one of my Harvard Business School executive education classes told a story about a family trip to
Question:
one of my Harvard Business
School executive education classes told a story
about a family trip to Walt Disney World in
Orlando, Florida. She lost her purse in the park
on the very first day: tickets, money, IDs, all
gone. The highly anticipated vacation
seemed all but over before it had begun. But
when the family turned to a Disney em-
ployee for help, he gave them food
vouchers and park tickets for the next
day. And while the relieved family was
enjoying the park, Disney employees
searched for the purse — and found it.
The executive enthused to my class:
"Wow, what a company!"
Over the years I have heard hundreds of such stories in my classes. I ask
students to tell them as part of an effort to develop principles that can be ap-
plied to the design of great customer experiences. This field of customer
experience (CX) design — which aims to ensure that customers have posi-
tive touch points with companies while buying and consuming their
products and services — has grown quickly in recent years. Research has
shown that memorable experiences, and the ensuing positive word of
mouth, can drive customer decisions as much as, if not more than, price and
functionality. 1 To that end, consultants have created thoughtful tools
and frameworks such as journey mapping, service blueprinting, and
A
problem-solving mindsets. Academics have studied
customer engagement models that focus on mana-
gerial variables such as employee selection, training,
rewards, and service culture. Yet recent research re-
ports suggest that there have been few, if any,
meaningful improvements in customer experience
over time. 2 Despite the insights gleaned about cus-
tomers through advanced technologies and data
analysis, something still seems to be missing for
most companies.
My classroom experience points to the missing
ingredient: emotion. Years ago, when I first asked
students for their most memorable experiences as
customers, I was surprised by the language they
chose: Made me feel special. Showed empathy. Really
cared. Personalized the process. Trusted me. Didn't
argue or delay. Killed us with kindness. Owned the
problem. Surprised us. Made things simple. These
executives weren't using the standard language of
business. They weren't using terms like functional
value, efficiency, and cost-value analysis. Instead, they
were describing emotional impact. Their feelings of
surprise, delight, happiness, relief, empathy, and
more defined their most memorable experiences.
The stories they shared — along with a deep
dive into research on the many components of
decision-making — led me to a critical insight:
Customers want their choices to align as much with
their feelings and senses as with their values and
ethics. The rational approaches taught at most
business schools — offer customers more value for
money, add features, make service more efficient —
are not enough. Creating memorable experiences
for customers also requires a bit of emotional
magic. This article explores how that can work,
drawing on several company cases to illustrate.
People like to think of themselves as logical, but the
truth is that emotions inspire decisions.
Research on human cognition and behavior sup-
ports the idea that customer experiences should be
as infused with emotion as they are with logic and
rationality. "The essential difference between emo-
tion and reason is that emotion leads to action while
reason leads to conclusions," writes neurologist
Donald Calne in Within Reason: Rationality and
Human Behavior. Psychologist Richard Lazarus
clarifies this idea in his book Emotion and Adaptation,
where he argues that cognition (thinking), emo-
tions (feeling), and motivation (acting) work as
a system, with emotions serving as the critical
go-between. Lazarus says that events — and by
events he means everything from experiencing an
earthquake to shopping for shoes — trigger a
cognitive appraisal and an emotional reaction
before we come to a decision on what to do. This
process helps explain the many studies described
in behavioral economist Dan Ariely's book
Predictably Irrational in which people behaved
irrationally. We overpay, underestimate, procrasti-
nate, and so on because we are emotional beings,
not rational automatons.
The behaviorists' theories and results are borne
out by quantitative research. A Forrester Research
study found that customer loyalty is driven more
by emotional factors than by rational ones. 3
Another study, by CEB Marketing Leadership
Council and Google, suggests that this may also be
true in B2B decisions. They surveyed 3,000 B2B
buyers across 36 brands and interviewed 50 B2B
marketing organizations, and found that personal
value (appeal to emotions) has twice the impact of
business value (appeal to logic and reason) on
favorable decisions. 4
The payoff can be huge. A report from Gallup
suggests that organizations that optimize emo-
tional connections outperform rivals by 26% in
terms of gross margin and 85% in terms of sales
growth. 5 They cultivate emotionally engaged cus-
tomers who are less price sensitive, less likely to buy
from competitors, and three times more likely to
recommend and repurchase.
