Do you know how your customers are feeling? Richard talks to Gary Moskoff of Sleeping Giant Labs about the Consumer Emotional Index. Gary discusses how the pandemic affected different groups of people in different ways - and their recovery too! The conversation digs into how different lifestyles respond to marketing messages, when those messages are best served, and how brands have to take a role in those lifestyles.
Brandon Wehn (00:08):
Welcome to the show. This is Brandon Wehn and you are listening to the Understanding Consumer Neuroscience podcast, brought to you by the folks at CloudArmy. In this episode, Richard talks to Gary Moskoff, president of Sleeping Giant Labs, about the Consumer Emotional Index and how it can help marketers to better target messages to their potential customers.
Richard Campbell (00:36):
Hi, this is Richard Campbell and thanks for listening to Understanding Consumer Neuroscience. Today, my guest is Gary Moskoff, who's the president and CEO of Sleeping Giant Labs and he's been studying consumer emotions and feelings and how they affect consumers' purchasing journeys and decisions for more than 20 years. And over the past few years, he's taken all his knowledge in the psychology models that he and his team have created to launch the Consumer Emotional Index. Thanks so much for coming on.
Gary Moskoff (01:00):
Thank you so much for having me.
Richard Campbell (01:01):
I love the idea of this, the same way we have these consumption indexes and so forth, but how do you measure emotions?
Gary Moskoff (01:11):
Well, that's a great question. We go out and we talk to a lot of people and then we break them down into the lifestyles that they lead. So it's a real simple analysis of asking them how they're actually feeling, and we go a couple layers deep inside those feelings, and also questions such as, have you've been having angry outbursts, have you had repeated disturbing memories? All the things that really tell us how people are actually handling their day-to-day life.
Richard Campbell (01:44):
So not just to have making sure people can articulate their emotions, but what are your behaviors that might reflect an emotional state.
Gary Moskoff (01:51):
Absolutely. And we're seeing just more and more of those behaviors coming out as the pandemic lingers and continues on.
Richard Campbell (02:00):
Well, it must have been a heck of a spike in 2020 that the numbers all changed, because you started this before that.
Gary Moskoff (02:05):
We started it actually right with the lockdowns.
Richard Campbell (02:07):
Oh, perfect timing. Okay. So you hit us at our emotional worst.
Gary Moskoff (02:13):
The emotional worst, and this was something I want to do for years, and so many other people out there, I took a look at my life during those lockdowns and what I wanted to be doing and what I felt I did the best in the world. And that's when I was like, I need to completely change everything that I do and how I do it. And we started the Consumer Emotional Index to really be able to drive down and understand how people were feeling because we felt that brands needed a new way and new advice on how to communicate with their own communities.
Richard Campbell (02:45):
Interesting. Yeah. Although, I mean, we didn't know how long this was going to go, I think there must have been more hope in the early for parts of 2020. At least I seem to remember myself being that way, it's like, "This is going to be kind of fun, we're going to do some puzzles, it's going to be great."
Gary Moskoff (03:03):
Now we're hearing about more variants and the people that are so scared about additional variants coming in, hurting our recovery and our timeline. And I definitely did not think that it was going to last this long. I mean, I thought maybe six months at the outside I figured it would take about six months for us to get through this. And I think now we're on two and a half years, so we're all in this together.
Richard Campbell (03:26):
For better or worse, that's the nature of pandemics. Everyone gets to play and yet work still has to go on and certainly we still have to be able to reach out to folks to help them know what's available to help them. How do you speak to people differently now given a look at the CEI? How does that shape the way I may have marketed in 2019 compared to the way I should be marketing today?
Gary Moskoff (03:51):
Well, I think it has to do a lot with the different communities that you're speaking to. In the very beginning of the pandemic and the lockdowns, we noticed that technologists were having the hardest time of all of our different lifestyles that we study.
Richard Campbell (04:04):
That's really interesting.
Gary Moskoff (04:05):
It is because they knew they were going to keep their jobs.
