Brain Food

Where is customer experience?

Architects, retailers, visual merchandisers, manufacturers and virtually everybody else who’s connected to the retail industry would tell you that it’s in the store.

It’s in the materials we choose, the lighting we hang, the merchandise that’s folded carefully, laid out on tables and artfully displayed on mannequins.

In fact, it’s not really in any of those places.

Customer experience, as it turns out, is mostly in our heads. The three-pound organ locked up in your skull and the environment around you are in a dynamic dance, where your brain makes, and is made by, experiences.

We are more readily apt to name five things under the hood of a car, though we may only spend one or two hours a day in them, than we are to name five things inside our head, though we spend all day in there. If we can agree that experience isn’t always tangible, but is created through customers’ reactions to their environment, then it’s somewhat confounding to me that for more than 20 years in the retail industry, not one client, colleague or customer has spoken to me about their – or anyone else’s – brain.

Want to create better experiences for customers? Get inside their head.

Even a basic understanding of neuroscience will lead designers and retailers to create experiences that get to the heart of customers’ buying decisions, which, more often than not, are based on emotional factors rather than logic. We have long believed that we will arrive at the best decisions by our ability to think logically through problems. Left-brain rationalist thinkers from Plato onward have believed the road to utopia would come through our capacity to find solutions by thinking through them, rather than relying on intuition or emotion. To them, emotions were to be mistrusted and maligned.

This, of course, is a deadly prescription for retail place-making, where connecting through empathic relationships has been a core driver of the shopping experience, since we’ve entered into the exchange of goods and services. Connecting to customers in a meaningful way is done through engaging their emotional right brain, rather than driving value through price-point and SKUs, which is the providence of the linear and sequential left brain. In the end, it’s not what customers carry home in their shopping bag that’s most important – it’s what they carry home in their hearts and emotional minds.

This is certainly true in a world of abundance, and the ability to acquire goods and services through multiple digital touchpoints will only proliferate. Understanding the brain’s functional processes when confronted with choice becomes critical when today, and into the future, customers will have choice beyond reckoning through their digital devices. The ‘pile them high and watch them fly’ adage, when applied to retailing, is actually a disincentive to positive buying experiences. This is because despite what many buyers will tell you, the brain can’t deal with multiple choices very well. More choice doesn’t increase the number of things you buy. Nor does it enhance your satisfaction with the things you finally choose. This is all based on how your brain makes sense of its surroundings.

More is not better. In fact, more is often less.

If you look at the proportion of neurons (brain cells) related to the different areas of the brain, there are more neurons in the older “reptilian brain” that reacts instinctually and on emotion, than there are in the most recent part of our brain to develop, the prefrontal cortex (to which we attribute the faculty of higher-order thinking). This points out the power of engaging the customer’s emotional center to create long-lasting brand connections. Many decisions are made from the gut, which by the way, also has an abundance of neural connections directly to the older, emotional areas of the brain.

We are emotional beings driven to connect via meaningful relationships through which we transcend the unremarkable moments of everyday experiences. The brain is a novelty-seeking social organ that delights in learning and empathic connection. Understanding some “brain basics” goes a long way in crafting customer experiences that matter.

In the coming months, this blog will focus on the brain and emerging technologies. It will look at how both entities can be woven together to create customer experiences that remain relevant in a retail world that’s under unprecedented change. While that pace of change is quickening, our brains are restructuring themselves in relation to new digital experiences. A new shopping generation with different expectations about how a shopping trip should unfold will usher in a new era of retail innovation.

All of these points should be food for thought. Brain Food.

David Kepron is the creative director of Little’s Brand Experience Studio and author of “Retail (r)Evolution: Why Creating Right-Brain Stores will Shape the Future of Shopping in a Digitally Driven World,” published by ST Media Group Intl. and available online from ST Books. His retail design work focuses on the creation of relevant shopping experiences at the intersection of architecture, sociology, neuroscience and emerging digital technologies. @davidkepron; www.retail-r-evolution.com; www.littleonline.com