I Choose You: How Emotions Regulation Influence Our Decision Making

Almost everyone would accept that emotion has an important role to play in marketing, but what isn't appreciated is just how significant it is in driving both engagement and decision making.

Today's consumers are bombarded with a vast amount of marketing comms and unsurprisingly, only a minuscule amount of that gets through. On average, we're exposed to 5,000+ brand messages every day, but we're aware of about 86 with only 12 making a lasting impression. So the percentage we engage with is tiny and the percentage that has any effect on us is even smaller, yet marketers expect a huge amount of cognitive reflection to be applied to consuming their brand messages. This just isn't realistic.

There's a limit to how many messages we can give our attention to because attention is a limited resource; we don't have enough neural capacity to pay attention to all that surrounds us, so as the number of media channels and marketing output increases, so does competition over neural capacity for processing. This means that'always on' methods of increasing quantity and frequency of communications could be viewed as simply contributing to the problem by pushing out more 'stuff'.

One thing that may affect our decision making is emotions, and emotions are something we can regulate, this is referred to as emotion regulation. This book aims to investigate to what extent the use of emotion regulation strategies can influence our decision making, and how this process plays out at the neural level.