Richard Campbell (04:10):
Yeah. They were already used to working from home. In some respects, their lives should have changed the least.
Gary Moskoff (04:15):
Right. And yet they were feeling so isolated and you kind of thought about it and gamers as well. It was really fascinating to me that gamers actually were a close second because they continued doing the things that they loved, which was gaming and having those interactions. But I think that what happened was that the few interactions in personal interactions being cut off just completely made them feel completely lost. Whereas, people who were living in outdoor adventure lifestyle never really stopped doing the things that they loved outside. And so they really helped up really well throughout the pandemic and still are.
(04:52):
Now we're seeing homemakers having a harder time emotionally, I think because they're caught with a deer in the headlights where they just don't know anymore how to help their family through what we're all experiencing. So the key to go back to your question, if you're advertising to both technologists and outdoor ventures and gamers, maybe you're messaging should be a little different because everyone's feeling different in this moment. So figuring out when they're most likely to buy something, figuring out what are the right words to say, what are the right situations to put forth, to get someone to understand about your product and the community that they'll be joining by buying your product are completely different depending upon what lifestyle.
Richard Campbell (05:42):
Interesting. So you're saying people are receptive different ways between those different groups?
Gary Moskoff (05:48):
Absolutely. Absolutely. When they want to be spoken to, for instance, an outdoor venture feels most hopeful in the early morning, whereas you would not expect a gamer to feel most hopeful in the early morning.
Richard Campbell (06:03):
I don't expect the gamer to be awake in the early morning unless they haven't gone to bed yet.
Gary Moskoff (06:06):
Exactly. But it was really fascinating because I thought around midnight was when they were going to feel most hopeful, but it's not midnight, it's actually late evening, so just before midnight is when gamers feel most hopeful. So in our opinion, the best time to approach somebody with an ad or with a conversation or with any kind of engagement is when they're feeling most hopeful.
Richard Campbell (06:28):
Right. And so, how do I target time that way?
Gary Moskoff (06:32):
Right. Well, I think that you need to subscribe to the CEI because we're going to be able to tell you that. I mean, that is part of it. It's all about approaching people when they want to be approached, how they want to be approached and where they want to be approached. So it's not enough to know two and not the third. So if you have to be able to put together a message that makes sense for them, deliver it when they want to hear it, so when they're most open to it and where that they are most likely to feel most open to it. For instance, what we do is our questions about what media people are watching and engaging with, it's more about trust with that media outlet. So do people trust CNN more than Fox? Do people trust Fox more than MSNBC? Do people trust ESPN the most or ABC or NBC or CBS or whatever? So because we feel that the combination of trust and people feeling hopeful is really strong and sets a brand up to win before they even arrive with their message if you know those two things.
Richard Campbell (07:41):
And we've heard in PRA shows certainly this idea that what you're most concerned of is doing harm to the perception of the brand that that's remarkably easy to do. So this idea that I simply would not schedule ads towards a gamer in the morning on the risk that it would annoy them.
Gary Moskoff (07:57):
Right. And gamers are much easier to figure out than an introverted chic individual or a homemaker or a cyclist or someone living a rural lifestyle. All of these sorts of lifestyles that people try to live, their purchasing reflects that.
Richard Campbell (08:17):
Right. At least to aspire, too.
Gary Moskoff (08:20):
At least to aspire, too, because sometimes that's an interesting statement. Sometimes it's difficult to figure out, does someone really live that lifestyle or do they aspire to live that lifestyle? The reality is that it probably doesn't matter because if they aspire to live the lifestyle, they still want to be a part of it. So they do the things that they have to do to be a part of it. So it doesn't really matter if someone's a climber or not. If they want to live the climber lifestyle, you better be speaking to them as if they live that lifestyle. Otherwise, you're going to miss the opportunity.
Richard Campbell (08:54):
Well, certainly if I'm targeting that product that way, it should be appropriate to that audience. But I feel like we're mostly describing different remote marketing opportunities, whether we push out via social media or other mechanisms like that as opposed to they have gone to a store, how do I get my product perceived over others?
