The Right Brain Way: Drive Your Brand with the Power of Emotion

By Charles T. Kenny

Dr. Kenny's Revolutionary New Book reveals the Inside Secrets of Right Brain Research...

Get Inside the Mind of Your Target Audience. Learn how to access and leverage the critical emotional needs that cause consumers to choose one brand over another, access that traditional research cannot reveal.

Emotional needs drive behavior. The Right Brain Way takes this powerful concept and details a proven methodology for uncovering the needs that motivate people to buy a product or a brand. Whether your objective is to increase market share or to gain a better understanding of your customers, The Right Brain Way reveals the intrinsic links between consumers' emotions and their wallets.

The Right Brain Way is a must read for organizational leaders, business owners and top executives. This landmark book opens the vault on 51 years of Right Brain Research, bringing to light detailed proprietary insights previously available only to clients. The Right Brain Way will help you understand the power of emotion and how to access and leverage the key motivational drivers you need to differentiate your brand, establish the right strategy, optimize your messaging and gain a clear competitive advantage.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Oct 5, 2009
• ISBN: 9781425130435

Charles T. Kenny

Dr. Kenny holds a BA from the University of Notre Dame and a Ph.D. in Psychology from Clark University. Dr. Charles T. Kenny saw the application of his academic expertise to the commercial world early on. He founded the strategic market research firm, The Right Brain People(R) in 1972. Now, his client list is a veritable Who's Who of major companies, including 22 of the top 40 advertisers on the Advertising Age list. Today he is recognized as one of the top consumer psychologists in the world. Using two proprietary methods Right Brain Interviewing and Brand Strategy Workshops that discover the ideal positioning of the client's brand; Dr. Kenny has worked with more than 450 corporate clients and organizations in 225 product and service categories. He lives in Memphis, Tennessee, with his wife Heather. They have two daughters and five grandchildren. Learn more about Dr. Kenny, his work and his company at: http://www.rightbrainpeople.com 901-237-7048 [e-mail]

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Copyright 2009 Charles T. Kenny, Ph.D.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

Cover Design by John Lambert

ISBN:

978-1-4251-3041-1 (sc)

ISBN:

978-1-4251-3042-8 (hc)

ISBN:

978-1-4251-3043-5 (e)

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Trafford rev. 08/11/2016

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Table of Contents

Foreword

Chapter 1 Why Questions

Chapter 2 What Is A Brand After All?

Chapter 3 Positioning

Chapter 4 The Arkansas Test: Ozark Mountain Wisdom

Chapter 5 Right Brain and Left Brain

Chapter 6 How Right Brain Research Works

Chapter 7 How the Subconscious Mind Works

Chapter 8 Visualization: The Royal Road to Human Emotions

Chapter 9 Listening: The Suspension of Belief

Chapter 10 What Respondents Say:The First Step of Analysis

Chapter 11 The Right Brain Taxonomy

Chapter 12 Right Brain Research Has Universal Validity

Chapter 13 Qualitative vs. Quantitative

Chapter 14 Positioning Silver Dollar City

Chapter 15 The Saturn Story

Chapter 16 Into the Wild Blue Yonder… the FAA and STARS

Chapter 17 Right Brain Strategy Development

Chapter 18 The Right Brain Approach Gets Results

Conclusion

Appendix A Planning a Research Project

Appendix B Why Small Samples Work So Well!

Appendix C How Right Brain Research Addresses the Challenges of Qualitative Research

Praise For The Right Brain Way

Victor E. Zast, President, Private Perfumery

In the competition for the consumer’s attention, restricting yourself to conventional marketing research is like entering into a fight with one-half of your brain tied behind your back.

Jim Belasco, Ph.D., Business Leadership Strategist and Best-Selling Author

"The Right Brain Way is the key to finding the magic inside the minds of your customers. It will forever change the way you sell your brand. Dr. Charles Kenny’s Right Brain Research can show you what business you’re really in and exactly why your customers know more about it than you do. The Right Brain Way is a strategic road map to buried treasure. Read it and discover yours…inside the minds of your customers."

