---
author: "[[Bob Marshall]]"
tags:
  - blogpost
publish: 2026-09-05
sources:
  - https://flowchainsensei.wordpress.com/2026/09/15/emotioneering-revisited/
---
## Emotioneering Revisited

In April 2012 I stood up at the BCS with Chris Matts and made the case for Emotioneering to a room full of software people. The argument was simple enough. Neuroscience had established, beyond serious dispute, that people buy on emotional grounds and rationalise afterwards. Software development, meanwhile, was organised almost entirely around the rational: requirements, specifications, acceptance criteria, features. We were building things optimised for a decision-making process that human beings do not actually use.

The evidence I was leaning on most heavily at the time was Martin Lindstrom’s _Buyology_ (Lindstrom, 2008) — a three-year, seven-million-dollar neuromarketing study that used fMRI and EEG to look inside the brains of some two thousand volunteers from around the world as they encountered advertisements, logos, commercials, brands and products. Lindstrom’s interest was in the gap between what people say drives their purchasing and what their neural activity says drives it. The gap turned out to be enormous.

Fourteen years on, the argument has aged reasonably well. But I framed it too narrowly, and I want to put that right.

### The Bit I Under-stated

In 2012 I talked mostly about how a product _feels to use_. Delight, frustration, confidence, shame. That is real, and it matters, but it is the shallow end of the idea.

The deeper proposition is this: the emotional payload of a deliverable lives in its **content**. Not in its polish, not in its interaction design, not in the easing curve on its animations. In what it is actually _about_. In the life it depicts, and whether that life is one the customer would love to be living.

For which the clearest available example is not software at all. It is pop music.

### What Buyology Was Actually Telling Us

Re-reading Lindstrom now, I notice that the book was already making the content argument and I did not hear it properly. His study set out to examine logos, product placement, subliminal advertising, the influence of the senses, and the relationship between religion and branding.

Look at what his study kept finding. Product placement, on its own, largely fails — dropping a can of drink into a shot buys you very little unless the product is woven into the _story_ being told, in which case it can be remarkably potent. Sexualised advertising performs far worse than the industry assumes, because the imagery is remembered and the brand attached to it is not. Meanwhile the brands that generate the strongest neural responses do so in a way that has less in common with product evaluation than with the response to meaningful symbols and rituals — brands functioning as objects of belonging and identity rather than as bundles of attributes.

Every one of those findings points the same way. The emotional power is not in the stimulus. It is in the meaning the stimulus carries, and meaning requires content — a story, a world, an identity worth having.

Two honest caveats. Lindstrom’s underlying data has never really been opened up for academic scrutiny, and neuromarketing as a field remains thin on peer-reviewed validation that brain scans predict market behaviour. And the book was written to help marketers sell more, which is not what I am recommending anyone do with it. Read it as a description of the mechanism, not as a manual.

### Songwriters Are The Best Emotioneers Alive

Consider what a hit song actually does for its listener.

It is not, mostly, describing the listener’s life. Nobody’s Tuesday resembles the summer in a song. The lyric is a portrait of a life the listener would like to be living, rendered with enough specificity that they can step into it for three and a half minutes and wear it. The open road and the town in the rear-view mirror. The night that does not have to end. The small rural idyll with the porch and the dog and nothing urgent. The unbothered self-possession of somebody who has stopped caring what the room thinks. The abundance of having finally arrived, after everyone said you wouldn’t.

These are not descriptions. They are aspirations, and the song is the vehicle by which the listener temporarily occupies one.

Three things about the craft are worth stealing.

**It is specific.** The aspirational life is never sketched in abstractions. It arrives as concrete particulars — a make of car, a time of night, a name, a street, a brand of drink. Abstractions cannot be inhabited. Details can. The listener needs somewhere to stand.

**It is about the listener, not the singer.** The writer’s job is not self-expression; it is the construction of a space large enough for a stranger to move into. The best writers leave deliberate gaps for the listener to fill with their own particulars.

**The hook carries the aspiration, not just the melody.** A chorus earns its repetition because it is the moment the desired life is stated most plainly. The tune makes it memorable. The content makes it _wanted_.

Songwriters do this consciously and systematically. They are running a rigorous, measurable discipline of emotional engineering, and they have been doing it for a century while our industry congratulated itself on gathering requirements.