Gary Moskoff (09:15):
Yeah. No, I think that this kind of way to market to people works for every single outlet and that's how we look about all of it. With customer experience and the growth of this study, it's so important that every single time you touch that individual that you're taking into account, the lifestyle that they're leading and how they want to be spoken to, it's just so important. So we have to remember that whether we're in-person, online, over the phone, in a video chat, whatever it might be, you have to remember who that person is and how do we figure out who that person is. That is exactly what we're trying to help people do.
Richard Campbell (09:57):
Absolutely. How are you seeing change in behavior over the past two years through the CEI? I mean, are things getting better? Are people getting more hopeful?
Gary Moskoff (10:07):
People are getting more hopeful. We've seen more that people are getting more comfortable again than hopeful per se. Our hopeful numbers are up a little bit, but not as much as our comfortable numbers. So for a technologist in the first quarter of this year, 38% of them were feeling comfortable and now we're looking at 47% of them. But we're seeing with avid readers in the first quarter of this year, 47% of them felt comfortable and that number is now up to 74%. Some of the hopeful numbers, it's been fascinating, but not as fast of a jump or for joyful, but they are moving in the right direction for sure and taking down some of those comfortable numbers as well.
Richard Campbell (10:52):
Then now you also split across these different lifestyles speaks to, they're all going to react at different rates on this too. Some are going to become more comfortable faster.
Gary Moskoff (11:03):
Absolutely, and we've definitely seen that. With the few of them, they adjust faster runners, which is kind of funny in cyclists maybe just everything they do is fast because both those lifestyles make big changes every single quarter, whereas, we see technologists moving much slower with their change in their feelings.
Richard Campbell (11:26):
So they get sad slowly and they get happy slowly, too.
Gary Moskoff (11:31):
Yeah. It'd be interesting to see if they got sad slowly, they might get sad faster. That's interesting. It's always hard to remember how someone feels when they're feeling sad, when they're feeling scared, when they're feeling mad, those numbers are always lower because no one wants to admit how they feel. So we look at those a little bit more deeply even though they're lower because it's really important to understand when someone's going to feel that way. Because chances are, they're probably not going to want to talk about you and your product and your community when they're feeling sad, mad or scared.
Richard Campbell (12:05):
Right. I certainly remember in the early days of the pandemic with the technology folks that I work with, there was a non-trivial amount of guilt that their jobs were fine where everybody else was disrupted and had to be sent home, I thought it was a very powerful force. It's like, don't talk about work because our work is fine. In fact, our work got busier.
Gary Moskoff (12:26):
Right. Right. And then all of a sudden nobody was less busy than they had ever been. Everyone was trying to do 900 things even from home. But our numbers, we asked this one question in our research, basically, do you feel as though you're doing much more than eating or sleeping every single day? And even though technologists worked really hard, they felt that in huge numbers that they were only eating and sleeping every single day. So was it that they didn't want to admit how hard they were working? I don't think so. I think that even though they're working so hard, they feel like they're sleeping and eating and that's it. And now we're seeing a change. Actually homemakers feel more that way and technologists are feeling much less like that, but gamers are still feeling like they're doing not much more than any or sleeping every day.
Richard Campbell (13:22):
It's funny they don't perceive their own work, at the same time when you asked about work, they're super busy.
Gary Moskoff (13:27):
They don't perceive their own work. There's a clear line there.
Richard Campbell (13:33):
Yeah. True. I mean, you must, in any given analysis, have these contradictions where they're clearly indicating they're really busy, yet only eating and sleeping.
Gary Moskoff (13:41):
Right. And that tells you so much about where their mental state is because we know that they're not just eating and sleeping, we know that they're working harder.
Richard Campbell (13:49):
They told you they were
Gary Moskoff (13:50):
They told us they were, more hours, more time. But the reality is that's different than how people are perceive of their own time, I guess. And that leaves a lot more reason to understand these underlying feelings because if you don't understand them, then basically you're guessing on how the pandemic is really affecting your community.