Celebrate the Outliers
Ask yourself this: Is your company trying to mini-
mize complaints or maximize customer delight?
Given the research I've cited, you might think that
every company would be trying to create dynamic,
delightful customer journeys infused with emotion.
You'd be wrong. Many focus almost solely on com-
plaints. Their goal: Eliminate the customer's pain at
every point where the consumer and the company
intersect. It's a myopic strategy that leads to consis-
tent mediocrity, because companies miss much of
what the customer experiences on his or her journey.
Today's customer journey is not just a matter of a
few touch points as the consumer systematically nar-
rows choices. Instead, most consumers take an
iterative and expansive journey. They consider mul-
tiple perspectives, often through the use of social
media. They interact with other people and other
products and services. The journey between visiting
a company's website, say, and making an actual pur-
chase is an emotional, cognitive, and motivational
process. It's the mix of those forces that creates feel-
ings, memories, and stories about an organization,
whether positive, negative, or ambivalent. It's this
variability that creates opportunities for companies
to deliver memorable experiences. Rules and
standardization can get in the way (see "Reducing
Variability Can Eliminate Terrible and Great
Experiences"), because sameness is forgettable.
For that reason, positively varied emotional jour-
neys can have the richest payoff. They leave indelible
memories, increase customer loyalty, and have
REDUCING VARIABILITY CAN ELIMINATE
TERRIBLE AND GREAT EXPERIENCES
When companies focus on reducing variance in customer experience, eliminating
outliers, they make sure that, statistically speaking, as many customers as possible
occupy the middle of a normal distribution curve. Terrible customer experiences get
a lot of attention, which reinforces the strategy of standardizing operating procedures
and laying down more rules. Imposing controls helps bring experiences closer to ex-
pectations. While eliminating bad experiences may reduce complaints, result in fewer
angry customers, and trim costs, the unanticipated consequence of moving most cus-
tomers to the middle of distributions is that it will also result in consistent mediocrity.
They will have undifferentiated, average experiences, which will leave them with few,
if any, memories.
TERRIBLE
EXPERIENCES
GREAT
EXPERIENCES
EXPECTED
EXPERIENCES
Customer stories
(outliers)
Reduced
variability
SLOANREVIEW.MIT.EDUFALL 2019 MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW 59
multiplier effects in a world where customers are
closely connected. 6 For companies that embrace
variability, even terrible experiences that spawn neg-
ative emotions — such as that lost purse at Disney
World — are an opportunity. 7 If the company sur-
prises and delights the customer by efficiently and
innovatively resolving his or her problem, the domi-
nant emotion, the one that lasts in memory, will be
positive. The managerial challenge is clear: how to
infuse customer journeys with emotion.
Building Emotion Into
Customer Experiences
Bringing emotion into customer journeys isn't easy.
Triggering a specific emotion at a particular touch
point doesn't guarantee anything. Instead, compa-
nies must address the customer journey holistically,
understanding that people may remember emotions
generated anywhere along the way. In my work over
the last few years, I've identified five ways to do this.
1
Stimulate the senses. Sensory stimula-
tion triggers emotions such as surprise, trust,
joy, and even anticipation. Through products
from cars to smartphones, clever companies use the
senses to create emotional experiences.
At Ferrari, for example, automobile design is
more than an exercise in efficient engineering. It's
also a process that taps into the driver's senses to cre-
ate an emotionally rich experience, from the pleasing
sight of the car's body to the exhilarating roar of the
engine.8 Ferrari uses plush interior materials such as
fine leather, even though this gives lighter, faster
competitors a 5- to 10-kilogram advantage. The
company also experiments with advanced technol-
ogy, engine placement, tire dimensions, and the
nuances of wheel movement to impart a feeling of
control as you steer through tight corners or acceler-
ate laterally. Compared with the fear you might feel
in other sports cars as your back wheels fishtail,
there's a sense of power and achievement here, of
believing that you are an exceptional driver steering
the car to new heights of performance.
