You are choosing a car. You have read the reviews, watched the comparisons, sat in three showrooms. The internet has given you more information than any buyer in history has ever had. Then a friend puts down her coffee and says, “If I were you, I’d take the Volvo.” And that settles it. Four words from one person, obeyed almost too willingly, after a thousand pages of research changed nothing.
Why? She is no car expert. She has no spec sheet. The advertisements you scrolled past this month had bigger budgets and better production. Yet her sentence carried more force than all of them together. If you can explain that force, you hold the entire science of influence in your hand.
Rewind the conversation ten minutes. You had mentioned the baby, and somewhere in there, without quite saying it, the thing underneath: you think about accidents now. You never used to. She felt that. Then she said, “I know what that’s like. When my kid was a baby, I remember having a meltdown once when I saw a bee near her.” You chuckled. And in that chuckle something settled that no brochure has ever produced: she gets me.
It is worth unpacking what she “gets” exactly, because this is where most sellers go wrong. Anyone can say “I get you,” and saying it is better than nothing. She went further: she demonstrated it. She knew what you felt, and you felt that she did. There is nothing more binding than a moment of shared emotion. And it is the juncture in which true influence becomes possible. That is all the “she gets me” that is needed to change a heart and a mind. “If I were you, I’d take the Volvo” arrives as advice you almost cannot help but take.
Notice what happened to you in that moment, too. You had not put the thing into words yourself. You knew you had started thinking about accidents. You had not called it fear, and you certainly would not have said it to a salesman. When she offered her own version of it, the feeling stopped being an odd thing you were carrying alone. It became acceptable. People often cannot name what they feel until somebody listens well enough to help them get there, and being understood like that does something on its own. It brings comfort. It brings the sense that you are not the only one. It is part of why the advice that follows lands perfectly.
To be clear, I’m not referring to the kind of “influence” that is factually coercion. Where someone insists that you do something to the point that you give in. There is something remarkable about true influence. You get a person to a point where they change their own mind. Nothing is forced. They feel inspired and better off for it.
Back to our story. Put a name to what your friend understood.
What you said out loud was a want for a safe car. That is the tangible want: the actual thing, the product, the result you are after. Underneath it sits a feeling. That is the emotional root: fear that your family may be harmed. And between the two sits what you want emotionally, which is reassurance and protection.
Read it upward and you have the whole sequence. Fear that the family may be harmed. A want for reassurance and protection. A want for a safe car, which takes the form of a Volvo. Emotional root, emotional want, tangible want, in that order.
Now take a young professional walking into the same showroom. He wants the same safety score, and the lower insurance premium that comes with it. Both of those are tangible wants: things, results. What he feels underneath is not what the mother feels. It is the fear of going broke on a new car. What he wants emotionally is financial security and relief. Same car. Different emotional root and emotional want. And the difference decides what each of them needs to hear.
So learn to see a want for what it is. A tangible want is a solution. It is a result. The emotional root is the cause. The mother’s fear for her family produced a want to feel her family protected, and that took form as a want for a safe car. The professional’s fear of going broke produced a want for financial security and relief, and that took form as a want for the lower insurance premium and the same car. If all you hold is the tangible want, you hold the outcome of forces you cannot see.
Let’s not disregard the power of a spoken tangible want (“a safe car” in our example). It is incredibly powerful. It is what powers all good marketing and advertising. Work with a big enough sample of what a market says it wants and you can make powerful inferences about how to position your product to that market. That is where the Power Listening thesis begins. A spoken tangible want is fantastic raw material. But the real value, the kind that differentiates top revenue leaders from average, shows up in the interpretation: what lives under the thing they asked for. What emotion is feeding it.
When you truly understand and feel the mother’s want, you can position the tangible she would consequently want. If her tangible want is already spoken, your understanding decides which solution she chooses. The choice happens where decisions are actually made, at the level of emotion. If the tangible want for a particular solution has not formed yet, it is latent. Discern the emotional want, and you can position a tangible want that genuinely answers it. You cannot wake a tangible want out of nothing. The feeling is what is already there.
Put plainly: he who understands the emotion stands most credible in directing what tangible should be wanted. That sentence is the entire science of how a product gets wanted, and it explains things sellers usually consider a mystery. It explains the influencer, who spends all his time connecting at the emotional level with his audience, until they feel he lives their reality; there is a reason his recommendation gets them wanting. It also explains the power of a friend’s steer. And it decodes a phrase the pundits have been punting for decades: become a trusted advisor. While the rest of us were trying to decipher what it meant to be trusted, this is what it meant all along: the power of directing want at the juncture of emotional resonance.
This applies at the level of the market and at the level of the prospect. Feel the emotion of the one buyer in front of you and you direct one want: that is selling. Feel the emotions running through a whole market and you direct wants by the thousands: that is marketing.
At market scale the job changes shape but not substance. You are looking for the emotion the people in that group are most likely feeling right now, and you find it by reading what real people actually said and deciding, as a human being, what it means. Feelings do not average. If some of your market is frightened and some of it is angry, the answer is not a blended emotion made of fear and anger. It is a judgement about which feeling is doing the work, made by someone who has listened to enough of them to tell.
Positioning follows the same mechanism. The marketer looks for a common emotion in real testimony, discerns the associated emotional want, and positions the tangible want as a legitimate answer. In the Volvo example, fear of harm is the emotional root, reassurance is the emotional want, and the safe car is the tangible want. Repeated consistently, that alignment becomes part of the brand.
A purchase has other forces in it too. Brand loyalty, habit, price, timing and plain function all play their parts. They can affect which tangible want is chosen or when it is acted on. Emotion is the most basic aspect of the buying decision. This essay is about the role of emotion in producing the want for a solution. Master the emotion and you will change hearts and minds.
Which brings this series back to the machines. A machine can record every tangible want your market speaks out loud. It can analyse them by the truckload. It should. That is what I call hearing, and machines now hear at a scale no human can match.
Stand the machine next to your friend, though, and watch what it cannot do. It has no meltdown to remember. Nothing has ever been at stake for it. It shares no reality with you, and resonance runs on shared reality. It can hand you the thing your market asked for. Deciding what the words mean emotionally stays with humans. Even a machine that heard every sentence in the market the moment it was spoken wouldn’t get the chuckle, and the chuckle is where the heart changes.
Here is this week’s drill.
Take the three wants you hear most from your market and write them down in the customer’s own words, exactly as they said them. Next to each, write what you think that person wants emotionally. Keep the customer’s words and your interpretation of them clearly apart on the page, because one is evidence and the other is your view. If your interpretation turns out to be just another way of restating the solution, you have not felt your market yet.
Back to our example one last time. The want was on the table for everyone to see. Your friend was the only one who felt what was behind it. She showed you she knew what you feared, and the advice did the rest.
Make it rAIn, KG