Peter Herschend, Co-Founder & Co-Owner, Herschend Family Entertainment

Without a good sense of what your customer believes, knows and dreams about your business, you don’t stand much of a chance of walking through the door" that will match who you are to those same beliefs, knowledge or dreams. Charles Kenny and Right Brain offer all of us a way to step through that door and into the minds of those wonderful people we call customers."

Don Schultz, Professor Emeritus of Integrated Marketing Communication, Northwestern University

"The Right Brain Way illustrates how to REALLY gather customer feelings and beliefs so you can understand and make the most of them. Many promise a ‘how to’ way to generate customer insights. The Right Brain Way delivers."

John Meyers, Director, Business Analysis & Information, Amgen

Read this book and discover how to create a winning product platform by removing the bias associated with traditional market research.

Tom Marnell, President, MDM, Marketing Consultant and Database Architect

"If you are a CEO today, your ignorance is killing you. The ineffectiveness of traditional research to give you what you really need to set strategic direction should either be driving you crazy or scaring you to death. Knowing your current customers and your next customers intimately is the only path to a sustainable strategic advantage in today’s hyper-competitive marketplace. Dr. Kenny and The Right Brain Way can put you on that path."

Jim Neidorf, President, Neidorf Concepts, LLC

In the race to capture customer loyalty and market share, Right Brain Research is the key to the ignition. Without it, you just get into your vehicle, grab the steering wheel, make loud noises and pretend you’re winning, but you’re not really going anywhere. My advice: Read this book and turn the Right Brain Key before your competition does.

Michael J. Nussbaum, President, Warehouse Connection

Salespeople would do themselves a great service to read this book and learn that there is so much more to sales than personality. The Right Brain Way can take an average salesperson and show him why he’s average. If he would incorporate The Right Brain Way of selling, he could then focus on doing what he needs to do and be vastly more successful.

Ken Kring, Senior Manager of Strategy, at a Major Retailer

"Anyone who is in business or interested in business should read this book. Right Brain Research will help you get at market and consumer behavioral truths that you cannot get at in any other way. We choose The Right Brain Approach because it is the only way we know of to get at the information we need. If you are a CEO, I strongly encourage you to read The Right Brain Way before you spend any additional resources on product development, research, marketing or advertising. If you don’t do this you risk allocating company resources in a sub-optimal and wasteful way. Why put your resources at risk when it’s not necessary?"

Heidi Wanaski, Marketing Director, Humira, Abbott Laboratories

I will never work on a new product introduction without having Right Brain at my side. We had more than a million dollars in the budget for marketing research. Most of it was wasted. We should have allocated a lot more of the budget for Right Brain.

Thomas M. Wittenschlaeger, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Raptor Networks Technology, Inc.

I am outspoken in crediting a great many competitive wins and accompanying career successes to the depth of knowledge and radically different frame of reference we were able to acquire through Right Brain Research. People wonder, to this day, HOW my team won virtually every new business competition we pursued. Our team’s competitive tenacity, depth of competitive analysis and preparation, and the ‘secret weapon’ of Right Brain Research’s insights into the emotion-centric manner in which even the most senior executives make acquisition decisions proved to be a potent and winning combination. On every occasion where I called upon Dr. Kenny and the Right Brain People, we T-Boned the competition! They never saw it coming…Ironically, they ascribed their losses — my wins — to ‘luck!’

Dedication

In recognition and love for two of the best grandparents ever:

Mary Kalt Kenny & Frank Matonis

Whose love and devotion made it possible for their

descendants to become who they are.

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And in recognition and love for the best

parents a man could ask for:

Anna C. Matonis Kenny & Charles T. Kenny, Sr.

Who inspired me in ways that I cannot even articulate!

