It’s no big secret human beings use their emotions to make purchasing decisions more than they do their logic. In fact, ISPO News ran a January 2015 report in which it was revealed that 90 percent of the time, humans are making their purchasing decisions via the subconscious mind.

“A major part of our brain is busy with automatic processes, not conscious thinking. A lot of emotions and less cognitive activities happen,” said behavioral economist George Loewenstein, adding that brains run on “autopilot, despite making us believe we know what we are doing.”

ISPO continued: “[Ninety] percent of all purchasing decisions are not made consciously … brands and products that evoke our emotions, like Apple, Coca-Cola or Nivea, always win.”

That’s all well-and-good, but it doesn’t answer the question teased in the headline of this post. What is the No. 1 Buying Emotion? To answer that, perhaps we should look at some of the appeals to emotions that brands often make.

Professional public speaker George Torok identifies five of the most powerful:

• Love
• Pride
• Guilt
• Fear
• Greed

We buy or rent the types of movies/books/music/clothes/[insert any product here] that we love. What do we love about them? Perhaps we connect to a character or we love how we look in a shirt because it is slimming and makes us feel good about ourselves.

We buy the latest iPhone because we take pride in the unspoken boastfulness of being a little ahead of everyone else. We buy the kids new school clothes every year, in part because they may have outgrown last year’s batch, but also because we would feel guilty if they were walking around in last year’s fashion while all their friends are sporting the latest and greatest.

We buy gold because we’re fearful of the diminishing value of the dollar. We buy out the grocery store before an impending ice storm, in part because we want to be prepared, but also because we’re greedy and want to make sure that we have more than enough, no matter what.

Don’t feel badly if any of this sounds like you. Everyone uses their emotions to make buying decisions, but at the heart of it all, is a single buying emotion: yearning.

Your job as a marketer is to find what your customers are yearning for in both the short and long terms.

Let’s think for a moment in terms of programming. You run a teaching business, where you specialize in helping entrepreneurs grow their brands.

At the beginning, you may post a free course detailing the basics — everything they need to know from a bird’s eye view.

But inevitably, there will be information you cannot possibly convey until the student achieves a certain level of mastery over the fundamentals.

By tapping into that yearning emotion, you can develop new products and services that satiate at the time in the student’s development where it will make the most positive impact.

Underneath the yearning, you will find motivators like the ones bulleted above; but before you get to those, you need to address the elephant in the room — that sensation from your customers that something is missing in their lives. Learn to recognize it, and you will be the one their go-to.