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Emotions are the central organizing process of our thinking and behavior. What makes this process so messy – so frustratingly and beautifully messy! – is that it is driven less by immediate response to discrete stimuli and more by the ever-changing and ever-unstable tone and tenor of our relationships. What that means for brands is that affinity and loyalty is the result of how we feel about being in a relationship with (i.e. consumers of) those brands. The smart brands are figuring this out and driving the movement toward customer-centricity and conversational marketing.

This insight isn’t wholly new. In 1740, the philosopher David Hume asserted in his Treatise on Human Nature that “Reason is, and ought to be the slave of the passions and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”MORE…

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In the past year or so, we’ve been witnessing the convergence of several trends – a shift in online behavior, where users of social media tend to be gravitating toward micro-social networks and smaller, more socially curated sites; the rise of micro-lending, micro-giving, and localism; the growth and innovation occurring in qualitative market research; the higher levels of participation and quality in smaller-scale forms of research; the pruning of “friends” in social networks and tightening of privacy controls, and other phenomena. While disparate in their form, they are all manifestations of a few basic principles:MORE…

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BRIC markets (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) are evolving at a fast and furious pace, transforming the digital landscape. In fact, BRIC consumers are taking the lead when it comes to using the social web: their behavior is more diverse and also more mobile than peoples’ from westernized countries; they are more likely to blog and to maintain social network profiles, and thus share content on the Web; and they represent the greatest potential for growth, as Internet penetration is still below 50% in all four countries.MORE…