Sensing customer's emotions

Tailoring your interactions with customers to their current emotional state provides extra opportunities to improve your service delivery or sales. But how to determine feelings of a specific customer at a given point of time? Perhaps mobile phones and particularly smartphones can provide a platform to understand how your customers are feeling.

Emotions have been traditionally considered a subject exclusive to our personal lives and in business we typically try to stay away from them – of course, because business people are expected to behave rationally, be always fact driven, making conscious decisions and naturally emotions do not have a place in such environment. While this view cannot be further from the truth itself, such mindset has had some profound implications – word “emotions” is rarely present in business jargon and has nor become a major buzzword yet.

However, this has already started to change recently on a wider scale and businesses are starting to realize that they might have been missing the potential of emotions, for example in management of interactions with their customers or in advertising and sales. Body of research suggests that behavior of customers is heavily affected by their emotional states and perceptions – contrary to belief of conscious assessment and decisions making. Therefore marketing people in certain industries have been trying to leverage the power of emotions already.

But, one tricky thing with emotions is, well … they are super complex to understand!

Simplification of emotions

This is true - emotions can become a very complex subject field. Still, this subject can be also extremely simplified, down to a level where it becomes fit for practical use and still remains meaningful. One useful model for emotions classification uses only two variables, which are measurable and easy to understand - positive or negative valence and level of activation or arousal. Types of emotional states can be mapped according to levels of these variables.

Valence		Arousal
Represents the judgment of a situation ranging from unpleasant to pleasant		Expresses the amount of excitement felt, ranging from calming to exciting

 

Mobile apps - catalyst of entrepreneurship potential in Japan

Previous study on this blog Country of the rising global mobile leadership demonstrates that Japan has an unique opportunity to become a global leader in mobile services. The same industry offers consequently an opportunity to boost the entrepreneurship levels in Japan, where aspirations of young generation to launch own business score still amongst the lowest in the world. By focusing on this subject, and factoring in the global context, Japan can enter a path towards raising a multitude of global entrepreneurial stars.

In order to raise these globally successful entrepreneurs through mobile applications industry, the aspiration of business founders needs to be fully integrated with the rest of the ecosystem including:

• Concept ownership – idea generation and its scoping
• Funding – financing, potentially facilitation and incubation of concept’s execution
• Execution management – project management and control of execution
• Design – user interface and visualization
• Development – implementation of design and functionality
• Support – application specific support e.g. translation or customer services
• Marketing – promotion of product and channels management

This study highlights several recommendations for improvements across this ecosystem to boost entrepreneurship levels further beyond current levels. The key areas are:

• Providing easier access to funding
• Higher sophistication of marketing and overall commercial efforts

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