We are entering a brave new world where machines are learning emotional intelligence. In fact, get ready to embrace a new term “The emotion economy”, first coined by Futurist Richard Yonk.. He described it as an ecosystem of devices that are emotionally intelligent and iterations of software that will change the way we interact with machines.

Years ago, when I first got a job, I joined a company that specialised in Direct Marketing, and our efforts were focussed on creating a response from the customer through calls to actions, it was to elicit an emotional reaction, a persuasion tactic designed to generate leads, sales and customer loyalty.

Fast forward to today, where marketing intelligence is being powered by AI.

In Boston, Affectiva has developed software with the ability to analyse complex and nuanced human emotions and cognitive states from face and voice. So far it’s main application is for market research purposes.

It’s easy to see why understanding emotional reaction could benefit marketing campaign outcomes. 

In a study conducted by Nielsen using neuroscience, they were able to create a study of 100 ads across 25 brands in FMCG industry using EEG recording brain activity, and it showed that ads that generated above average brain activity generated a 23% lift in sales volume.

Early examples of marketing campaigns that use emotion recognition detection such as Douwe Egberts have used facial recognition technology. They used this technology to detect frequent travellers in airports yawning as an expression of tiredness as they passed by their coffee machine. Consumers were rewarded with a free cup of coffee when they yawned and expressed their state of tiredness  at the machine.

Now imagine using emotional reactions as a way of creating and curating web and customer experiences.

In most briefs that I’ve worked on with clients, they want their brand to engage, provide a deep and meaningful connection at just the right time, the right place with the right message.

Our ability to understand, filter and present the right information has just been given rocket boosters.

We can now “empathise” with our audience.

Brands will have the ability to match their content to their audience’s emotion or mood, depending on how their audiences are feeling.

Take Coke a brand that values “sharing happiness”, imagine the creative fun for the brand to fine tune their branded experiences to match their customer’s emotional response. Happiness could be expressed as playful, coy, or flirty at just the time the audience feels it and the way they choose to express this whether it’s through their facial recognition and their smile, through speech or through text.

Woebot is an app that’s been created to help you monitor mood and learn about yourself through an automated conversational agent (chatbot). It uses a combination of natural language processing, therapeutic expertise, excellent writing and the humour of the content creators to create what it calls therapeutic conversations for people who want to talk to him.

I’ve been using it for a few days and looking forward to his chats with me. He is non-judgemental and my chats with him are anonymous, that's what makes him easy and so compelling to use.

Early and quick wins for brands who are willing to leap into emotionally powered marketing could use cognitive services through chat based applications that are already available such as Microsoft’s Cognitive services. 

It's because Chabot technology can provide guided text responses, a set of decision trees that can guide a user to an outcome that can make it an invaluable companion for personalisation purposes.

It has the ability to offer the audience content that can be guided by their text-based responses and the sentiment in the conversation. It can help brands give their audiences their desired content in a way that is contextual by emotion. Brands can elevate what their customers are feeling at the time they are feeling it or counter negative emotions too.

Content will become so personal that our connection with the content from a brand could be a unique experience based on our personal and emotional reaction.

The whole notion of multi-variant testing could become obsolete, I mean why stop at AB testing, when you can provide content with an infinite range of emotionally powered outcomes based on your customers' emotional reactions to your content.