Richard Campbell (14:17):
Yeah. Well, and much less how they would have any consideration for your product at all.
Gary Moskoff (14:23):
Right.
Richard Campbell (14:24):
That state of, I'm only eating and sleeping, doesn't leave a lot of room for buying.
Gary Moskoff (14:28):
No, it really doesn't. And I think that the consumer held up remarkably well through the pandemic so far, obviously, but except for the early days. But it's going to be a question because now people have gotten used to this pandemic thing that we're all going through and they're looking at their accounts going down, their own personal financial perspective is actually how they feel about their own personal financial opportunities and livelihood is actually trending down over the past several quarters because they're concerned about it. So I'm really looking forward to seeing how this holiday season shapes up.
Richard Campbell (15:10):
Because we are hearing that the vendors have a lot of stock that pushing through the global supply chain problem and so forth has meant that there's stuff sitting out there to be bought, but that the customer seems very unreceptive.
Gary Moskoff (15:23):
Right. Isn't that just the way life goes?
Richard Campbell (15:25):
Yeah.
Gary Moskoff (15:26):
It's so hard to know what to do with all of those sort of global issues, and then you get to a point you think that you had everything, you think you've had it all thought through, and then the recession hits or we start leaning towards financial issues and people are just buying less.
Richard Campbell (15:45):
Yeah. I mean, we're recording this in the fall of 2022. Typical retail cycle, we've already stocked up for Christmas, like all those orders are in. So we've tried to guess how people are going to spend through the winter. It's going to be interesting to see what kind of happens come early 2023 to see how that Christmas market actually shaped. But at this particular moment, it's very odd, the products in the shelves, people are kind of slow on buying or they're being careful about what they're getting.
Gary Moskoff (16:15):
Right. And that's why I always encourage all of my clients and partners and friends to do more research at every single step that they can take. So be wrong less, do more research is kind of something that I say more. Be more thoughtful about your decisions, it doesn't have to be a guess.
Richard Campbell (16:34):
Yeah. I mean, I question now, the buying we did in 2020, 2021 during the height of the pandemic, I thought was wrapped in a lot of need. It's like, "Well, my life has changed and I need different things." And so, there wasn't a lot of pleasure buying, it seemed, or with a language around why people were acquiring things was, "Well, I'm working from home now, so I need those kinds of things." They had very strong justifications for very specific buys.
Gary Moskoff (17:03):
Right. I mean, it was really hard to find a hot tub and really hard we had just remodeled our basement right before the pandemic or got it going and brought all the lumber right before the lockdowns, and we just got so lucky because otherwise the cost of that lumber tripled.
Richard Campbell (17:22):
Went through the roof.
Gary Moskoff (17:22):
Went through the roof, because everybody wanted to do home improvement. Now, our home improvement numbers are going down for a lot of people out there because they already built their basement, they already brought that refrigerator or new stove. So it is going to be really interesting what people need.
Richard Campbell (17:42):
Well, and part of this, I wonder, is this inflation cooling off measures that we have governments that are trying to discourage us from buying to slow down inflation?
Gary Moskoff (17:52):
Right. And is that the right move? And are they really going to be able to pull that off? I think that that's what everyone's really scared about.
Richard Campbell (18:01):
It's an excellent question, but for me as a marketer, it says, "How do I sell in an inflationary time? How do I overcome that additional fear?"
Gary Moskoff (18:11):
Right. And I would, again, point to research. No matter what the research is, more knowledge. You and I have been through a couple of recessions now and what's really fascinating to me is how different they all are. Can we really use 2008 to predict this recessionary moment? I don't think so, really. Can we really use 2001 to predict what's going to happen right now? I think that that would be a big mistake. So I think that we have to go back to understand how our community is feeling at every single turn that we take to really know what they need to help them achieve their goals.
(18:54):
We're seeing more and more communities and lifestyles and people wanting brands to participate and helping them achieve their goals to participate in helping them locally. And that to me is always a fascinating thing. Of course, outdoor brands want people living the outdoor lifestyle, want North Face to participate locally. But there's a lot of lifestyles such as the introverted chic individual that you wouldn't think that they'd want the support from a brand to help them achieve their personal goals, but they do. So what does that mean to a brand? How seriously do they take that?
