Article

How to use neuroscience to create great customer experiences

When is one piece of candy better than two? And what does that teach us about how customers react to retail?

July 15, 2014

By Daryl Travis, author of "How Does It Make You Feel?: Why Emotion Wins the Battle of Brands" and CEO of Brandtrust

The famous economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, once said that an ordinary person wheeling a shopping cart through the aisles of a supermarket is in touch with her deepest emotions.

The next time you go to a supermarket to do your regular shopping you can test the theory with simple observation. Watch people get lost to the world as they slowly fill their baskets. Their minds are in a whirl doing a million conscious and unconscious calculations per second. It’s easy to imagine this because you do it, too. That little voice in your head that never shuts up goes a mile a minute as buying decisions based on old stories and new curiosities are made in consultation with the logical and emotional centers of your brain. It is a totally absorbing, totally human process. And in the end, after all the subliminal cogitation is said and done, it simply has to do with the way you feel about the products arrayed before you and the experience you’re having in the moment.

Some of the moments embedded in a retail experience are more emotional, and thus more critical, than others, but many companies overlook this obvious fact. Getting caught up in monitoring every possible touch point, companies create needless complexity that leaves them data rich and insight poor. Big data can be invaluable but not until it reveals big insights. This distraction causes companies to lose focus and neglect to optimize the moments that matter most. Many companies simply fail to grasp that customers don’t always think or behave logically and that good or bad customer experience is determined by emotions that data alone does not reveal.

For example, give two groups of kids a great chocolate candy bar and they will be happy. Then give only one of the groups an inexpensive piece of hard candy. Logically, we think the kids who get two pieces of candy will naturally be happier—they have more candy! Right? But, no they aren’t. Actually, when scientists conduct this very experiment, the kids that receive two pieces of candy are less satisfied.

Nobel laureate and father of behavioral economics, Daniel Kahneman, described this phenomenon as the Peak-End Rule, explaining how experiences are judged almost entirely on the intensity of emotions at their peak moments, coupled with the end point or resolution of the experience. So a positive experience—the chocolate candy bar—is diminished and turns negative when a cheap piece of hard candy follows it and is the last touch point in the experience. Virtually every other aspect of the experience appears to be forgotten, including the overall pleasantness or unpleasantness and of the entire customer experience.

Another example: A trip to the grocery involves countless touch points for a customer. These include emotional rewards ranging from finding a new product that provides healthy meal solutions for hard-to-please kids, the satisfaction of checking everything off the list and completing the shopping task, to frustrations about out-of-stock items, confusing store layout and difficulty returning a shopping cart to the queue.

The customer will take the whole experience in stride and think nothing of it since she is accustomed to the overall irritations of grocery shopping. But the emotional side of her mind will not forget even subtle disappointments and evoke the feeling that she should go to a different grocery store without ever thinking of it consciously.

The touch points with the most positive or negative emotional intensity and the end or resolution of these specific peak moments have a disproportionate influence on the customer’s overall experience. This is very good news for retailers who are willing to take the time to identify and enhance the peak moments along their customer’s journey. Those retailers who identify their customer’s peak moments can stop wasting time and energy on things that don’t matter nearly as much. They can intensely focus on improving and optimizing the critical Peak-End moments that mean the most to how the customer feels about your store and your brand.

Much of what actually creates a successful brand is the ability to identify and deeply understand the psychology of the 4-6 peak emotional moments in the customer’s experience. These are the moments that will create and sustain loyalty while increasing the lifetime value of a customer. These are the moments that unlock the secrets to extraordinary customer experience and high growth brands.

(Photo by Tyler Burrus.)