Why Emotional Immersion?

You’re Ready To Genuinely Invest

Investing money is relatively straightforward, if you’ve got it. Your gain or loss will be simple to assess. The human relationships that all commerce depends upon move in more subtle dimensions, and can’t be reduced to a statistical dashboard.

Emotional Immersion is built upon a different kind of investment. It requires more than a purchase. It’s about being psychologically bought in.

The benefits of this approach, when they come in, are more expansive as well. It isn’t about getting a direct answer to a linear question. If you’re looking for quick and cheap feedback on an advertising concept, look elsewhere. Instead, the idea is to achieve a wider, longer and deeper feel for the landscape that can inform every aspect of your work.

You’re Tired of Superficial Emotion AI

You’ve heard the pitch of those who claim that artificial intelligence can “understand emotion” with nothing more than digital scans of people’s faces, or by measuring their skin conductivity and heart rate. It sounds promising, until you see the thin and scanty results Emotion AI is able to muster, with abstract statistical analyses that are devoid of context, stripping human experience of its nuance to cram the complexities of subjective feeling into a tiny number of basic emotions.

In contrast, Emotional Immersion invests the time and attention required to articulate consumer perspectives with full emotional granularity, respecting the subtle cultural wisdom of the hundreds of words for distinct feelings in various human language, rather than reducing their relevance until they fit into a few crude, general categories.

You Need Research To Match Your Questions

Emotional Immersion doesn’t match every research need.

If what you want is to build a tidy predictive model of consumer behavior, Emotional Immersion will be insufficient to the task. If you want to develop market segmentation to tease apart the differences that divide people, Emotional Immersion is the wrong choice.

If you want to get underneath the easy answers, Emotional Immersion may match your needs.

You Can’t Keep Up The Cruel Pace

Quantitative methods of research are accelerating relentlessly, and have reached a pace that is beyond the ability of human beings to sustain. Corporations are already amassing mountains of data that they never use, and the problem is only getting worse.

At the same time, algorithmic optimization is pushing people in the corporate world to operate at a speed that saps them of their strength, making them less productive rather than more valuable to their companies. Yet, the sprinting continues, more out of cultural habit than out of practical need. We have accepted a business culture that makes a fetish out of speed. It is time to break the habit.

Emotional immersion projects provide a much needed pause for corporate teams, providing the benefits of increased creativity, insight, and productivity that come from following a human pace. The research methodology itself models the power of slow connections to foster interactions that reconnect us with the most important aspects of our work, helping us to focus on what matters rather than racing to try to address every demand that competes for our attention.

You Need To Get To Why

Emotional Immersion is designed to address another, more fundamental business problem. It’s a tool that’s used to look behind the straightforward questions of market research to confront genuine mystery… when you don’t just want to know what is going on, or how it’s going on, but why it’s happening.

Perhaps it’s in that moment when you look at the data you’ve already got, and realize that it doesn’t match what your consumers are actually doing.

You Want To Counter Digital Bias

To counterbalance the remarkable quantitative strength of Big Data, we need qualitative methods that leverage the full range of human qualitative experience. We need to get past the scope of survey work, to go beyond focus groups, and to reach further depths beneath the conventional approach of what are commonly referred to as “in-depth interviews”.

It’s Time

It’s a nervous thing, standing at the edge of the water, wondering whether you should jump in. It’s easy to never get past the shoreline, to turn back and go inside, where everything is comfortable and familiar.

On the other hand, there is no thrill that can compare with the feeling of having taken the leap, pulling yourself forward into the depths, opening your eyes onto a new world that can’t be seen from the surface.