions. Without them, you'd remember almost nothing. Without them, you wouldn't learn much. Without them... you'd probably be dead. (And not much fun at parties or, for that matter, in bed ; ))

The key points for learning and marketing and creating passionate users is to keep this in mind:

People don't choose rationally to listen to your message and then have a feeling about it. They choose to listen to your message because they have a feeling about it.

If you're basing your communications solely on logical, rational, reasoned facts... the brain is not your friend. Emotions are the gatekeeper... if you want in, you gotta talk to the amygdala.

This doesn't mean that reason isn't crucial. In my little bar charts, logic is still there. You make a decision emotionally, but part of that decision is based on using logic to figure out how you'll feel in the future about your decision. In other words, you'll use logical thinking to predict whether you'll continue to feel good about the decision, or whether in the end... the guilt will be too much. Or that it's not worth the arguments you'll have with your spouse over it. You know the story.

And yeah, I've way over-exaggerated the bar chart to get your attention. In truth, when emotions or logic are not in balance, bad things happen. But we've spent the last several decades putting logic on a pedestal while poor emotions get kicked around and denigrated. In the end, guys, you're just as driven by emotions as women. Trust us... testosterone SO does not enhance your powers of reason. True, we women often show it differently... and certainly more freely than the average male. We don't have as much to prove there, and we always knew that emotions would one day gain the street cred they so richly deserve.

We've just been waiting for the neuroscience to catch up.

For more on emotions, check out the links above on LeDoux and Demasio, and don't forget Dan Pink's book A Whole New Mind, on why you must not only embrace your inner "right brain" attributes, but work and learn to enhance them. Or face being outsourced, automated, or something else bad I can't remember.

Sooner or later, guys, you'll have to learn to cope with the knowledge that you're not nearly as rational as you thought. But I bet if you look back at the last big purchase you made, you'll know in your heart of hearts that no matter how good it looked on paper... you bought it because of how it made you feel. Deal with it. : )