The power of connecting emotionally with your audiences with Starcount

Rowena Humby from Starcount sat down with us to answer some questions about emotional and rational decision making, how it’s important to know your audiences, and how you can access that data.

Not able to watch the video, or prefer your information written? We have the transcript here.

Who are you and what do you do? 

I’m Rowena Humby and I run Starcount. Starcount is a data science company … and what else can I tell you? I Live in London, Hackney, and just had some really good fried chicken.  

What’s the difference between rational decisions and emotional ones?  

So, emotional decision making is essentially when someone is making a decision based on feeling, and a rational decision is basically when someone's making a decision based on logic, and emotional decision making is actually 95% of all the decisions we make. Our emotions are driven by how we are currently feeling, the things that we prioritise in our lives, what we value, what we're interested in, and also the context of our past experiences. Because all the negative things that we've experienced, the positive things, those signals stay in our memory and that's what helps us make decisions in the future, essentially about where we want to go, where we want to eat or want to buy.  

What was the last emotional decision you made? 

The fact I need a coffee. 

Do you think finding audiences and marketing will be predominantly around emotional decisions?

Yeah, so I think that brands try to sell to consumers based on logic and rational decisions, which is that you should buy my product because it is at this price point, and it's got these features and it's really fast from broadband and things like that. 

When actually what we buy into is much more emotional, which is does this brand stand for my values, my interest, my beliefs? Do I have a good experience with this brand? And I believe that the future of brand marketing is buying audiences and targeting audiences based on what truly matters to them. 

So, brands can essentially connect emotionally and actually drive loyalty. Make sure their brand stands for something their customer cares about, whether it's the environment, fitness, health, you know, veganism, whatever it is, that passion in the consumer is what’s gonna drive them to make that brand choice.  

Do you think brands ever misunderstand their audience?   

Well I have been kicked out of a few clients meeting rooms when I've presented their data back to them. And they’re like, this is not my customer. And I'm like, well, it is your customer. The data doesn't lie!

I also think consumers quite often mislead people. We see a lot of brands leading with survey data to decide what their customers care about, and actually, it's what people do, not what they say. Apparently, there are more people in the UK, from survey data, that own a Bentley than there are Bentleys in the UK, so we often miscommunicate the truth behind us and I think as well, consumers often say what they think you want to hear. 

We naturally want to say that you know more people say they care about the environment than probably those that actually practise recycling. 

Yeah, there's definitely a gap in asking people, and there's definitely a gap in brands knowing who their actual customer is. But I think there's also something to say that brands should set on aspiration as much as reality.  

Are there geographical differences in audiences and their decision making?  

So there's huge differences based on where you live, so country by country, there are different reasons that people engage with brands, different reasons people make decisions because they've had different experiences and made different life choices and all of that culminates in them having different motivations for doing things. 

Similarly we see it in the difference between North and South England, different regions in the UK and even you know, community by community. You can take London and there's different pockets around London where everyone has different reasons for doing the same thing.  

Where does Starcount come in? 

So Starcount is all around helping brands understand the true motivators for why consumers buy. We use data, behavioural data, and we look at what people actually do. So we use banking spend data to see where they shop, how much they spend, how often they go and we combine that with social media following data- so what people follow on social, to understand what they’re interested in, what they love and care about. 

And by looking at that at scale we can see what people love and what people buy, which brands they choose, and that helps us understand the different types of people brands appeal to and the different motivations for consumers engaging with that brand. Because ultimately it’s what we love and care about, and what we’re interested in that drives our choices. 

People aren’t all the same, we're all different and unique. We're all a combination of the life experiences that we had and the things that we prioritise and things that we value and ultimately what unites us is the different things that drive our behaviours in terms of what we care about, what we’re passionate about, what we're interested in and, it's those signals that are the most important for brands to understand, because that's how they can really tap into true consumer loyalty and emotional connection.