According to a recent NBC-Wall Street Journal poll, the Democratic Party’s “favorable” rating has fallen to an abysmal 33 percent. But heck, that’s better than the Republican Party’s favorability which has plunged to just 24 percent.
Now here’s the weird part: according to a recent Gallup poll, registered voters say they intend to vote for Republicans—the guys they disapprove of most—over Democrats by a 10-point margin.
Anyone who’s conducted surveys, focus groups or other marketing measurements will tell you that the numbers generated are often self-contradictory. It’s not that people are liars. They’re just really complex creatures.
People can actually express strong preference for one thing, but when a decision finally has to be made, act in a contrary fashion.
Of course, the way a question is framed, the context of a survey and the presence of other participants can skew the results. But this contrarian outcome runs deeper than that.
It is because people react with both mind and heart. There are both cognitive and emotional forces at work when someone makes a moral, political or consumer choice. In the case of the anti-Republican electorate that plans to vote for Republicans, it’s clear that an emotionally charged discontent with the party in power is at work. And it’s not just consumer or voter decisions that operate this way. Multi-million dollar business deals involve as much emotional as rational reflection. (Ask any of our private jet brokerage clients about that one.)
That’s why brands, in order to get traction with prospects and maintain the loyalty of customers, must appeal to both head and heart.
Whenever we engage in major branding or re-branding efforts with our clients, we have a crucial exercise in which we identify all the cognitive and emotional brand attributes that we and the client believe can authentically accrue to the new brand in order to gain market dominance. Then we consciously cultivate those attributes in the advertising, web content, video and any other means of communication we produce.
Another crucial component of this kind of brand building is supplementing the statistical research with in-depth interviews—talking to stakeholders at all levels of an organization. It’s here that you get the stories that enlighten and complement the statistics. Survey numbers tend to point to cognitive brand associations. Personal interviews reveal more of the emotional associations inherent in a brand.
By taking into account both the emotional and cognitive aspects of a brand, you have a better chance of making sense of all the important survey feedback, sorting through the data to differentiate between what people say is important to them, and how they are likely to act when it’s finally time to make a decision.