Are Your Employee’s Emotions Aligned with Your Sales Promotional Strategy?

Outstanding employee and customer interaction is paramount for a service business success. When the emotional interface between a prospective client and an employee is either pleasant or unpleasant, the customer immediately assesses the service quality of the service provider.

When inspecting the role of human emotion in service work; we can include emotional contagion and emotional labor is ever-present. Emotional contagion consists of the transfer of emotional signals from person to person; where the receiver assesses the emotion that the sender demonstrates. To put into context, employees who display smiles and pleasantries toward customers tend to create a positive perception of the service provider in the mind of the customer (Thurau, Groth, Paul, & Gremler, 2006). Similarly, emotional labor infers that employees may display expected self-regulatory emotions. In doing so, employees go through an acting strategy with customers. The two main acting strategies consist of a superficial and an in-depth display of customer centric behavior. In the eyes of the consumer, such regulated behavior has a range of authenticity and sincerity (Thurau et al). As business owner and leaders, we should clearly understand that demonstrated employee emotions can and do have negative and positive consequences on customer satisfaction; customer-employee relationship; and future customer loyalty and commitment – you should also include implications on sales and revenue growth. Empirical evidence reveal that an employee’ emotional contagion and emotional labor demeanor can influence a customer’s perceptions. On the plus side, findings suggest that along with employees’ smiling; individual authenticity is a key ingredient that has a bearing on the customer’s emotions and acceptance of a service provider. However, all is not lost or wasted in negativism. Let’s consider advertisements. Negative appeals in advertisements is grounded on the foundation that negative emotional applications do have a place in marketing and advertising. The main driver for delving into the importance of negative emotions, as a means of advertising, has to do with examining the prevailing sentiments of how to effectively sway consumers (Cotte & Ritchie, 2005). Since the marketplace in very dynamic and under constant change, it is relevant to review existing advertising strategies. Given this background, Cotte and Ritchie (2005), posited the following positions; they have “[identified] three broad views of consumers that appear to guide advertisers when they develop ads: 1) a ‘desensitized consumer’ who pays little attention to advertising; 2) a ‘sophisticated consumer’ who is conscious of advertisers’ and 3) a ‘tribal consumer’ who is driven by a fundamental need to be accepted as part of a larger group”. Nonetheless, some market research experts elect to explore negative emotional advertisement research because they realize that on a daily basis, most consumers are under constant attack and bombardment of thousands of ads to the degree that they have become immune to the vast advertisement information. Getting consumers attention is becoming an enormous challenge because of the multiple sources of advertisements; such television, magazines, news media, and the Internet. With so many communications channels and information overload, consumers’ attention spans are challenged. Under these circumstances, consumers in the desensitized category can be motivated by negative ads because; ‘fear works. It makes you sit up…fear works, in my mind, to jolt someone to make them at least, remember it’. In the arena of the sophisticated consumer; buyers have become so savvy and intellectual that they cannot be manipulated by slick advertisements. As consumers and ‘as a viewer, they know it [when something’s real]. They know when something’s fake and when something’s not’ (Cotte & Ritchie, 2005); so let’s stop trying the same old outdated advertisement tactics. As we consider the emotional behaviors of our employees, with respect to customers, and the psychology of our consumers relative to the types of levers we push to garner their attention – each component must be socially stabilizing and ethical. Leading and managing a business to produce and deliver products and services that add stability to individual customers and the marketplace will facilitate a sober society. (Photo from public domain – Shutterstock Images)