Reimagining Marketing Through an Emotional Lens with Rob Harrison-Plastow

Mike (00:00.334)
Rob, thanks ever so much for joining me on Higgle the B2B sells to podcast

Rob (00:02.843)
It uploads, yeah.

Rob (00:10.736)
Okay.

Rob (00:19.375)
Absolute pleasure to be here, thank you.

Mike (00:21.748)
I mean, I look forward to all my podcasts to be honest. I enjoy the former. I love talking to people and building new relationships. You've got something very unusual to talk to us about. without further ado, can you tell the listeners who are you, what do you do and something unusual about yourself?

Rob (00:39.793)
Sure, okay, so my name is Rob, Rob Harrison -Pasto. I'm the founder and CEO of Source 9 Strategic Insights. We've developed a model called the empathy framework that unlocks a logic to emotion. And I'm just fascinated by the relationship between emotion and behavior. There's been a paradigm change in the neuroscience around emotion, and it's opened up whole new ways of understanding what emotion even is.

how emotion is constructed and how we can therefore better understand it and work with it and understand ourselves, understand our relationships and also to bring that into our work. I do that through mainly qualitative research and helping brands and charities to develop really strong strategies based on emotional insight. Some think a fun fact.

I once helped set up a new country. So I...

Mike (01:39.176)
You

You can't have done that's not possible. How do you do that? That's like inventing money.

Rob (01:46.213)
So, yeah, so I spent most of my career at the University of Exeter and a big part of my work there, which has fed into everything I do now, was around transformative learning and understanding how people learn and ultimately transform. You know, when you have like those big shifts where something really just changes, you've done a particular course or you've learned something, you've read a book and it changes you. I was fascinated by that.

Mike (01:53.187)
Right?

Mike (02:08.546)
Yes. Yeah.

Rob (02:16.137)
And I really wanted to apply that in our thinking around education towards sustainability and climate change. And I didn't want to create this curricula for students where they basically get really depressed about all the science, about climate and all that kind of stuff. And I was like, OK, well, how can I create conditions in which people can learn about all of these topics, but it be really

Mike (02:36.707)
Yeah, yeah.

Rob (02:44.667)
positive and encouraging. So I developed a project called the New Country Project and I got students from across all the different departments to come together and we took over a field on the campus. We declared independence, wrote to the government and said that this square acre is now its own country. And we then brought in all the academics from all the different colleges.

as advisors and counsellors to this group of people that were setting up their new country. They needed to write a constitution, they needed to write all their different policies on how they were going to live. And what it did was it meant that they could then engage with issues around energy, food, water, security, all sorts of policy decisions in the context of where are we now as a planet? And therefore, what do we want to do about that?

So it inverted the whole thing. So they were then looking at the future and thinking, what do we want? Rather than looking at the past and going, everything's so terrible. And at the end of that, they had created their own country. The people that were in the fashion school had come up with a national dress. The musicians had written like a national anthem. All the different departments had come up with all these different policies. And then a group of them acted as representatives for the new country.

Mike (03:43.438)
Very good.

Mike (04:00.11)
Brilliant!

Rob (04:10.321)
and they took the climate accord to the COP, the Conference of the Parties at Paris, this is back in 2015, and joined the student COP and asked to be recognised as the newest country in the world and to have a contribution to the Paris climate accord.

Mike (04:15.789)
Wow.

Mike (04:31.17)
Wow, that's amazing. That's amazing. Brilliant, brilliant, innovative thinking.

Rob (04:32.377)
It was a lot of fun. thank you.

It was great fun.

Thank you very much. So that's where my background comes from in understanding how people learn, how they change, how to create conditions conducive to learning and change and development. And that's what's led to me now running Source 9, but doing that outside of education just with populations of people instead.

Mike (05:02.978)
So we're gonna get into it in a few minutes about, there's lot more depth on this, but as a rationalist, my brain's going logic and emotion. You can't have those in the same sentence really. There is no logic to emotion. So we're gonna explore that in some detail, which is great. But first of all, just talk about kind of how you bring a different perspective to the kind of the insights industry, which has been going for.

Rob (05:22.128)
Yeah.

