Supported Emotions: The Key to Today's Leading Products

Built to Love: Creating Products That Captivate Customers is a 10-chapter book published in 2010 by Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc. and written by Peter Boatwright, Associate Professor of Marketing at the Tepper School of Business, and Jonathan Cagan, the George Tallman and Florence Barrett Ladd Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. The authors explain how and why evoking an emotional connection with the customer enables certain products to enjoy market success. They explore key concepts around high-emotion products and present research that proves the value of emotion in product success. Drawing on numerous real-world examples, including an extended case study of Navistar, they outline a model for creating high-emotion products in three phases: identify emotional opportunity, develop a product strategy, and transfer strategy into product features. They provide practical guidance and insight for managers. Chapter 5, Supported Emotions: The Key to Today's Leading Products (15 pages), delves more deeply into developing an actual product that delivers a high-emotion experience. The authors analyze Apple to illustrate the benefits of successfully supported emotions throughout a product experience. They present research on product packaging to show how every product detail can be used to provide customer value, and they further explore the benefit of supported emotions in business-to-business marketing, services marketing, and in higher education. The authors conclude that successful high-emotion products meet customer needs via both emotion and functionality.

• Psychology and neuroscience
• Innovation
• Brand management
• Consumer behavior
• Product development
• Strategic positioning