The flow of Emotional Immersion is always in play. It’s practitioners are improvisational, pursuing points of interest as they become apparent rather than attempting to rigidly adhere to a route that was mapped out ahead of time. As we move forward in our inquiry, however, there are certain rules that we play by. These are our main currents.
Slow Down
There’s no point being in a hurry if you’re headed in the wrong direction. Emotional Immersion prioritizes finding direction, and only then moves at a slow, mindful pace toward a strategic destination. A human speed enables our team to pay attention to the details that shape the context in which we work.
Empathize
The purpose of Emotional Immersion is to understand consumers’ experiences from their own point of view. Instead of operationalizing their subjective experience, and then analyzing it as if emotions were physical objects, we listen, and we follow the lead of consumers’ realities, regardless of whether they fit conventional models.
Ritualize
The research process is never cool and removed. It’s always emotional. That’s why the Emotional Immersion process involves a ritualized experience for everyone involved: Client, researcher, and participant alike. The participant is led through a ritual of deep self-reflection, out of the present moment and into evocative experiences of consumption from the past. The researcher goes through a ritual of transition that enables the abandonment of ordinary social interactions, to take on a new identity that gains the power and permission to explore the most emotionally sensitive topics. The client enters a ritualized space apart from their corporate culture, where they encounter challenging ideas, symbolic displays, and powerful messages that can be taken back to their corporate homes to serve as the raw material of organizational revitalization.
Visualize
Emotion isn’t logical. It isn’t found through discussions of opinions or concept tests. Emotional Immersion doesn’t ask direct questions, but followings deepening cycles of exploration of visual scenarios that participants hold in their minds. By understanding the significance of these reconstructed moments, we build a contextualized model of emotional motivation that transcends rationalizations of consumer behavior. By understanding what consumers see, rather than what they think, Emotional Immersion gathers the material for a vision of authentic purpose that can be shared throughout the client organization.
Meaningful Error
Conventional methods of inquiry seek to eliminate error, and to minimize for it when it occurs. Emotional Immersion takes a different approach, acknowledging that error is unavoidable in human endeavors. Instead of reducing the real role of error in research, Emotional Immersion seeks to understand the ways that inaccuracies reveal underlying truths that, though they may not be true in a literal sense, indicate the presence of feelings that direct the construction of subjective reality without regard to objective facts.
Repeat
We take no pride in coming up with a quick answer to the questions we face. In Emotional Immersion, we ask the same questions over and over again, to show research participants that we aren’t just going through the motions, to respect the intricate passageways of emotion that too often remain forgotten. We have found that it’s when our questions seem obvious, when we seem to already know the answers, that the most surprising responses emerge. An Emotional Immersion interview has a rhythm that repeats like a song, with understanding growing richer each time it is revisited.