Mike (05:31.594)
probably hundreds of years and it's done in all sorts of ways. But in terms of the way you approach qualitative research, what perspective do you bring? What's different about what you bring to that industry?

Rob (05:45.617)
So the industry for a long time and marketing and advertising more generally have always championed the importance and power of emotion. At the same time, we operate within a system and an ideology of rationality. So quite often those emotional factors get seen as irrational.

Mike (05:55.373)
Yes.

Rob (06:13.297)
and they get pushed out. think a lot of this, if you wanted to go meta, comes down to like the whole enlightenment period and scientific revolution, scientific method and so on, and what that then precludes from what you consider as part of your reasoning. However, what I'm trying to bring to this, there's actually been a real shift in the neuroscience.

over the last few years, particularly sort of like late 20 teens. There's a great lab run by a professor, Lisa Feldman Barrett at Northeastern University, does amazing work showing the neuroscience of emotion and how it's all about perception and leveraging that insight into the relationship between perception, the creation of meaning and interpretation.

and how those then relate to our emotional experiences allows us to see that emotions aren't hardwired stimulus response experiences. They're actually constructed responses and our brains are constructing them and it's much more fluid than we think. But once you start to approach it from that different perspective, you can see it differently. So I can now look at

data that I previously would have looked at, say, 10 years ago in a completely different light, see it in a different way and arrive at different conclusions as a result. Because the assumptions and the framing that I'm going in with in the first place is it's a different paradigm of thinking.

Mike (07:53.934)
So does this apply to, so just really practical things. So if I'm a listener, I'm sat there going, this is getting quite intellectual. In simple terms, if I see an advert and then walk into a store and I think, I buy that product or not? Something's going on in my head and my heart as to whether I buy that or not. Does it apply to that environment or is it completely different?

Rob (08:01.337)
Yeah.

Rob (08:17.691)
No, it's the same thing. like, I say this to someone the other day, it's like when there's changes in physics, for example, the universe hasn't changed. It's just our understanding of it has we're now able to interact with it more reliably, more consistently than previous, but the universe is exactly the same as it was yesterday. Likewise, with emotion, it's the same thing that's been going on forever. We are human.

It's just when we look at things differently, we get better tools, we're better able to more reliably and consistently engage with those emotions. So for example, when it comes to

Mike (08:51.47)
Yeah, bring it to life. So give us an example of some kind, a simple thing that our listeners could understand. Assume I'm my son, assume I'm like 12 years old, very curious, but you've got to explain it to me.

Rob (08:54.683)
Okay.

Well, any.

Rob (09:02.725)
Yeah. Okay. So advertisers have long known that emotion drives behavior and it's really important. However, it gets a bit murky when it needn't. Because if we start to realize that emotions are created inside of us, and that we are creating them in response to the world around us, we can start to

to engage with it differently, because we start to ask ourselves, OK, so how is that being constructed by that person? What would I need to know in order to understand how that emotion is being constructed? Previous questions would have seen the item and been looking it through your eyes and seeing it the way that you do and going, right, how do I make that person feel something? But it's indirect.

It's about how do I create conditions to that person feeling it themselves? And that creates you need empathy. So in a real world example, what I'm talking about is we don't buy items for the reasons that we think we do. We're actually buying an emotional transformation. We're buying the feeling that that thing gives us. Let's say, for example, money. Now, people think that they need money.

But there is no emotional need for money. The job that money is doing is as an exchange of value. It's not the thing itself. It's the means. why people want money is because of the agency it gives them, the autonomy it gives them, the ability for them to meet their emotional needs.

Mike (10:38.19)
Mm -hmm.

Mike (10:48.492)
Exactly.

Rob (10:54.833)
So if we can understand what the emotional needs are behind a thing, that's why people are really doing what they're doing. So in the case of point of money, people are running around thinking that's what they need and want, but really what they want is to feel free. They want agency. Or depending on who they are and their culture and their beliefs and their perceptions, they may see it very differently and they might want money for esteem or they might want it for safety and security.

