Emotional Immersion is a radically human research method designed to provide an alternative to the heavily automated, data-driven approaches that have become dominant in business practice. As predictive quantitative methods lead to predictable ends, it’s the human experience that becomes the new frontier of insight and strategy.
The point of Emotional Immersion is not to obtain yet more data to add to the mountains of data that already exist, but to explore subjective human experience on its own terms. Through this method, external reality gives way to internal reality, as often occurs in the marketplace.
In an Emotional Immersion research project, everyone involved is submerged in the emotional world that drives consumer behavior in unpredictable ways. Through an intimate, one-on-one interviewing method, researchers guide participants back in time, to revisit reconstructions of emotionally evocative experiences related to the research objective. These visualizations are not factually correct “flashbulb memories” of past events, and that’s why they’re so useful. Because these emotionally salient visual memories have been filtered according to participants’ emotional frameworks over and over again through the years, they have become vivid symbolic representations of the powerful and lasting behavioral motivations that drive behavior in the marketplace.
Clients are immersed in this process as well, disconnected through a ritualized research process from their typical environment of work, so that they become capable of achieving atypical insights.
Emotional Immersion interviews go deeper than conventional “in-depth” methods, taking a broad view of consumer experiences. Instead of rushing along literal lines of questioning that lead straight to clients’ objectives, Emotional Immersion adopts an open-ended approach that keeps the topic of research in mind, but trusts participants’ relevant experiences to shape the inquiry, allowing the realization of new perspectives.
The method is slow and patient, a welcome respite from the lean and agile business culture of constant sprints toward work that is always minimally viable. Down below the surface, where emotions are at work, ideas connect in unusual ways that only make sense when people are given the time to move in broad curving arcs toward their destinations.
This human approach to insights research provides the material organizations need to build cultures that preserve space for human work. A company immersed in emotion builds enduring commercial relationships in which employees and consumers alike can thrive.
Plenty of businesses talk about the need to become “more human”. Emotional Immersion helps them put their ideals into action.