The story of how Ferrari struggled to get the
sound right for its turbocharged 488 also illustrates
how much attention it pays to emotions. For years,
Ferrari worried that turbocharged engines, which
can flatten intake and exhaust sounds while intro-
ducing annoying tones such as whistling, would
detract from the pleasure of driving. At Ferrari,
sound is a critical component of what a car buyer
expects and enjoys. Indeed, there's real evidence
that customers associate sound with performance.
Could Ferrari engineer turbo engines for an emo-
tionally pleasing driving experience?
Using a proprietary sound simulator, the equiva-
lent of three Ferrari engineers and drivers worked
full time for two years on the problem. One of the
team's recommendations — increase the exhaust
diameter from 63 to 70 millimeters — had extensive
ripple effects for engineers and company managers.
Implementation was difficult and time-consuming.
That kind of investment might seem excessive at
other companies, but not at Ferrari, which places
great value on the emotions behind the driving ex-
perience. The 488 has garnered praise and prizes
for its sound and performance, winning the 2018
International Engine of the Year award in Stuttgart,
Germany (rival Porsche's hometown), and being
hailed as Robb Report's Car of the Year in 2016.
Ferraris may not be the fastest or the most comfort-
able cars, but the company focuses on producing
the best combination of the two, making their cars
among the world's most thrilling and luxurious.
Stimulating the senses doesn't mean creating sen-
sory overload. Some of the best examples of sensory
appeal are ones where complexity gives way to sim-
plicity. Apple products are known for this. From the
original Mac to AirPods and iPhones, the company
repeatedly hides cutting-edge technology behind a
Sameness is forgettable. But varied emotional journeys
can leave indelible memories, increase customer loyalty,
and have multiplier effects in a world where customers
are closely connected.
60 MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW FALL 2019SLOANREVIEW.MIT.EDU
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simple user interface that customers love. Few com-
petitors have been able to achieve that. Samsung, for
example, trails Apple in user experience even though,
feature-by-feature, its products are often superior.
The power of sensory simplicity is at work at
HappyOrNot (HON), a small Finnish startup that
measures businesses' customer satisfaction through
polling. 9 The central challenge is how to gather
enough responses to support meaningful conclu-
sions. Few customers have the time or inclination
to fill out long, boring surveys.
HON tackles this problem with radical visual and
tactile simplicity. Near the exits of department
stores, airports, dining halls, drugstores, supermar-
kets, and other establishments, HON installs a
terminal with four big push buttons. The green ones
have smiley faces, and the red ones have frowny faces.
The shades of the most smiley and most frowny are
darker than the other two. A small sign asks custom-
ers to rate their experience by pressing one of the
buttons. A HON terminal can prompt thousands of
reactions in a single day. In fact, with terminals in
over 100 countries, HappyOrNot's buttons have
prompted well over 600 million responses from cus-
tomers. That's more than all the customer ratings
posted to sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, or Amazon.
The clarity of the colors is important, but the com-
pany believes that the satisfying tactile experience of
pressing a button is the primary driver of this ex-
traordinary participation.
2 Turn disappointment into delight. If
your company is going to value the outliers,
it must be ready to transform negative expe-
riences into positives, as the hotel manager did in
this story:
After a long transcontinental flight, my tired
family arrived at a Taj Group hotel in India in
the middle of the night. The front desk couldn't
find our reservation. Still, the night manager im-
mediately took us to a room so we could go to bed
right away, and even gave us an upgrade for the
inconvenience (we waited less than five minutes!).
He didn't ask for a credit card or anything. When
we woke up, the problem had been solved — and
it wasn't the hotel's fault. Our booking agent had
made a mistake.
I've heard many variations of this story (you may
have, too), but the gist is always the same. By resolving a
problem that he didn't cause, the night manager deliv-
ered an experience that was remembered for years.
When employees are taught to be in tune with the cus-
tomer's emotions, they can notice changes in emotional
state and respond quickly. As their alacrity accelerates
the shift from disappointment to delight, the interven-
tion creates a sudden contrast that makes experiences
sticky. (See "Capitalizing on Emotional Transitions.")
