People don’t buy an experience, they buy a future memory
On the difference between the Experiencing Self and the Remembering Self, and how the Peak-end Rule helps you think about designing memorable art experiences.
Imagine this.
You are at a concert. You have great seats with a wonderful view of the stage. The music is beautiful. You are having such a great night. The band is about to play their final song.
Then your neighbor’s cell phone starts to ring. You try to ignore it. It keeps ringing. And then, your neighbor picks up the phone and starts talking to someone about how they are at the concert.
You can’t believe it. Your experience is ruined!
Daniel Kahneman would tell you otherwise. You had a wonderful experience. What is ruined is the memory of the experience.
And this could have strong implications not only for the memory of this concert but also for your future decision-making.
Two Selves
In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman shares his research on the distinction between experience and memory, and how you could see yourself as two selves.
There is an Experiencing Self who lives in the present.
And there is a Remembering Self. It’s the one that keeps score and maintains the story of your life.
Asking the Experiencing Self
When you ask your audience to talk about their visit step-by-step, it’s usually their Experiencing Self who answers. Something like: “We entered the venue. Left our jackets at the locker room. Got a drink at the bar. Browsed through a brochure with upcoming shows. Etc.”
Asking the Remembering Self
When you ask your audience to evaluate the experience, it’s the Remembering Self that takes over. They will tell you the story they have constructed of the visit. Something like: “We had a lovely evening. When entering the building, we were struck by the wonderful architecture. We had an interesting discussion before the concert started while having a drink. We had to hurry afterward as we lost track of time. We entered the venue and had great seats. They played our favorite songs.”
The Remembering Self is a storyteller. What we get to keep from our experiences is a story. And this story is important. It’s the Remembering Self who is in charge of our decisions in search of future memories.
Peak-end Rule
So first, what defines which parts of the experience will be part of the story we keep as our memory?
A story is defined by:
Peaks: (significant) positive and negative moments in an experience
Endings: the final moments of an experience
This is also known as the Peak-end Rule.
The Peak-end Rule is a cognitive bias that strongly impacts how people remember events. And because of it, they make decisions that are not in the best interest of having the best experience, but in getting the best memory.
The Tyranny of the Remembering Self
The Remembering Self is the one that makes decisions. We don’t choose between experiences. We choose between memories of experiences. And even when we think about the future, we don’t think of our future normally as experiences. We think of our future as anticipated memories.
What we learn from living is to maximize the qualities of our future memories, not necessarily of our future experiences. This is the tyranny of the Remembering Self.
In his book, Kahneman shows examples of how this works in practice.
Here, you see the experienced pain by two patients undergoing a colonoscopy. Who do you think has the worst memory? Obviously, Patient B.
But it is actually Patient A, as the pain was at its worst when it ended. Even though Patient B suffered longer, and if you were to add up the pain, it would be more, but the memory is not about the sum of the experience.
This also shows the concept of duration neglect. Time is not a significant factor in how a memory is stored.
It’s about peaks and endings.
The Peak-end Rule also works when we are talking about positive experiences. Kahneman also talks about the difference between experience and memory in vacations. Where duration neglect is very present. If the second week of your holiday is equally pleasant as the first, it’s wonderful for the Experiencing Self, but doesn’t add much for the Remembering Self.
This is why tourism focuses so much on helping people construct stories and collect memories.
Memorable art experiences
So all these examples from surgery and holidays are nice. But how does this relate to art experiences?
Future Memories
I think, first of all, it shows that it’s useful to be aware of how visitors think they are booking tickets for an experience. But actually, they are looking for future memories. And their decisions to book the tickets are very much biased by earlier memories and stories constructed by the Remembering Self.
Does this change something in how you could reach them? And how you could keep existing visitors? What is the story of their visit, and how does it relate to the story they tell about themselves?
Does the ending have to be fireworks?
When thinking about art experiences, it’s good to know that it’s not only the literal ending that counts. So you don’t have to put up a confetti machine just to make the end of your exhibitions memorable.
It’s also about how people feel at the end.
When they feel energized, full of new ideas, moved by the beauty of the piece, etc. This is what ends the experience, and is an important part of what the memory will be.
If the ending is a pit in the experience—so if people can’t really find the exit, or have a terrible time getting out of the venue and feel very stressed—it will have severe consequences for the memory, as you might have guessed by now.
In a Customer Journey
So when you work on a customer journey of the experience of a visitor. You know where to look for. Pay attention to potential peaks. Be careful of pits. And be aware of how the experience ends.
It’s also important to know what type of the feelings you want your visitors to walk away with.
It will help you do research on the audience experience, knowing what the potential peaks and pits of the experience are and how it ends.
A good source for how to work on this is found in The Power of Moments by Chip and Dan Heath.
Another research that I want to get into another time is Making sense of Audience Engagement by WolfBrown, with the very useful Arc of Engagement, a framework that helps art organizations think about memorable experiences. It looks at the impact you want to make, and how you can design an experience toward this impact goal.
That’s all for now. Thanks for reading all the way through. If you have any questions or ideas for topics, let me know!
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