### So What Is Your Deliverable About?

Here is the question I should have been asking in 2012, and now do.

Every deliverable depicts a life. It cannot help it. The question is only whether anyone chose which one.

Most enterprise software depicts a life of reconciling discrepancies. Of chasing approvals. Of re-entering data that the system already holds because two departments could not agree on a schema. Of being audited. Nobody designed that life. It is a residue — the accidental by-product of a feature list assembled from stakeholder demands, with no one ever asking what existence the sum of those features would compose for the person living inside it eight hours a day.

Worse, where an aspiration _has_ been deliberately embodied, it is frequently the buyer’s rather than the user’s. Enterprise procurement software often embodies a genuine, coherent aspiration: total visibility, absolute control, no unpleasant surprises at quarter end. That is somebody’s dream life. It simply is not the dream life of the person made to use it. Whose aspirations are inscribed in your deliverable is a political question long before it is a design question.

Turn it round and it becomes a usable brief. What life does this thing invite the user into? Would they choose it? Would they play it again on the drive home?

### I Was Right, And I Rather Wish I Had Not Been

The uncomfortable part. Emotional engineering has won comprehensively — and almost none of it is doing what I had in mind.

The infinite scroll is emotioneering. The streak counter, the notification badge, the variable-ratio reward, the manufactured scarcity, the outrage amplification that keeps a feed sticky. Executed with a sophistication I could not have imagined in 2012. The industry did not ignore the argument. It absorbed the argument and pointed it at the wrong target.

But notice _how_ it is wrong, in the terms above. These techniques all work on the mechanism and abandon the content entirely. They are hooks with no song. A slot machine is emotionally engineered to an extraordinarily high standard and depicts no life whatsoever — it simply exploits the reward circuitry directly, with nothing aspirational anywhere in it. That is the distinction I lacked the vocabulary for fourteen years ago. Compulsion engineering bypasses aspiration. Emotioneering, properly understood, is entirely made of it.

### Which Aspirations, Though

A fair challenge: pop music can do this badly too. An entire industry exists to depict lives that are unattainable by construction, precisely so that the gap between the listener and the depicted life can be monetised. Advertising is largely this. Aspiration engineered to manufacture inadequacy is not a gift; it is a wound with a payment plan attached.

This is where the Antimatter Principle does the work my 2012 formulation could not. Attend to folks’ needs. Not their preferences, not their engagement metrics, not their revealed willingness to keep tapping.

The test is straightforward enough. Does the depicted life answer a real need the person has — for belonging, for autonomy, for competence, for rest, for mattering to somebody? Or does it install a want they did not previously have, which your product then sells back to them at a rate you control? Same craft. Opposite nature.

So if I were introducing Emotioneering today, I would not introduce it first. I would establish the Antimatter Principle thoroughly, and only then hand anybody the tools.

### Why Nobody Adopted It

The obvious question about an idea from 2012 that did not take hold is whether it was simply wrong. In this case the Marshall Model gives a better account.

Emotioneering requires an organisation capable of holding a serious, non-embarrassed conversation about feelings. In an Analytic-minded organisation that conversation is literally unavailable. Feelings are not part of the domain of discourse — soft, fluffy, unmeasurable, handled by HR at the annual survey and otherwise left alone. You cannot put an aspiration in a ticket. The tooling has no field for it, and neither does the mindset.

There is a second barrier, which the pop music framing exposes. Such organisations do not experience their deliverable as having content at all. It is a system. Systems have behaviours, not meanings. Asking what life a payroll platform depicts sounds, to that mindset, like a category error rather than a design question.

What I was really proposing, then, was a technique that only a Synergistic or Chaordic organisation could perceive as coherent. The failure of adoption was not a refutation of the idea. It was a fairly precise confirmation of the model that predicts such failures.

How many good ideas have you watched die in your own organisation, not because they were wrong, but because the prevailing mindset had nowhere to put them?

### Writing The Spec Like A Songwriter

The practical shape of this, if you want to try it.

Begin with the life, not the feature list. Write it down as prose, in the second person, in concrete particulars: a morning in the life of this person once the thing exists. What they are doing, what they are not doing any more, what they can say about themselves that they could not say before. That document is the specification. Everything else is derived.