Magicians, who constantly think about the audi-
ence experience, understand the emotional value of
rapid shifts from disappointment and confusion to
happy resolution. They have developed techniques to
change people's emotional states. For instance, a ma-
gician may allow members of the audience to believe
that they have figured out the trick or caught him in a
mistake, only to end it in a way that shows the audi-
ence had no idea what was really going on. Their
momentary disappointment at their failure to "catch"
the magician quickly transforms into delight in his
excellence. Disappointment to delight: Magicians
know that this emotional transition will wow audi-
ences more than a constant flow of technically perfect
tricks. The former creates memorable moments,
while the latter may cause eyes to glaze over.
3 Plan to surprise. Good magic also upends
expectations in order to engage people emo-
tionally. For instance, the well-known
magician Doug Henning developed an illusion in
which an assistant would float on water, with a
fountain providing cover for the support mecha-
nism. But then magician David Copperfield, aware
that audiences may have figured that out, took the
trick further. Anticipating their reaction, he turned
off the fountain, and the assistant remained float-
ing — which surprised and impressed even people
who knew of Henning's show.
Like magicians, companies can thrill customers
again and again through continual innovation and
unexpected solutions to problems, building a loyal,
delighted following for their products and services.
Creating those moments of surprise is often the
result of paying attention to the smallest detail.
When former Sony CEO Kazuo Hirai set out to
turn around the company's TV business in 2011,
for instance, he discovered a fundamental problem.10
SLOANREVIEW.MIT.EDUFALL 2019 MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW 61
While the designs for Sony's new TVs were beauti-
ful, some customers said they found their sets ugly
because the cables couldn't be concealed. Armed
with that knowledge, Hirai started responding in
the same way to every new design: "I'm still seeing
cables, and I don't want to see the cables." It took
three years for the engineers to truly get the mes-
sage. Hirai was teaching them that details matter to
the customer, and that Sony would never develop
winning products if it didn't pay attention to the
feelings its products evoked.
Sony eventually found a way of concealing the
cables. As Hirai expected, customers were delighted
by the surprise of not seeing the wires they had
grown so accustomed to disliking and tolerating.
Hirai, who recently retired as Sony's chairman, told
me: "Everything we do at Sony needs to have that
'Wow, this is pretty cool' element. ... We don't com-
pete on functional specifications [anymore], but
on people's emotional experiences."
Some companies try to inspire a desire to sur-
prise in their employees. The Oberoi Group, a global
hotel chain based in Delhi, India, gives its employees
funding to surprise guests by turning problems into
opportunities. 11 Team members get funding to
create such moments of delight; in 2013, employees
logged more than 30,000 examples of this kind of
problem-solving. Similarly, an equipment company
has given its front-line employees a considerable
budget to solve customer problems — without hav-
ing to ask for approval. Company leaders call it the
memorable experiences budget. Empowering em-
ployees with resources can extend your ability to
surprise and delight your customers.
4 Tell compelling stories. A good story,
well told and repeated often, is a powerful
way to create an emotional connection be-
tween customer and company. For most of our
existence, oral narratives have been a primary means
of learning, socializing, and transmitting knowledge,
so we are conditioned to understand, remember, and
tell stories. Companies that infuse them into the cus-
tomer's brand experience can provoke an emotional
response and create sticky memories.
Consider A. Lange & Söhne, a watchmaker with
East German roots and a fascinating history. 12 In
1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Walter Lange
resurrected the company started by his great-grand-
father, F.A. Lange, which had all but disappeared
during the previous decades. Instituting a focus on
innovation and craftsmanship, he propelled Lange
into the ranks of the world's finest brands with the
launch of its first wristwatches in 1994.
With products that can cost hundreds of thousands
of dollars, Lange knows it must position itself as a par-
agon of innovation, excellence, and diligence. One
story it tells to reinforce that image is about the assem-
bly of its watches. Every Lange timepiece is put together
by hand — twice. When the first assembly is complete,
the watch is taken apart. Every part is cleaned, and the
watch is then assembled anew. During the second as-
sembly, the watchmaker can make small adjustments
based on the first assembly. The tangible result may
improve the watch's accuracy by perhaps one or two
seconds a day. The intangible result, arguably, is more
important. Lange's double assembly process commu-
nicates the essence of the company and its products. It
tells the world that Lange cares so much about creating
perfect products that it routinely does something that
rivals regard as inefficient. Even though few customers
can discern any difference between a watch assembled
once and another assembled twice, the story is told and
retold in Lange's marketing materials, in personal in-
teractions with customers, and, most powerfully,
through word of mouth.