It could be a blend of all of these things. But what I'm getting at is, to paraphrase Bruce Lee of all people, he had this great quote about the finger pointing at the moon. Have you ever heard of that one? It's like the point isn't to don't get lost staring at the finger pointing to the moon. The point is to look at the moon, not the finger pointing at it. So in this case, in point with money, the money is the finger pointing at the moon.

Mike (11:38.219)
No.

Rob (11:52.695)
And the moon is really autonomy, agency, freedom. So once we can start to get through the levels and the layers and take into consideration potentially like a brand or a product, what is the emotional need that that brand or product or service is really servicing? Just like in the case of money. Money is just an idea. It's just a piece of paper. But the emotional value that is created, what's really being needed,

are those deep human emotional drivers around agency, around connection, around a state. There's a certain set of emotional needs that we all share, and those are the things that drive us. And every time that we're looking to make a sale, purchase something, do any kind of behavior really, you can always bring it back to an emotional need that's driving that behavior, something that's being sought after.

so that person can feel okay.

Mike (12:55.224)
So that takes us into the kind of the next question really, which is the, what do you mean by unlocking the logic of emotion? So take it to the next stage. So I think I get the concept, but what do you mean when you say unlocking the logic of emotion?

Rob (13:15.227)
So nothing is irrational if you have enough empathy. The benefit of seeing emotion as being constructed and not as hardwired and fixed. If we think about color, for example, I like to think of emotion in the same way that I think about color. So color is a spectrum of light.

we then construct from that infinite variety of frequencies the colors of the rainbow. red is a construction on an electromagnetic spectrum. We say that's red, that's yellow, that's orange. Now if you live in Russia, they actually have an extra color in their rainbow. You can Google this. What we consider to be

Mike (14:08.899)
Really?

Rob (14:11.831)
light blue and dark blue, they consider to be two completely different colors because they have constructed as a culture a different set of categories because the categories are constructions, they're not fixed. Right? If we look at other languages, I love German for this compound words in Germany, so in German, so they'll put two words together to create a new feeling.

Mike (14:17.678)
Hmm.

Mike (14:27.041)
No, exactly.

Rob (14:40.591)
Because again, these feelings aren't fixed. It's a spectrum of feeling which we then construct these categories on top of. Take, for example, schadenfreude. So taking pleasure in the misfortune of others. They took two words around that and put those two things together to create that new feeling, to give voice to that part of the spectrum, those colors. Likewise, when we think about the color red,

Mike (14:51.117)
Yes.

Rob (15:10.129)
There isn't one red, there's almost an infinite population of frequencies within red, like anyone who's ever done any design work knows RGB or hex colors, knows that there's so many different types of red, right? It's the same with emotion. So some cultures will have a category for sadness, but not all do, which is really interesting.

Mike (15:16.077)
Yes.

Mike (15:20.174)
That's right.

Rob (15:35.663)
we are primed by our cultures into seeing the world through those constructions. So

Mike (15:41.368)
We are, because it's a shortcut. Because we have to have in life shortcuts. We have to have labels. Otherwise, we can't live. So you have to have proxies, labels, shortcuts to just get through your day.

Rob (15:50.096)
Right.

Rob (15:56.133)
So let's unpack this a little bit more then. So now that we've established that emotions are constructed, we now need to understand, how are they being constructed? And it all comes down to understanding people's beliefs, because we're all confusing our beliefs about reality for reality. we in the UK, exactly. So we in the UK have got a certain number of colors in the rainbow. The Russians have got one more.

Mike (16:15.426)
Yes.

The map is not the territory.

Rob (16:26.353)
If we can map the context of a person or a group of people to understand what their beliefs are, we can then understand how they're perceiving the world. Because the danger is to fall into assumption and to think that you know how other people are thinking. It's called naive realism. And we're all looking at the world through different lenses of belief. So just like you've got your glasses on.

Mike (16:53.421)
Yes.

Rob (16:56.271)
I've got mine here, we've got different prescriptions. Everything that you've been through in the past is going to create a different prescription for you. You've got different beliefs that then are framing what you're seeing. They're going to prime you to certain information and preclude other information from you. You're literally going to see the world differently than me. We could put the same stimulus in front of us and you're going to see it in one way, I'm going to see it another.

