It turns out that quitting a job is a lot like buying vitamins. Obviously, one is much more significant in life than the other, but the underlying motivations are similar: Both are activities for which people say they want to take control and get exactly what they’re looking for, driven by a desire for autonomy and choice.

In our research, we seek to identify patterns of emotional and social needs for both people and industries. For example, in interviews with consumers over the years, we have heard people say they are driven by the desire to be better parents when explaining actions as diverse as buying organic groceries, planning a family vacation, or putting in overtime at work.

Leveraging emotional patterns to drive business success — Honeycomb approach

Emotional patterns also have huge implications for business. Companies that understand how people feel — and how they want to feel — are better at creating products, services, and businesses that truly resonate, whether their goal is to improve current offerings or make a leap into a new industry. This deeper level of customer knowledge can help companies create breakthrough business insights that provide a major advantage over competitors.

We recently wondered: What if we could systematically map common emotional themes so that we could understand which types of life decisions, events, and activities have similar motivations? The map wouldn’t tell us exactly where any one company should innovate, but it would save time in the upfront research process and potentially spotlight avenues that aren’t immediately obvious.

Over time we refined the idea into a series of data-based visual representations of everyday activities we call the Honeycomb. The activities are displayed as cells that connect to form lattices of common emotions that people want to feel when they do something.

To build the Honeycomb, we surveyed 32,000 people across the US and UK over the course of more than a year about the last time they engaged in specific actions — including tasks that were common and uncommon, consumption-focused and not — such as using an ATM, buying groceries, and getting married. We asked them to choose from a series of descriptions about what they were most trying to accomplish (for example, getting it done as quickly and efficiently as possible, connecting with other people, or getting exactly the thing they wanted).

By linking these individual answers with several underlying fundamental needs, we were able to create a fingerprint of 300 different activities, understanding at a population level the relative strength of each motivation. The aerial view helped us identify emotional similarities between different activities. 

The effects of motivation on employee satisfaction

Taking this approach can help businesses tailor products and services to better meet customers’ needs. 

For example, one of the 300 activities in our study was the task of “shopping for or changing a life insurance policy.” The top three motivations respondents cited for this activity were safety (“protecting my loved ones from risk”), learning (“learning about life insurance and the different options I have”), and making a positive difference (“ensuring that I won’t be a burden on the world after I’m gone”). People also strongly wanted to feel peace of mind, maximize efficiency, and get the best product they possibly could. 

From this fingerprint, the mundane task of buying life insurance emerges as an activity that provides a great deal of satisfaction when it is accomplished — but also one that requires an unusual amount of research, potentially leading to anxiety. Equipped with this knowledge, insurance companies could help potential customers by providing more useful and accessible information on policies, as well as look into other ways to simplify the purchasing process to reduce customer frustration. 

How emotional experiences can influence business strategy

While the picture of an individual activity can be telling, the Honeycomb is more powerful when it shows the connection between seemingly unrelated ones. For companies, discovering these relationships might suggest changes in strategy or even hint at new lines of business worth pursuing. To expose the connections, we used a statistical clustering technique to group similar fingerprints together, arriving at distinct groups of activities that are motivated by similar kinds of desired emotions.

From this we know for instance, that shopping for life insurance is not only closely related to shopping for other types of insurance (travel, accident, and long-term care) but also activities like marketing one’s freelance business and talking to a credit counselor for help with debt issues. These activities are linked by a desire to get the best outcome possible and to feel a sense of peace or safety.

Notably, none of these activities is fun or joyful in and of itself. Instead, these are part of a cluster we call “planning” activities — things like preparing for a trip rather than actually traveling or saving money instead of spending it.

Some companies we advised have used this insight to think about how they can leverage their “planning” strengths rather than trying to be too fun or novel. Others have identified a need for further research on how they could educate their customers or tap into the feeling of accomplishment or satisfaction to get customers to move past the initial inertia phase and purchase a product.

How the Honeycomb can inspire new innovations

Regardless of where a company’s next steps lead the Honeycomb can provide a head start on corroborating or challenging existing assumptions. When, say, a financial services provider discovers that investing in cryptocurrency and moving to a new country are in the same cluster (known as “getting what I want,” which involves autonomy and choice as well as elements of fun and novelty), it raises questions that can reveal surprising insights about customers’ mindsets and suggest new areas of focus. Does investing make customers nervous, or do they find it exhilarating? What kind of orienting guide would help them?

Similarly, hospital systems and healthcare providers might take inspiration from the fact that finding a new doctor belongs to the same cluster as applying for a mortgage. The commonality in this cluster is the desire to know that one has chosen the best option possible, along with a desire to take care of a task efficiently. Both these activities share motivations with changing internet providers, selecting a utility company, tracking credit, and invoicing freelance work. What can these industries learn from how others help consumers evaluate their options quickly? And how do they assure those consumers that they have made the right choice?

The answers to these kinds of queries can orient your business in directions you never would have considered otherwise, opening up vast possibilities for innovation, whether you’re selling crypto, life insurance, or a bottle of vitamins.