Storytelling techniques have played an important
role in the reemergence of the mechanical watch
CAPITALIZING ON EMOTIONAL TRANSITIONS
By turning disappointment into delight, companies can create emotionally
memorable experiences and win customers who will sing their praises.
Delighted
Disappointed
Transition:
Problem
begins
Transition:
Employees are given license
and capability to act
Emotional
change
(stickiness)
Great experiences
and stories
CUSTOMER JOURNEY
+
-
62 MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW FALL 2019SLOANREVIEW.MIT.EDU
E S S AY
industry more broadly, after battery-powered quartz
watches made mechanical ones nearly obsolete. In a
study that included 136 interviews with senior execu-
tives, watchmakers, distributors, retailers, historians,
and museum curators and a review of extensive ar-
chival data, my Harvard Business School colleague
Ryan Raffaelli found that the reemergence "involved
a cognitive process of redefining both the meanings
and values associated with the legacy technology."13
Mechanical watchmakers used literary devices —
metaphors and analogies — to distance their
products from the negative perceptions most people
had of cheap quartz watches. Said one executive, "We
don't sell watches. We sell dreams." Others compared
the watch to the human body, creating an empathic
connection between customers and the mechanical
parts of the product they were eyeing. Raffaelli writes,
"Several people likened the oscillating balance wheel
of the mechanical watch to a 'beating heart,' describ-
ing the watch's gears as part of a 'living organism' that
needed to be 'fed' with daily winding. A CEO stated,
'A mechanical watch has a soul, it has a heart, it
has life, it has something breathing inside of it.'"
Described in this way, the watch essentially becomes a
protagonist, which encourages customers to connect
with the brand on a human level.
This kind of storytelling is yet another form of
emotional magic that companies can perform.
Before a trick culminates, magicians often walk an
audience through the various steps just taken ("You
picked a card, I turned around, you placed the card
in the deck ... "). The purpose is to focus the audi-
ence on what they should remember, omitting
anything that might be inconsistent with the in-
tended effect. The reframing becomes the new
reality, shaping people's memory of and feelings
about the trick in a positive way. Good storytelling
can do the same for companies, reinforcing positive
emotions that cement the relationship between a
customer and a brand.
5 Run controlled experiments. Even com-
panies intent on infusing emotion into their
customers' journeys have a terribly hard
time predicting which triggers will prompt cus-
tomers to act. The question companies must ask is
not simply "What works?" but "What works where,
when, and for whom?" And more often than not,
they should be prepared for dead ends in their
search for answers. To give just one example, only
10% to 20% of the web experience improvements
attempted by Google and Bing yield positive
results. 14 Scoffing at those percentages would be a
mistake. Smart companies in businesses as diverse
as high tech, media, retail, financial services, and
travel know that controlled experiments and learn-
ing from those that don't pan out are necessary
components of designing emotionally powerful
customer experiences.
Booking.com, the travel accommodations aggre-
gator, is relentless in its focus on optimizing user
experiences and in its experimentation to that end. At
any point in time, Booking.com's staff may be run-
ning more than 1,000 live tests. (About three-fourths
of the company's 1,800 core product and technology
employees are involved in testing.) Most are so-called
A/B tests, where the company sets up two experiences
for users: A, the control, is usually the current system,
and B, the treatment, is a modification — such as a
new layout, a new pricing model, or new wording for
a customer communication — that attempts to
improve something for customers. Customers are
randomly steered to one of the two experiences, and
the resulting metrics are compared. The test's winner
then becomes the current system — until a future
modification, tested in the same way, replaces it.
The goal of some tests is to discover tactics that
elicit emotions such as surprise and joy (from getting
a terrific deal), fear (of missing out on a deal or a
room), or a feeling of accomplishment (for success-
fully organizing a trip). 15 These experiments have
It's hard to predict which triggers will prompt customers to act.
The question companies must ask is not simply 'What works?'
but 'What works where, when, and for whom?'
Please summarize this article
Entrepreneurship Successfully Launching New Ventures
ISBN: 9780132555524
4th Edition
Authors: Bruce R. Barringer, R. Duane Ireland