Mike (17:25.784)
Did you ever read the stuff by Bandler and Grindler about NLP? They talk about filters and we have these filters in our mind and we seek the thing that we know and that goes through the filter. And the things that we don't really know or don't really agree with, we filter out. So when you look at a scene, I see that scene in a certain way because I'm looking for certain things. You see it in a different way because you're looking for certain things. But that's just a construct. Yeah, exactly. Yes. Yeah.

Rob (17:29.967)
No.

Rob (17:34.761)
Mm

Rob (17:42.661)
Mm

Rob (17:52.153)
Yep we've got different models of reality.

So the beauty of taking the constructive route is that we're not assuming that there's some sort of fixed objective reality. We're immediately accepting the fact that, I need to understand how you're constructing it. I can't assume that there's an objective way of seeing this. That's gone. There is no objective understanding here when it comes to these things.

Mike (18:20.28)
So what does this mean for marketing? How do you make the leap from this psychological understanding of how the brain or humans perceive things into, marketeers want to advertise things and create empathy and make us buy certain brands. How does it translate into that world?

Rob (18:23.332)
It means that you

Rob (18:31.953)
Mm

Rob (18:44.271)
Okay, so you map the lenses of belief, you take people's prescriptions, you understand their backgrounds, and really importantly, their expectations, and their values, their filters, right? So we check what the filters are, then those sets of beliefs are going to enable certain narratives to be told. So that's how we create meaning. So the beliefs are kind of the patterning, make it know, it's like, this is what I am perceiving. Out of those,

imagine that as a set, out of that set come narratives. That's how we ascribe meaning to the world. We take that information and we bring it to life by telling stories and we give meaning, we interpret. Now those interpretations, this is where it gets really, I love this part, it's like the interpretations that we then create, that's where our emotional responses are happening. And this is where the logic of emotion comes to play.

So out of the stories that we tell and the beliefs that we have about the world, we each create meaning and our emotions are responses to those meanings because the logic is happening is this, this is from cognitive behavioral therapy, essentially. The meanings that we create then lead us to perceive whether or not our emotional needs are being met. And when we perceive that our emotional needs are being met, we experience

Mike (19:55.926)
Yes.

Rob (20:13.489)
pleasurable emotional states. And when we perceive that our emotional needs are not being met, we experience discomfort. And now we're back into the traditional territory of advertising and marketing of pain and pleasure and moving away from discomfort and towards pleasure and the creation of emotional value. So what this approach then allows us to do is to get really granular.

And we can see those behaviors and we can now understand, well, yeah, if I believed that and I was creating meaning and I thought that that was the case, and that then led me to perceive that my need for connection was not being there, I would also feel quite isolated. And that would then lead me to behaviors such as this, this, and this. So all of a sudden, those behaviors that previously seemed irrational,

once looked at through the lens of this really empathetic understanding of beliefs, of stories and of emotional needs, all of a sudden those behaviors become completely logical. Of course you would do that. And this is the beauty of empathy. When you have sufficient cognitive empathy, you can understand why someone would feel the way that they feel and therefore why they would act the way that they would act. And the model that we've developed

comes in handy because not only does it allow us to explain behaviours, it also to certain extent allows us to predict behaviours. And by looking at the emotional needs and having a strong set of them and understanding what they are and how they relate to behaviour and how they relate to story and beliefs, we can then say, okay, well, these people are here, they believe this and there's this unmet need state.

Mike (21:45.102)
Aha!

Rob (22:05.355)
that looks like this and it feels like this and here's what they're feeling, here's why they're feeling it and here's what that is then doing to their behavior. What you need to do in terms of your brand or your product or whatever it is, is you need to help to take people from there and what they're really needing is this specific flavor of emotional value and here's how you create it. This is what they're needing and wanting.

Your job here is to create this specific flavor of emotional value. And when you do that, it will enable them to act on what's already inside of them that they want to act on and enable them to. The way that we put it is if you take this reasoning and put it into your strategic development, you can create strategies that make the achievement of your goals and those of your customers feel like pushing on an open door.

It's about aligning with the emotional motivations that are already present in people and helping to work with that by creating conditions conducive to those people, believing your emotional promise, feeling psychologically safe to engage with you and to act on what's already in them. So it's not about coercion at all. It's about service, really. It's about looking at people and understanding as empathetically as possible.