Acknowledgements

I have been blessed with a wonderful group of friends whom I have come to call my Literary Circle. These people gave their time generously to read the initial drafts and gave me detailed feedback. This experience was one of the very best parts of writing this book, because I was touched by the care and interest shown by each and every one of the people in the Circle. They include:

Of course the responsibility for the final content is mine, but the book is immeasurably better because of the contributions of the Literary Circle. I have also been blessed with a wonderful team of editors, all of whom have made substantive contributions to the book:

I would like to acknowledge and thank the following people who have made substantive contributions to the success of Right Brain projects over the past 36 years:

I want to thank my support staff, the people whose work allows me to do two or three things at a time. Thanks to all for their dedication, their help and their advice. This book would never have been born without their contributions:

And thanks to Randy Jelinek for all of his great work directing the production and marketing of the book. Finally, I wish to send a note of special thanks to Tom Wittenschlaeger for his wonderful Foreword.

To all who read this book, I hope that you find the key to your own success in The Right Brain Way.

Charlie.Signature

Charles T. Kenny, Ph.D.

April, 2008

Foreword: An Epiphany

Thomas M. Wittenschlaeger, Chairman and CEO,

Raptor Networks Technology, Inc.

Of all the positions that I’ve been privileged to serve in over the years, the most intellectually challenging, and the most fun, came from my time at the Hughes Aircraft Company — the technological gem founded by Howard Hughes to support his passion for racing aircraft. Howard Hughes founded the Hughes Aircraft Company in the early 1930s. He assembled the finest engineers in the world, because he wanted to build the fastest airplanes in the world. Standards that we take for granted today in aviation, such as flush rivets, fully enclosed cockpits and retractable landing gear, were all invented at the Hughes Aircraft Company to accomplish Howard’s goals. It comes as no surprise, then, that Howard Hughes held the transcontinental speed record for more than 12 years.

Hughes was structured as a non-profit company, owned by the Howard Hughes Medical Foundation. After providing the medical foundation several hundred million dollars a year to advance the state of the art in medicine, Hughes Aircraft Company invested its residual earnings in technology and people. They had the best of both.

When entering corporate headquarters for the first time, visitors walked into a cavernous foyer in which massive satellites were suspended from the three story high ceiling, evoking a visceral response, indicating that their time at Hughes would be different from any other. The place was dripping with technology. Everywhere you looked, you could see the latest lasers, torpedoes, missiles, spacecraft and sensors. And the people — they were different too. Hughes had compiled more raw brain power than any of its competitors. They were brilliant, they were iconoclastic and they could think outside the box. Like Howard, they were rebels.

When I was promoted to Director of the corporate market research function at Hughes, I came across Right Brain Research. Unlike most market research professionals, I had come from the line organizations, where I had started in systems engineering and later ran the business development teams of some of Hughes’ most successful divisions. Also, unlike most marketing, advertising and sales professionals, I was an electrical and nuclear engineer and former submarine officer, who was dragged kicking and screaming into a marketing role — a role I viewed as perfectly incongruent with my personal strengths. My mentor at that time was Toby Warson, who later became President of Honeywell. He used to quip, Marketing is easy to do — it’s just hard to do well. At Hughes Aircraft, I was assigned to the market research role to help less winning divisions figure out how to capture more new business. I had little time or patience for effusive branding experts and squishy advertising agencies.

When I met Charlie, I knew he was different — very, very different. There were no flashy, shiny brochures or cutesy videos to sell his approach. Dr. Kenny exuded the understated scholarly confidence and rumpled demeanor of a deep thinker. He and I got along immediately. It helped that my alma mater, the United States Naval Academy, and his alma mater, Notre Dame, were sister schools. But, it helped even more that I felt he was introducing me to something very special, almost revolutionary.

The first challenge we worked on together took us to the absolute edge of technological innovation: The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) or Star Wars Project, as it had been called under President Ronald Reagan. Hughes was a natural to win research and development projects in this vital national initiative, because of its technology leadership in optical and non-optical sensors as well as in weapons control and large-scale systems architectures. What we observed in practice, alarmingly, was quite different. Hughes was winning far less business than it should have, considering its inventive prowess. We needed a rigorous diagnostic assessment of why we were falling short in the eyes of the customer, and we needed it quickly.

I had been looking for a different way