At the beginning of March 2020, I participated in a video call with Mrs Mila for the first time. Although I had met Mila in person a few times in the boardroom, she was behaving differently this time. Mrs Mila put more emphasis on her facial grimaces and generally seemed affected. It was like watching the overexposed face of an adolescent YouTuber. She laughed louder, thought harder, occasionally rolled her eyes. She didn’t look at the charts I sent her. She had a strangely fascinated expression on her face. She was looking at herself.
We’re used to it now, but if you Skyped before 2020, you were probably surprised at how static and emotionless our faces looked. Our grimaces don’t match our feelings at all. How come when I’m surprised I don’t roll my eyes and open my mouth like Joey from Friends? Why isn’t my mouth open from ear to ear when I’m amused? Why do I look like a complete idiot when I’m concentrating? And so your video call partner stares into the camera, tries on expressions and ignores you.
According to Malcolm Gladwell, the belief that we can read a person’s emotions from their body language is one of the misconceptions of our time that has cost us many lives. Body language cannot be reduced to universal patterns. Our inability to guess someone’s emotions contrasts with our self-confidence that we know how someone feels from their body language and facial expressions. Such a thing as universal body language is simply nonsense. We’re too different as human beings. We can interpret what is simply stage fright as a lie. We can mistake paralysis for disinterest. And humble modesty can be played by a calculating psychopath in front of a jury. People don’t act like characters in a TV show. Except for those who are playing the show in their heads and have included you in the plot without your consent.
Furthermore, emotion itself is culturally and historically conditioned. It’s not some kind of biological constant. While marketing research tries to reduce the number of emotions to twelve or even six, the brain has hundreds of different emotional cocktails on its menu. What we in marketing research call basic universal emotions are really just responses to danger. For example, laughter is a biological response to the fact that a suddenly perceived insecurity is not actually dangerous. That’s why the repetition of a joke is always an embarrassing thing to do.
Most emotions we can’t even name, so we can’t even be aware of them. It is only by naming an emotion that we become aware of it. And this includes love. Goethe, for example, described unrequited, bittersweet love in The Sorrows of Young Werther. His best-seller made young people of the time discover bittersweet love. A wave of teenage suicides followed. Contrary to our view of emotions, emotions come and go throughout history. Perceptions of emotions change. In the 16th century, for example, sadness was considered a desirable emotion and the key to an active lifestyle.
Emotions have become a market research fetish, much like Jung’s archetypes. It may be true that emotions underlie everything human, but this is as useless a claim as saying that everything is based on a rational desire to satisfy one’s needs. It is the useless truth of the economist, who has been taught to look for a universal principle behind everything, and so merely replaces homo economicus with homo emocionalis.
Marketers exploit emotions in good faith. And big plans need big emotions. The entire marketing budget is spent on building a barrier between the customer and the benefit. The material is exaggerated joy, enthusiasm, pride and other emotional cocktails. Not feeling enough excitement and joy? Then maybe you’re not good enough for our brand. But the reason most brands exist is because of feelings, which researchers aren’t even sure they’re measuring. Spontaneous brand awareness measures the degree to which people feel fear. Specifically, fear of the unknown and fear of being different. It’s human laziness and, above all, good old-fashioned xenophobia that protects all the leaders in the spontaneous awareness race from the newcomers.