Emotional Significance | The Case of Holiday Inn
En route to the Pink Spoon St. Louis Workshop earlier in the month, I spied a terrific story from a couple years back that underscores the concept of ‘Listening Deeply’ to your market – not just for what you think they want, but digging deeper for what they feel about you/your business.
Listening Deeply for feelings (as opposed to the more linear advice to ‘do market research’) can be a slightly foggy and unwieldy idea for the simple reason that there’s no straight-line formula to get to ‘THE ANSWER’ for your business.
However if you’re looking for affirmation that feelings, rather than thinkings, are the Gold Standard for how to design promotions and generate business – here’s a case study for you. I’ve discovered no better (or more enjoyable) way to rewire a brain towards creativity than to marinate in stories like this.
Call it an ‘emotion-driven business context.’ Because we become most like what we surround ourselves with most consistently…you connect the dots! 
To that end, here’s a story from ‘Cultivating Creativity’ by Pat Fallon and Fred Senn (page 106) in United Airline’s November issue of Hemispheres Magazine:
Sorry, brief side note: I can’t tell from Hemispheres if the article is an actual excerpt from the authors’ book ‘Juicing the Orange: How to Turn Creativity into a Powerful Business Advantage’ OR if it’s a separate article to showcase the book.
——begin excerpt—–
Principle 2/ Discover a Proprietary Emotion.
In his book ‘How Customers Think,’ Gerald Zaltman, a professor at Harvard’s Business School shows how marketers learn from the science of how the human brain works.
Zaltman points out that market research is often conducted as if decisions come from pure logic, with emotion playing only a bit part. But, Zaltman writes, ‘if the idea doesn’t have emotional significance for us, we’re not likely to store it, and therefore it won’t be available for later recall.’
Our ‘Towel Amnesty Day’ for Holiday Inn in 2003 demonstrates this principle. One day, our team was marveling at this factoid:
More than a half-million towels disappear from Holiday Inns every year.
What if, for one day, the company announced that everyone who had ever ‘borrowed’ a towel was forgiven?
The idea was from left field, yet our Holiday Inn client wisely decided to go with it because it provoked an emotional connection to the brand in its own quirky way.
The message was “You lifted that towel years ago, and you’re still using it. It has that big green stripe with Holiday Inn in big letters, so it’s hard to forget how it came into your household.”
We ran a few print ads to seed the idea and put up a Towel Amnesty Web site to give the consumer a place to interact with the idea. The rest was public relations.
Twenty-five hundred ‘borrowers’ told their stories online, where they reminisced about the circumstances under which those towels came into their posession. Jay Leno and Paula Zahn gave the story national airtime.
There were 1,200 media pickups, far more than Holiday Inn had received when it celebratd its 50th anniversary the year before.
About 100,000 people participated.
They did so because the idea connected to their lives.
(Isn’t it interesting that journalists call these ‘human-interest stories’? What would the opposite of a human-interest story be? A story of no interest to humans?)
The beauty of Towel Amnesty Day is that it is based on a simple insight into how we are wired and proves that emotional marketing does not have to be high drama – just human and genuine.
—-end excerpt—
How does your market feel about you? (Good, bad, indifferent?) (Passionate, Guilty/Mortified, Blase?)
Where are the most significant ‘points of interaction’ that occur between you and your client? (The moment of ultimate success when they implement something of yours (crossing the ‘finish’ line?) The joy/ease/pleasure they feel along the way? (the journey?) Or something else…)
What startling factoid is true about your business? Mine your metrics and statistics for these.
What is your business equivalent of ‘Towel Amnesty Day?’
And finally, allow me a moment of indulgent repitition since I’ve been posting quite a bit about the intersection between technology and coaching of late, in the Coaching Electric category:
Notice how the marvelous technology of blogging, email follow up, RSS, etc. are TOOLs in the above story…the greater ‘story’ of ‘why’ the client should ‘care’ about what’s being ‘sold’ is in center ring.
That’s because technology is rarely the center of the story in our businesses — there must be a Greater Human Story being told, and the worthwhile telling is *only then* supported (at best, exponentially) by the right technology.
So…to begin, ask yourself (again) ‘Where is the emotional significance for ME and my clients in my business, and how can I tell that story?’
More about technology later…
