Umania interviews Mr. Francesco Gallucci, expert in emotional marketing and owner of 1to1lab.

1) Mr. Gallucci there’s a lot of talk about emotional marketing, can you explain us what it is?
 Emotional Marketing is a new window that opens onto the consumer’s mind and is based on a model, combining marketing with several disciplines, among the main ones there’s neuroscience.

The assumption that implies a paradigm shift is based on one of the latest neuroscience discoveries, i.e. 95% of decisions are unconsciously taken, while only 5% (as emerging from what was stated) is rationally processed. That’s why the team of 1to 1 lab has developed a research model called C.E.M.S. (Emotional and Cognitive measurement System), which supports some theoretical models, such as non-verbal technologies, in particular biofeedback and eye tracking. Thanks to this model, people can identify unexpressed consumers’ needs with possible applications to all areas of marketing (from retail to multichannel advertising, from packaging to innovative design, etc.).

2) How do you think this particular technique can be associated to innovative design?
Surely, emotional research is a very important element of innovative design, both in the investigation phase and the resulting design. It’s very important to evaluate what are the consumer’s needs and requirements, above all the unconscious ones. This is because very often people can’t verbally give indications neither about their rating of a shape, nor its usability, nor their requirements because they themselves do not know them. It is design, and also Umania really works in this direction, that must investigate people’s latent needs and propose the most appropriate, accessible, simple and usable solutions, that are at the same time pleasing and captivating and able to satisfy also the purely emotional aspects related to aesthetics and taste.

3) Do you think it could be a good leverage in a period of crisis like the one we are living in? How?
Surely, periods of crisis, as past highlights, are the ones innovation somehow manages to make space in., because it is seen as a very important engine of change, which can help you face important structural processes which will lead to new balance in the markets and society. Emotional marketing and non-verbal research are proposing a paradigm shift which could finally help understand the consumers’ or users’ unexpressed emotional sphere, all researchers, experts in marketing, designers, etc, have been investigating for a long time in, without getting full and complete answers.

4) 2009 has been defined the European Year of Creativity and Innovation, do you feel somehow spokesman of this tension to research? Why?
Actually my team and I have been pursuing the path of innovation for several years.
The turning of the company, first conceptual, then operational took place in 2004, when studying the impact of emotions on behaviours became our first fundamental aim. To do this we invested much time in the search of measurement technologies and in the development of new study methods, using disciplines seemingly distant from the world of marketing, such neuroscience, design, artificial intelligence, cognitive ergonomics, and also rediscovering the contribution of other disciplines always highly integrated with it, such as psychology, cultural anthropology and semiotics.
1to 1 lab is hence a halfway identity between the world of pure research and the applied one, that responds to a strong need of new knowledge and above all of change and that found Umania as interlocutor which shares the idea of work as a constant applied research.