Vladislav Gurin :: BioTech & Pharma consulting

Many years ago money changers and merchants used a hard black stone, such as jasper or basalt, to test the quality of gold or silver by comparing the streak left on the stone by one of these metals with that of an alloy…

Essentially, emotions play similar roles in the interactive workings of the mind and brain. Using emotions as touchstones, the brain assesses the value of incoming information in terms of needs—the stronger a need, the stronger the emotional response to something that can satisfy the need. No emotional response to a marketing message means it failed to arouse emotions strong enough for the brain to think it relates enough to its owner’s interests to send the message to the owner’s conscious mind. This is not theory. We now know from brain research that it takes emotional arousal for a person to connect anything to his or her personal interests.

Emotions energize behavior. They are not vaporous puffs in our minds, but material changes in our body states. Emotions are formed by changes in blood pressure, adrenalin flow, pulse, muscle tension, salivation, and other body systems. Feelings of love, surprise, anticipation, fear, anger, and rage are outcomes triggered by stimuli in body chemistry. Many changes are too subtle to be detected by the conscious mind, yet they influence moods, perceptions, thoughts, decisions, and behavior. They are called background emotions.

For example, when you have a “gut feeling” about something, the feeling literally did originate in your gut. Changes in body states signal what is important enough for the brain to bring to the conscious mind’s attention. Reason plays a much smaller role in decisions than we have long thought—even less so as we age because once we enter our 30s, we make increasing use of emotion-generated gut feelings or intuition. We put more trust in first impressions, which are emotionally generated and experienced as feelings. The more we trust our feelings, the more resistant we are to efforts of others to change them. In the New Customer Majority, if you don’t get it right the first time, you are less likely to get a second chance than with younger customers.

We become less rational and more intuitive as we age because the more experiences we have reasoned through, the fewer we need to reason through in the future. With a neuronal macro in place, a mental activity that once took many steps to work through to yield a perception or thought can now be accomplished virtually instantly when something activates that neuronal macro. A more common term for neuronal macro that marketers often use is hot button.

The material brain uses the language of emotions to communicate with the nonmaterial mind. An emotion is how a need feels, or how an action or event that satisfies or frustrates a need feels. Feelings are the conscious mind’s attempt to figure out and label what our emotions are trying to tell us.

Emotions guide us toward pleasure and away from pain by how they make us feel. People choose products for the emotional payoff they feel the product will provide—not for what they think the product will provide. Companies and customers usually operate in a dichotomy of features versus feelings, because

• most companies focus on features, while
• all customers focus on feelings.

Companies will generally find greater success in today’s more emotionally directed second-half markets by focusing less on product features and more on customers’ feelings. This is what the “the customer experience” that everybody is talking about calls for. However, why has the customer experience seemingly overnight become the “big” thing in marketing? Some say it is because products have become commoditized. I say it is because of the New Customer Majority, most of whose members are experiencing ebbing of materialistic influences and rising influence of experiential aspirations on their behavior.

Nowadays the global drug problem is being contained. In 2006/07, the global markets for the basic illegal drugs – the opiates, cocaine, cannabis, and amphetamine-type stimulants – remained considerably stable. Particularly notable is the stabilisation seen in the market of cannabiods, which had been expanding rapidly for some time. In line with a long-term trend, the share of total drug manufacture that is seized by law enforcement has also increased – some 42% of global cocaine production and 26% of global heroin production never made it to consumers.

Of course, within this aggregated picture, there remains considerable variation. Most notably, heroin production continued to expand in the conflict-ridden provinces of southern Afghanistan. While global heroin consumption does not appear to be growing, the impact of this surge in supply needs to be monitored carefully.

In general, most indications point to a levelling of growth in all of the main illegal drug markets. This is really good news and may indicate an important juncture in long term drug control. A stable and contained problem is easier to address than one which is expanding chaotically, provided it is seen as an opportunity for renewed commitment rather than an excuse to decrease vigilance.

Most indications are, however, that Member States do have the will to re-commit to drug control. Although it is outside of the scope of this article to assess policy, the estimates and trends contain several examples of progress forged on the back of international collaboration. The extent of international collaboration, the sharing of intelligence, knowledge and experience, as well as the conviction that the drug problem in the world must be tackled on the basis of a ‘shared responsibility’ seem to be growing and bearing fruit.