Abstract:

Emotion plays a part in everything consumers do. But in B2B, it has played an increasingly more important role over the past decade – more than most marketers, researchers, and brand managers are willing to admit or measure. Some of their reluctance to acknowledge emotion in the B2B space is due to the fact that measures and metrics of emotional engagement have not received the kind of attention "softer" measures like "sharing" or "tweets" have, as well as due to the inability of newer "emotional" forays to provide category-specific emotional metrics that are generalizable at high degrees of confidence. Additionally, this is the first time that social networking/mobile research has been used in the B2B space so comprehensively.