Name the chorus. If the whole aspiration had to be stated in one line, what is the line? If you cannot write it, you do not yet have a product; you have a backlog.

Then make every feature audition. A feature earns its place by demonstrably contributing to the depicted life. Most will not, and the exercise becomes an unusually effective way of deleting things.

And measure the response, not the usage. Usage tells you a thing is habit-forming. It does not tell you whether anybody is living better.

I will add that going through this exercise honestly quite often reveals that software is a poor vehicle for the aspiration in question. A returned phone call, a person who listens, a process that does not humiliate the person subject to it — these reliably compose a better life than any amount of interface. #NoSoftware and Emotioneering arrive at the same place from opposite directions. Naming the life you intend has a way of exposing the software as an expensive detour.

### The Amendment

One more change to the original material: the life depicted for the people _building_ the thing belongs in the specification too.

In 2012 I framed all of this outward — the customer, the market, the buyer. Too narrow. The Needsscape includes everyone whose needs the work touches, which emphatically includes the developers, the testers, the support staff, the people who will maintain this for a decade. An organisation that composes a beautiful life for its customers whilst composing a squalid one for its own people has not understood the idea. It has merely industrialised it.

And the life inside the building always shows up in the built thing. Covalence is not a separate concern from Emotioneering; it is the same concern, observed from inside.

So: what life does your current work depict for the people doing it? And would you write that down in the specification, next to the one you intend for your customers?

### Further Reading

Damasio, A. R. (1994). _Descartes’ error: Emotion, reason, and the human brain_. Putnam.

> The neurological case that emotion is not an impediment to good decision-making but a precondition of it. Patients with damage to the emotional centres do not become coolly rational; they become unable to decide anything at all.

Eyal, N. (2014). _Hooked: How to build habit-forming products_. Portfolio.

> Read this one adversarially. It is the clearest available manual for the compulsion engineering I describe above, and it will teach you to recognise what is being done to you.

Kahneman, D. (2011). _Thinking, fast and slow_. Allen Lane.

> The standard account of why the rational deliberation our requirements documents assume is the exception rather than the rule.

Lindstrom, M. (2008). _Buyology: Truth and lies about why we buy_. Doubleday.

> The neuromarketing study discussed above. Compelling, commercially motivated, and never properly opened up to academic scrutiny. Worth your time, but not your trust.

Marshall, R. W. (2018). _Hearts over diamonds: Serving business and society through organisational psychotherapy_. Falling Blossoms. [https://leanpub.com/heartsoverdiamonds](https://leanpub.com/heartsoverdiamonds)

Marshall, R. W. (2021). _Memeology: Surfacing and reflecting on the organisation’s collective assumptions and beliefs_. Falling Blossoms. [https://leanpub.com/memeology](https://leanpub.com/memeology)

> Relevant here because the belief that a deliverable has no emotional content is precisely the kind of unexamined collective assumption that determines what an organisation can and cannot build.

Marshall, R. W. (2022). _Quintessence: An acme for highly effective software development organisations_. Falling Blossoms. [https://leanpub.com/quintessence](https://leanpub.com/quintessence)

Norman, D. A. (2004). _Emotional design: Why we love (or hate) everyday things_. Basic Books.

> The nearest thing to a canonical treatment of emotion in design, and a useful contrast with the argument above: Norman is largely concerned with how a thing feels to use, which is the layer I now think of as the shallow end.

Pattison, P. (1995). _Writing better lyrics_. Writer’s Digest Books.

> The Berklee lyric-writing course in book form. Pattison on specificity, sense-writing and the use of concrete detail is more directly applicable to specification work than most books on specification.

Rosenberg, M. B. (2015). _Nonviolent communication: A language of life_ (3rd ed.). PuddleDancer Press.

> The needs-based foundation on which the Antimatter Principle rests, and the corrective to aspiration engineered in service of the seller rather than the served.

Webb, J. (1998). _Tunesmith: Inside the art of songwriting_. Hyperion.

> A working songwriter on why the craft is craft, and not the mystery the industry finds it convenient to pretend.

Actionable Insights

Antimatter principle

Article

Business

Emotioneering

Software development