Why are you doing this? What is it that you're really needing? And then how can I serve you? How can I help you? And the more granular that you can go in the understanding of and communicating of that emotional value, better that you're going to do, the better that they're going to do. So it's not about taking, it's about giving.

Mike (23:49.08)
How do you map the current state of a consumer? Do you do primary research? Do you go and talk to them? So do you have a framework of questions that allow you to understand their current state that then can tell you if you know where you want them to get to, the transformation, I am here, I want you to get to that point, and then I've got a map that gets you from A to B.

Rob (23:54.501)
Very quick.

Rob (23:58.153)
Mm

Rob (24:02.233)
Yes.

Rob (24:11.235)
Mm -hmm. Yeah. Mm

Rob (24:18.671)
Yeah, so there's different ways that you can apply this. So I tend to think of people as audiences, as humans, as groups, as opposed to consumers per se. But once we've identified a specific target group, it's all about solving particular problems. So what's the job at hand? Is it a brand job, in which case we're looking to understand what is the emotional value that's needing to be created?

what are other brands doing in the space and what is being needed and what is it that that brand can give authentically and mapping those emotional territories and saying, this is why people are really buying. This is what your emotional job to do really is. And here's how you need to do it within the specific context of this target audience. It might also then show up in product, in which case it's like, okay, so you know what the functional job to be done is.

But really emotionally, what people are needing is x, y, z. So let's feed that in. It gets really interesting when it comes to media, because if we appreciate that emotions are constructed, then what we do, have been really enjoying, is mapping the times and places in which people already experience those needs as being met. And then we say, for example, OK, so

this particular group has a really strong sense of autonomy and personal freedom on an early morning dog walk in nature in these specific places. So, what would that mean then for the media buying in terms of times, places, activities, channels and that kind of stuff? And then in terms of creative strategy, it's obviously feeding into, so what's the emotional job of this story? What is the...

What have we got to show people so they can feel and experience? And yes, it's primary data through qualitative research. However, we're also developing an AI tool that I think is going to be really interesting to use not just on primary data as we are at the moment, but existing data. Thinking about the data that people might have in terms of customer experience, customer journey.

Mike (26:36.673)
Exactly.

Rob (26:44.215)
all sorts of different data that's on existing platforms and being able to analyze that at scale using this methodology to again show the same value that we create when we look at transcripts, because at end of the day, transcripts are just text. Yes, we've got specific questions that we're asking, and yes, we've got a particular way of bringing out a lot of these things through the techniques that we use.

However, when it comes to the amount of data that's out there in secondary sources, there's sufficient data there too for us to also get a really good insight into why are people doing what they're doing. One of the main things that we always say to our clients is before running off into strategy, trying to work out what should we do, let's first stop and analyze why are things as they are and then work out what to do. And I think there's a lot of

Mike (27:39.512)
Yes.

Rob (27:42.383)
data already out there. The problem is a lot of it is talking about what, when, where. It's not explaining why, whereas that's exactly what we do.

Mike (27:53.836)
Rob, it's been amazing. It's stretched my mind.

Which is always a good thing, because we're at 28 minutes, which seems to have gone unbelievably quickly. Yeah. So if people are intrigued and want to find out more, then what's the best way of doing that? How do they find you?

Rob (28:03.749)
OK, really quickly.

Rob (28:16.177)
Go on to LinkedIn and find me there, Rob Harrison -Pasto, Source 9 Strategic Insights. I've also got a YouTube channel, Rob Harrison -Pasto, which I really need to revive and bring back to life. It's been very busy over the last few months, but that's definitely on my agenda because I love doing it. And yeah, those are the two places, LinkedIn and YouTube. And yeah, go to the website as well, source9 .co .uk. And if you're interested in understanding why people do what they do,

All those kind of things. As you can tell, I love talking about this. So I'm more than happy to have a chat.

Mike (28:49.568)
Exactly. Robert's been brilliant. Thank you ever so much.

Rob (28:53.366)
Thank you, thanks for having me on, real pleasure.

Mike (28:56.492)
Right, let me just stop the recording.