The ROI of making people feel something

This post is sponsored by CAPITAL-e.

We talk a lot about ROI when it comes to experiences. How many people attended? How many leads did we generate? What was the pipeline? Did engagement increase? They’re important questions. But there’s another one that many people don’t ask nearly often enough: How did we make people feel?

It can sound like the softer side of marketing. It’s harder to measure, harder to put into a spreadsheet, and certainly harder to attribute to revenue. But there’s growing evidence that that feeling isn’t separate from commercial outcomes, it helps create them.

‘Feeling’ changes what people do

Qualtrics XM Institute has spent years studying the relationship between the customer experience and loyalty. In its 2023 US study of 10,000 consumers across 351 brands, it looked at three dimensions of an experience: whether it was successful, how much effort it required and how it made someone feel.

Emotion had the strongest relationship with all four loyalty behaviours measured: trusting a brand, recommending it, forgiving it for a mistake, and purchasing more.

Consumers who rated an experience highly for emotion were 5.1 times more likely to trust the organisation and 4.6 times more likely to purchase more than those who rated it poorly.¹ And while those figures come from consumer research, emotion also matters in B2B.

Research from CEB and Google, in partnership with Motista, found that B2B buyers who saw personal value in a brand – things such as confidence, pride or professional benefit – were over three times more likely to purchase and roughly eight times more likely to pay a premium than those who didn’t.²

It makes sense when you think about it. Businesses don’t make decisions. People inside businesses do.

Welcome to the ‘feel economy’

As AI becomes better at processing information, producing content and helping us compare our options, we believe the things that are uniquely human become more valuable.

Trust. Belonging. Empathy. Meaning. Judgement. Connection. That’s what we mean when we talk about the “feel economy”. It’s a subject we’ve written about before: “What is the feel economy and why does it matter?”, but the short version is this: as more of the world goes digital, the things technology can’t replicate become the differentiator, not the afterthought.

Technology can help someone understand your product, AI can summarise a hundred pages of information in seconds. A buyer can compare competing solutions before ever speaking to a salesperson, but knowing something about a brand and feeling something about it are very different things. And in an environment where products, messages, and content are increasingly easy to replicate, the way you make people feel becomes another way to differentiate.

The same is true inside your organisation

This isn't only about customers. Think about why organisations bring their own people together for sales kick-offs, company meetings, leadership retreats and off-sites. If the only objective is to communicate information, there are much easier and cheaper ways to do it. We gather because something different can happen when people are in a room together. We spend a lot of our time thinking about exactly this.

A sales kick-off can leave people feeling confident about the year ahead. An off-site can create stronger relationships between people who usually see each other through a screen. A leadership gathering can create clarity, trust, and a genuine alignment around where the business is going.

Those things might be harder to measure than attendance, but that doesn’t make them less valuable. In fact, how your people feel influences how they show up – with each other, with customers and ultimately with the market.

The ROI isn’t in gathering people. It’s in what the gathering changes.

That’s why the question shouldn’t simply be whether we should bring people together. It should be what we want to happen because we did. Do we want customers to trust us more? Prospects to feel understood? Employees to feel connected? Sales teams to feel confident? Partners to feel valued?

Once we know that, we can design the experience backwards from the feeling we want to create. Because the venue, food, content, speakers, creative and technology are all inputs. The feeling people leave with is part of the outcome.

At CAPITAL-e, this is the first question in every experience brief we write, before a venue is booked or a run sheet is drafted. It’s the difference between an event that happened and one that changes something.

If that feeling influences what they remember, who they trust, where they want to work, who they want to work with, and what they do next, making people feel something isn't the fluffy part of the experience.

It's part of the ROI.

So alongside “What do we want people to know?” and “What do we want people to do?”, every experience brief should include one more question: How do we want them to feel?

¹ Qualtrics XM Institute, “How success, effort, and emotion affect customer loyalty, 2024” – Q3 2023 US Consumer Study, 10,000 consumers across 351 brands.

² CEB Marketing Leadership Council and Google, in partnership with Motista – "From promotion to emotion: Connecting B2B customers to brands” (2013), survey of 3,000 B2B buyers.

About the author: Cara Hamann is the managing director at CAPITAL-e – a marketing and experience agency helping brands turn gatherings into moments people remember. If you’re rethinking what your next event, kick-off or activation is designed to make people feel, get in touch with CAPITAL-e.