4 Ways to Establish How People Are Feeling

You can’t just ask.

I have written a version of that statement into almost every consumer research proposal I’ve written for many years.

You can’t just ask because people don’t know. 

You can’t just ask because then people will overrationalize their behaviour and rationale. 

You can’t just ask because people are bad predictors of their own behaviour.

 You can’t just ask because it’s deeply personal and they might not want to share that with you, a stranger. 

There are many valid reasons that you can’t just ask. 

But what do you do instead? What do you do when you need to:

• Understand their motivations

• Explore their decisions

• Understand how they’re feeling right now

Never was this more pertinent than right now. 

Our world is in a strange place. It’s been turned upside down with Covid19 and then the George Floyd protests spread: we are having all sorts of feels, many of which we struggle to articulate. 

Nobody wants to capitalize on any of this, but brands wanting to be smart should be exploring how their consumers are feeling: 

• how optimistic they feel about the Covid19 crisis

• how they feel about their lives as a whole

• what behaviours and emerging attitudes they have adopted as a result of lockdown and which ones they would quite like to hang on to

• how their behaviours and attitudes are shifting in the wake of increasing awareness of diversity and how this impacts the brands they choose and what they expect of them

But none of this is easy to articulate. I know because I struggle to answer any of these questions myself, but I know there’s a shift taking place in my psyche. I wouldn’t go so far as to say my values[1] are changing but my awareness is. 

Based on research we’ve done, I am not alone: current events are moving the needle on awareness of core values such as: 

• sustainability

• simplicity

• family

• happiness

• diversity

• inclusion

People have told us: 

“I don’t want to shop for ‘stuff’ anymore.”

“It all goes back to the environment, really. Being less busy, buying less, relying on the people in my community (less shipping, not keeping big box stores open).”

“More conscious of what I’m doing.”

“More time to allow yourself to do the important things instead of the every day tasks.”

“We've been forced to focus on and value the simple things - not the things you think you need.”

So, how do you establish what people are feeling? Here we give you 4 established ways…

1. Talk about what they have done: 

Ask them about what they have already done or are doing, rather than asking them to predict what they might do. Ask them to talk through that experience as buried in what they have done is the motivation for doing it, which is driven by how they’re feeling. 

BAD WAY TO ASK: Asking about something generic, e.g. what do you usually do?

GOOD WAY TO ASK: Ground it in something specific, e.g. when was the last time you did XXX? 

2. Project their feelings onto other people close to them:

Ask them what their friends or family think or feel. People often find it easier to speak about other people and project their feelings and reactions on to those people. 

• BAD WAY TO ASK: Diving straight in as you’ll get surface-level, generic responses, e.g. how do you feel about the current situation?

• GOOD WAY TO ASK: Allow them to discuss difficult things through the lens of their friends and use that as the springboard for how they feel, e.g. how do you think your friends are handling the current situation? Then follow-up, for e.g. how about you?

3. Use their network:

The people we hang out with is a reflection of what we admire and both like and dislike in ourselves, so ask about their friends and the sort of people they are, what they admire about them and how they’re different: 

• BAD WAY TO ASK: Asking them to talk about themselves as they’ll pick out things they want to portray about themselves, rather than the real person, e.g. how would you describe yourself?

• GOOD WAY TO ASK: Ask about their friends and their role in the group, e.g. describe your friends, what role do you play in the group, what do you admire about them?

4. Use visual prompts:

I love the idea of using creativity to express our emotions but not everyone is a creative who can take a crayon or a pen to paper and illustrate their feelings through art. But everyone can pick up children’s construction toys, like Lego® and start building. The joy of the likes of Lego® is that it doesn’t require specialist skills and as people tinker with the blocks, building and deconstructing them, emotions (and creativity) emerge. This makes them an excellent means of projecting their emotions, because they can construct something that ‘reflects’ their emotions, however inexpertly, with each component reflecting something and it doesn’t even need to look like anything (which is why people feel intimidated by using drawing). When you discuss it with them, you discuss the construction and not their feelings. Because they can ‘hide’ behind their construction (much like they can hide behind their friends in the example above), they find it easier to both uncover their emotions as they start building it and in turn discuss them, because it doesn’t feel like they’re baring their soul. 

• BAD WAY TO ASK: Be too direct or general, e.g. using the Lego® blocks, tell me how you feel? (direct because you’ve asked how they feel which makes them feel exposed but also too general because what exactly do you want to know - what they’re feeling about their life, their work, their relationship etc?)

• GOOD WAY TO ASK: e.g. use the Lego® blocks to build a representation of how you’re feeling today about diversity. Allow them time to quietly do that on their own and then ask them to explain what they’ve created, not their feelings, e.g. tell me about your construction.

This is a slightly more complex technique so let me illustrate it with a couple of personal examples. 

Lego® blocks as a tool for communicating feeling.

Here is an example of what I created on Blackout Tuesday (2 June, following George Floyd’s death)

I knew I was feeling something about what was going on, but other than feeling uncomfortable, I couldn’t quite place my finger on what it was and most importantly what I could do to change that. After tinkering (and having my son destroy my tinkering a few times), this emerged:

My construction is of people facing away from each other but not moving, with nowhere to move to, which represents how I feel I’ve been living: turned away from the realities around us and not speaking out:

1. Having grown up in South Africa, white privilege is a concept I have always understood. It’s something that’s always been in my vernacular and something I’ve always been acutely aware of, but that doesn’t mean I’ve proactively stepped out and done anything to change it.

2. The events of the last week highlighted that that silence makes me complicit, which is a deeply uncomfortable feeling.

3. Going through this exercise and expressing my emotions like that, helped me see what I need to do: educate myself but most importantly it raised my awareness of my role as a mother and what I need to do to be a part of starting to change the world for the generations to come.

I’ve done this exercise on myself many times, on less serious topics, and it’s always as revealing:

Lego® blocks as a tool for communicating feeling.

After a particularly taxing Strategy Holiday (a week spent refining Embark’s strategy and focus) I built this.

I knew I was feeling positive but I couldn’t quite put my finger on why and doing this exercise helped me see what I was most excited about and where I probably needed to get assistance for the things I felt less excited about or less able to execute:

1. The door represents the idea that refining the strategy will open more doors, but I need to proactively open them: they don’t open on their own

2. The steps show that I’ve come a long way, but the steps I need to take can be big and sometimes I need help to climb these

3. The person standing at the top represents that after the Strategy Holiday I felt like I had lighthouse vision on what I wanted to achieve and how I was going to do that

Without fail, these 4 techniques work to uncover how people are feeling. 

At the end of the day, it’s not about not asking, it’s about how you ask. 

[1] Values are what drive behaviour and attitudes; they are internalized and reflect what one finds important in life. Life transitions can have a profound impact on how we relate to life and as such shift our core values, so it is not unlikely that current events will shift people’s core values over time.