Bzzzt. You are having a common nerd/guy adverse reaction to the word "emotional", but as someone who has sold software and services to huge companies staffed with gun-totin' Ron Swansons for 15 years, let me assure you, everyone is receptive to emotions. They're just different emotions†.
Watch Patrick's talk. Particularly the Google slide.
† "Fear" is one my industry has used to great effect; "egotism" is another one.
And as someone who has sold software and services to huge companies with gun-totin' Ron Swansons for over 15 years, let me assure you that this is untrue.
So, yeah, it's a question of approach. Which was my entire point.
You've never seen the "better" product, with superior performance and more feature check-boxes, lose to the product with the more attractive user interface? Because I feel like that's the oldest blues song I've heard sung.
Of course. But I don't believe that every sale I have lost for what I believe to be non-rational reasons is inherently an emotional decision. Sometimes I just don't understand the motivations of my customers.
We're spiraling here. All I'm saying is, emotional appeals are very much in play in most markets, very much including old conservative white males in '50s-era financial products businesses (fear; get - me - home - in - time - to - see - the - kids; fraternity) and young thin white males at software shops (vanity).
Someone said, "sell emotional experiences and features". You said something to the effect of "eh, maybe that works in your market". Here's where I cut in: bzzt! It works in virtually all markets.
Even in buy-by-committee enterprise sales, there are emotional appeals that will give you an edge.
A fun exercise: look at the most successful, best marketed products in a variety of fields, and spot the emotional elements. Start with Github.
It's all good. I've lived an odd life, but essentially every dollar I have made has come from someone thinking he is getting more value for his dollar than I am charging him for my software/service/whatever. Considering the businesses in which I have often found myself, that has often meant that they felt they were smarter than me. I doubt any of them felt an emotion beyond greed. If that counts, then I'm well and truly wrong.
Then, again, you managed to drag a huge thread out of me based on my emotional reaction to your (frankly offensive) "Bzzt" so maybe you're right for "most" markets.
1. The business man from the city that buys a small piece of land (40 - 60 acres) and cash rents it out. Now you might say that's greed. He's looking to make more money and is greedy pushing the family farm out and renting to the big corporate farmers. You're wrong though. He bought the small farm to brag about it at cocktail parties. That's why all these business types own small chunks of land in rural areas. That's an emotional reason to own it.
2.Imagine a company that allows you to out source your life. One might say, "If I can make $100 an hour free lancing, then I should out source all tasks that I can for less than $100 an hour" and you would argue this is logical. But the real reason someone would want to outsource the laundry, and all aspects of their life is purely emotional. They can then go brag about to all their friends how perfect of a life they have because they don't have to do any crappy work. That's why people making $35 an hour are paying $50 an hour to have the crap done they could do themselves.
If you damage the emotional part of the brain, you are unable to make decisions. You can reason all day long and compare and contrast, but you can never decide.
I wouldn't be surprised if the emotional value that the guys you run into is how they can brag at cocktail parties or to their business associates how they screwed over some computer science graduate and that they used their Harvard MBA to do it.
"Sell benefits, not features" is a marketing-101 principle; a good way to tell if you're selling a real benefit (and selling it effectively) is to isolate and hone the emotional component to it. You can do this even in hard-nosed products; there are emotional components to the "we're not full of shit and our products just do what you need them to do" pitch.
I'm not trying to argue with you now; just extending my point.
> but essentially every dollar I have made has come from someone thinking he is getting more value for his dollar than I am charging him for my software/service/whatever.
Isn't that the basis of all voluntary transactions?
Watch Patrick's talk. Particularly the Google slide.
† "Fear" is one my industry has used to great effect; "egotism" is another one.