ColumnistsSep 14, 2026
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Peter Smith: Our Struggle With Emotional Selling
People aren’t thinking rationally when they are buying luxury products, and we shouldn’t be selling them that way, Peter Smith writes.
Peter Smith is an industry consultant, speaker, sales trainer, and author. He can be reached via email at TheRetailSmiths@gmail.com.
Just one day into our second trade show in two weeks, I had numerous reminders that despite being in the “love” business, many of my fellow industry practitioners struggle with the concept of consumers buying emotionally.
They’ll often agree with the general premise, but when it comes to practicing it, well, they say it’s just “not my customers or my products.”
Diamonds are, unsurprisingly, an obvious place to witness the disconnect, but that category has been so thoroughly covered of late that it seems almost unfair to use it as an example.
Listen to any industry podcast, check out the weekly harvest of articles and blogs, and you’ll find that most everyone (including yours truly) has expressed an opinion about diamonds in recent weeks and months.
In “The Creative Nudge: Simple Steps to Help You Think Differently,” Mick Mahoney and Kevin Chesters wrote: “Emotion is central to our ability to make decisions. That’s because the wiring to the brain at this point in our evolutionary history means that connections from the emotional systems are stronger than connections from the cognitive systems.”
We might think decisions to make purchases—especially purchases of expensive luxury products—would be rational, but the evidence from the behavioral sciences suggests otherwise.
They’ll often agree with the general premise, but when it comes to practicing it, well, they say it’s just “not my customers or my products.”
Diamonds are, unsurprisingly, an obvious place to witness the disconnect, but that category has been so thoroughly covered of late that it seems almost unfair to use it as an example.
Listen to any industry podcast, check out the weekly harvest of articles and blogs, and you’ll find that most everyone (including yours truly) has expressed an opinion about diamonds in recent weeks and months.
In “The Creative Nudge: Simple Steps to Help You Think Differently,” Mick Mahoney and Kevin Chesters wrote: “Emotion is central to our ability to make decisions. That’s because the wiring to the brain at this point in our evolutionary history means that connections from the emotional systems are stronger than connections from the cognitive systems.”
We might think decisions to make purchases—especially purchases of expensive luxury products—would be rational, but the evidence from the behavioral sciences suggests otherwise.
“Decisions in our primal brain happen long before we are aware of the mental processing. We feel it long before we can describe it.” - Peter Smith, The Retail Smiths
Logic and emotion are intertwined, but if logic was the dominant driver of our decisions, there’s a strong likelihood our ancestors would not have survived evolution.
Do you know anyone you might reasonably describe as an irrational optimist, that person who is so consistently and annoyingly optimistic that they remind you of a character in a Monty Python skit?
I’ve met the odd one here and there, but there aren’t that many of them because evolution was not kind to them.
While the rest of our ancestors ran for the caves, the irrational optimist whistled his favorite caveman tune as he approached the club-wielding stranger before receiving a fatal whack on the skull for his misplaced optimism.
The same thing would have happened to our ancestors if they had allowed themselves to be guided by rational thinking in that situation.
By the time we weighed all the available options it would’ve been too late; we’d have been peppered with condiments and removed from the gene pool.
In “The Influential Mind, What the Brain Reveals About Our Power to Change Others,” Tali Sharot wrote: “Humans are not wired to react dispassionately to information.
“Numbers and statistics are necessary and wonderful for uncovering the truth, but they’re not enough to change beliefs, and they are practically useless for motivating action.”
Up until about 25 years ago, it was believed that logic was the driving force behind our decision-making.
Nowadays, however, the evidence is indisputable that we are emotional decision makers.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that emotional and instinctive purchases would lead to more regrets, rather than the slow, methodical processing of evaluating every conceivable option and piece of information, but that’s not the case.
In “Emotional Intelligence Habits,” Travis Bradberry wrote: “When you make major decisions, your intuition can matter as much as your intellect.
“For example, in a study, car buyers who carefully analyzed all the available information were happy with their purchases about 25 percent of the time, while buyers who made quicker, more intuitive purchases were happy with their purchases about 60 percent of the time.”
Decisions in our primal brain happen long before we are aware of the mental processing. We feel it long before we can describe it.
Of course, if we’re asked why we bought something, we’ll quickly summon a justification for the purchase, to ourselves and others.
That back-end rationalization matters because the principle of agency is important to us from our earliest years.
We need to feel that we are always in control and completely aware of our choices and motivations, even if we’re not as in control as we’d like to think.
Sometimes, we’ll even fabricate a reason for having made a big purchase, because telling people we “just had a feeling” about a piece of jewelry or a watch we’ve just spent tens of thousands of dollars on is not something we’re comfortable admitting.
“I swear I bought that Breguet watch to tell time.”
Whether it concerns your marketing, your language, your imagery, your sales processes, your salespeople—all your customer touchpoints—ask yourself, are you appealing to the rational brain or to the emotional brain?
It’s not as though doing so demands a complete elimination of facts, data, and logic, but it’s difficult to influence buying behavior when you lead with rationalizations, whether you are selling diamonds, jewelry, or timepieces.
As Ogilvy Vice Chairman Rory Sutherland wrote in “Alchemy,” his 2021 book: “The human mind does not run on logic any more than a horse runs on petrol.”
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