Zappos CEO to Start New Company to Teach Happiness Principles

Tony Hsieh. From Fast Company.

Today Fast Company reports that Tony Hsieh, billionaire CEO of Zappos, plans to start a new company based on the principles in his book Delivering Happiness. The new start-up, also called Delivering Happiness, will advise businesses on value-based management and design a line of "motivational apparel." Hsieh (pronounced "Shay") says that his company’s root principles are to inspire, connect, educate, and experience. He suggests that companies adhere to their principles, even when they impact the bottom line.

In the future, Hsieh also wants to expand beyond helping businesses. He and his business partner Jenn Lim hope to publish educational literature for college students and provide "experience packages"--which include things like helicopter pilot lessons and foreign trips. Whether these packages will help longterm happiness or just create short-term pleasure is anyone's guess, but Zappos has an incredibly low employee turnover rate, even in its call center, so Hsieh probably knows what he's doing.

(You can read about Tony Hsieh at the Global Happiness Summit here, or see a video of a speech he made to Google here.)

Marketers Teach Happiness to Sell Products

One of the most well-known campaigns to sell "happiness."
From 2010 and High Heels.

Today I read this interesting Fast Company article about a consultant who specializes in teaching corporations how to market happiness. Her name is Jennifer Aaker, and she teaches a Stanford graduate marketing class entitled "Designing Happiness". She also consults with AOL, Facebook, Adobe, and other corporations.

According to Aaker, "The idea of brands enabling happiness and providing greater meaning in the world is powerful. People have an aversion to anything that feels overly manufactured." The article also mentions John Kenny of the ad agency DraftFCB saying that nostalgia and other "safe emotions" can create happiness in an ad campaign, making happiness into a commodity used to sell products.

Students in Aaker's class create a photo project by taking pictures of happy moments for a month, then rating those moments on a scale of one to ten, thereby allowing themselves to discover moments that they didn't realize could make them happy. They apply the happiness principals they learn to a fictional company.

How do YOU feel about this corporatized streak in happiness research? We've seen before that when corporations take employee happiness seriously, they increase productivity and stock price, so everyone benefits. Happiness classes can also be a great experience for students, and Jennifer Aaker sounds like a great teacher.

HOWEVER, I sort of feel like using those principles to sell products steps over the line into creepiness. Does Coca Cola actually make people happy? No, it doesn't--at least in the longterm, after the sugar and caffeine leave your system. Coke is flavored high fructose corn syrup that will harm your body and actually ruin your smile if you drink too much, so why pretend that it causes happiness? It's the same thing with these other companies. I'm sure marketers love creating emotional links in consumers, but in the real world their products invite no emotion whatsoever. Now they seem to be explicitly using happiness as just another cynical tool used to manipulate consumers instead of a worthy goal in itself.

Maybe people will know the difference between the short-term pleasure that comes from a newly-bought item and the longterm happiness that comes from meaningful social connection and personal action. Hopefully?

Cambridge Using Cellphones to Track Happiness

From Fast Company.

Here's some more tech news:  Cambridge University is studying happiness through cellphones. They're using a special technology called Emotionsense in modified Nokia phones to track people's daily activities. The technology compares user voice samples with those in a database called the "Emotional Prosody Speech and Transcripts Library," which gives the researchers data on the volunteers' moment-by-moment happiness. The phones also correlate the mood data with GPS data, to find out where people are the happiest.

This all sounds like a rather mechanical way to measure human emotion, but it actually represents an advancement. Previously, researchers would have to interrupt test subjects to get them to note their internal state of being. These interruptions could affect the data, but Emotionsense gets results without interruptions.

Dr. Cecilia Mascolo, leader of the research, has this to say:

"What we are trying to produce is a completely non-intrusive means of achieving that which also respects privacy. In time, it could have an enormous impact on the way in which we study human behaviour and give psychologists a deeper insight into what it is that makes different types of people tick."

For now, the actual results of the study aren't surprising:  test subjects were happiest at home, and more tense or sad at work. Hopefully the study will produce more interesting results if it continues, but the real story is the technology.

What do YOU think of this stuff? Is Emotionsense too much of an invasion of privacy? It's only been used on volunteers so far, but as they say, the genie can't go back in the bottle, and it's easy to imagine advertisers or other undesirables abusing the technology.