Richard Campbell (19:38):
And again, these non-revenue genuine behaviors, is this where I donate to a cause? How do I participate with a consumer this way?
Gary Moskoff (19:47):
Well, that's really fascinating. One of our major questions that we look at is we look at the United Nations, we looked at their social sustainability initiatives, and these are things like wanting clean water and wanting to end global hunger and ending global poverty and creating gender equality and climate change. And we saw huge differences in lifestyles and in communities and what people were hoping that brands supported. So again, our questions are always based on the community. So this specific question is, how important is it that the companies and brands you admire and love support the following sustainability initiatives? And what we found was a huge diverse answer, we just found urbanites wanted clean water the most.
Richard Campbell (20:43):
Not that they didn't have it, but they wanted it for others.
Gary Moskoff (20:45):
They wanted around the world. So we found out that 70% of artists support climate change where only 62% of technologists do, and only 55% of consumers want that. So our whole position is that it's awesome if an executive team wants to support one of these initiatives, but if they don't go out and ask their community what the community hopes that they support, they're missing it. Because by supporting the wrong global initiative, you've just wasted a whole lot of love that you could be receiving from your community. So you have to be aware about what they want all the time.
Richard Campbell (21:30):
And then figure out how to incorporate into that flow as well. I mean, certainly not doing harm to those initiatives would be part of it.
Gary Moskoff (21:39):
Right. That's a really important one. When we started looking at our social injustice questions and we started talking about voter suppression, the numbers of people that wanted brands to participate in the voter suppression conversation are astronomical for most consumers. So, that was a really fascinating thing, I think, that we're witnessing a moment in time where if you don't start participating in the right way to support your community in that social injustice conversation, you're just going to miss out because your brand's going to be perceived as having no soul.
Richard Campbell (22:20):
And suddenly soul's really important to a brand. Although maybe that was always true, it seems like the pandemic amplified all of these behaviors.
Gary Moskoff (22:28):
The pandemic definitely amplified all of these things and all of these feelings. I mean, just as it has everything that we do, people don't feel like they want something a little bit ever anymore. They either want it. It's amazing, even when I take a look at how many people want to change their life and change their lifestyle and change their job mean, we saw that going on from coast to coast and then all of a sudden so many people changed their job. And then we hear all about the great regret where people like, "I moved to make $10,000 more a year, what was I thinking, I had a great thing back there."
Richard Campbell (23:07):
Definitely I sort of grass is greener effect.
Gary Moskoff (23:10):
The grass is greener effect because we're all sitting alone in our houses for so long that we really didn't know what to do with ourselves.
Richard Campbell (23:17):
How much of this was projecting our own personal anxiety on our employer and potentially on the brands too?
Gary Moskoff (23:23):
I think so on society. And so, all of this is kind of bubbled to the top and that's where we're at. That is the current situation that we're all going through together and it's societal level trauma that we haven't witnessed since World War II.
Richard Campbell (23:41):
Yeah, that's a fair assessment. And then how do you sell into that? And it sounds like the sales pitch is hope, that people are generally after positivity these days. We got enough negativity, thanks.
Gary Moskoff (23:55):
I mean, I think that's why Ted Lasso did such an amazing job this year. Everybody flocked to Ted Lasso because it...
Richard Campbell (24:01):
That's 2020, man, that's already two years ago. I know it's hard to imagine. But that was a hot show in 2020 and it's 2022. But you're right, it was such a warm fuzzy in amongst all this darkness.
Gary Moskoff (24:15):
Right. And everything that was a warm fuzzy amongst this darkness is what we all wanted. My mother had to stop watching news, so she's just watching Christmas shows. And I find that fascinating, actually. But it's good for her. I mean, the anxiety on top of the day-to-day life that we're living can kill somebody. That said, we are seeing now people actually dip their toe back into news. So we're seeing more and more people watching and reading more news than they did.
