GOMER PYLE, MARKETING GENIUS?
“Surprise, surprise, surprise!”
Princeton psychology professor and Nobel laureate Dr. Daniel Kahnemann’s ground-breaking work in the field of Hedonic Psychology (the measurement of happiness and well-being) has helped us in understanding exactly how memories are formed and stored in the human mind. Long story short, what Dr. Kahnemann’s work revealed was that in any transaction, what resonates with us after the fact are two key things: the transaction’s “peak” experience (either the best part of the transaction or the worst part) and the “end” experience (how we felt at the conclusion). Think of a great meal out ruined by the waiter making you wait 20 minutes for the bill. The next day, instead of talking up the lavish décor, the extensive wine list or the Spicy Arugula & Fennel Salad, all you can do is gripe about the poor service.
With that in mind, is it actually possible to “engineer” a positive experience for the customer? Absolutely. The “end experience” we should have plenty of control over. Rather than allowing a transaction to merely “end” and hoping it was a good one for the customer, plan out how the end experience will go, with a show of appreciation at the top of the list. As for the “peak” experience, that may change from customer to customer, experience to experience. One thing you can do to skew things to your favor is to take Gomer’s advice: Surprise, surprise, surprise.
Meeting expectations doesn’t create a peak experience. Surprise and delight does. It may not add substantive value, but it does add emotional value, and in essence, communicates to the customer that you know them and cherish them.
As marketers, we need to put our “customer glasses” on and challenge ourselves to engineer both a “positive peak experience” and a “positive end experience” into our customers’ transactions with us.
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