Another week on the whistlestop world tour (the chosen continent for this week being North America) and the observation about the (mis)characterization of Emotion as the opposite of Reason has been emphatically reinforced.
Once again, the groups seemed rather uneasy at the prospect of having to articulate the emtional component of their value proposition to clients. It is easy to see why – in companies with a strong finance culture it is a grave rebuke to be told “you are being emotional” as it means that you are not thinking straight.
It is a magical moment when the participants realize that the value proposition of a high performing service can be lifted from “buy ours because we have the fastest feeds and speeds” to “ours is uniquely able to meet a wider set of needs” through the acknowledgement of the functional and emotional drivers of the customer’s decision.
The head and the heart do NOT represent mutually exclusive forms of logic. Rather, they are complementary forms of logic – one focusing on “what does this product do for me?” while the other focuses “which one feels right for me?”
This debate reminds me of the observation by the seventeenth century French philosopher, Blaise Pascal, that “le coeur a ses raisons que la Raison ne connait pas” (the Heart has reasons that Reason does not recognize). This statement is generally understood to mean that the heart is irrational. I think this is wrong. What Pascal is actually saying is that the heart has a logic of its own, and it is different from “rational” logic.
The goal of good branding is to craft value propositions that have both rational logic AND emotional logic, not just one or the other.