Richard Campbell (24:49):
The point being your mother was not alone, that at some point a lot of people just unplugged.
Gary Moskoff (24:53):
Right. If they could unplug, they were going to unplug.
Richard Campbell (24:56):
Yeah. And now, maybe swinging back around. It's question of what's generating stress and/or generating empowerment for you versus what's just making you feel more hopeless.
Gary Moskoff (25:13):
Right. Right. And is it really important to the brand to help you through that? And my opinion, it absolutely is. People want brands to participate in a way they never have before and seeing that again and again, and I think the whole local thing, we haven't even gotten started on because the reality is that everybody wants to see a brand, take a local position, and I just think that that's going to be better for our communities as a whole.
Richard Campbell (25:41):
Yeah. It's an interesting question to say, are we better off with our brands being heavily involved in our lives that way? But the bottom line is that's what folks are demanding right now. You're really wasting your message if you're not a part of that.
Gary Moskoff (25:56):
Right. Right. I think that's very true. I mean, when you start seeing over 50% of society wanting companies to help individuals achieve their personal goals and their personal values, I mean, we see 58% of outdoor ventures want companies to support their personal values. And 57% of outdoor ventures want companies to help them achieve their goals. I mean, I just think that that's amazing.
Richard Campbell (26:24):
I mean, isn't there a risk of alienation here too, Gary? As soon as I pick that direction, I'm also saying to a certain amount of the market, "Yeah, I'm not for you."
Gary Moskoff (26:33):
But I think that if we don't make those decisions, by absence of a decision means you made a decision. So that's why I think it's so important, you can't guess these things.
Richard Campbell (26:45):
So if you don't make that position, you're not for anybody.
Gary Moskoff (26:48):
Right. And that's going to get you nowhere. So when push comes to shove, the majority of people in most lifestyles want brands to take a stand. Is that going to turn off a lot of people? Well, you better know what your community's made of and all the people that really love your brand because that is the way that you're going to survive and thrive, by going in and making the conversation more human. When we were young and maybe we met somebody, as you get older, making friends is harder. But when you were young, it was so easy because you met somebody, and you shared your whole life story and you were really open.
Richard Campbell (27:24):
Well, story was short.
Gary Moskoff (27:26):
The story is short. So that's what we have to do as brand ambassadors, we have to be able to tell a short story that gets someone to identify with your brand right quickly.
Richard Campbell (27:39):
But AI, you can't sit on the sidelines try to be all things to all people, you're not going to get anywhere.
Gary Moskoff (27:43):
You're not going to get anywhere. It might work for a little while, but it will not work in the long-term.
Richard Campbell (27:47):
No, not at least for now. I mean, I wonder if this pressure will decrease over time as the societal anxiety hopefully goes down.
Gary Moskoff (27:59):
I mean, I don't know. I think that it took at least 20 years for us to recover from the horrible tragic things that happened on September 11th.
Richard Campbell (28:10):
Sure.
Gary Moskoff (28:11):
We saw the flag come down at LaGuardia, it was 20 years later. And as you were saying, when the US left Afghanistan, it was the end of something that happened 20 years earlier. All of this happened for the past year. So if it took 20 years for us to get over September 11th, how long is it going to take for us to get over the pandemic?
Richard Campbell (28:36):
A worldwide pandemic. And you don't get to sit in your hands in the meantime. In the meantime, we still have products to sell, customers to help, things to do. So you've got to go with the messages that are going to make the most sense. And I really appreciate the insight. I think that this is pretty powerful. Where could folks learn more about the Consumer Emotional Index?
Gary Moskoff (28:54):
Absolutely. And I appreciate those kind words. So they can learn the most about us at our website at www.sleepinggiantlabs.com.
Richard Campbell (29:04):
Awesome. Gary, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Gary Moskoff (29:07):
Thank you so much for having me. I truly appreciate your time.
Richard Campbell (29:09):
You bet, and we'll talk to you next time on Understanding Consumer Neuroscience.