Happy Monday morning!
Today’s Curio includes:
🧠 Regretful customers are more likely to churn. [Consumer Insight]
🚀 How to develop and present your big ideas. [Leadership]
🤖 What you need to know about Total Experience. [Digital Trend]
And inspiring ideas and insights to help you lead better, think smarter and build stronger.
🧠 Regretful customers are more likely to churn than disappointed ones.
Imagine being turned down for a promotion.
How does it feel?
Personally, I remember feeling pride and joy in one moment and falling into sadness and anger with a tinge of anxiety soon after.
Emotions alert us of any changes in our environment that might stop us from achieving an important personal goal.
Our emotions help us course-correct and prepare for action.
A widely used framework for understanding the role of emotions and behaviour is Plutchik’s psychoevolutionary theory of emotions. It suggests that humans evolved emotions to ensure our survival.
It includes eight basic emotions.
According to Plutchik, each primary emotion is linked to a characteristic behaviour, and each of those behaviours is connected to a survival function (Adaptive Function).
For example, experiencing joy makes us more cooperative. And cooperation is essential to the survival of our species.
Just think of how male birds have to put on an impressive enough dance show to be invited back to the nest.
Incompetence or force majeure?
Positive emotions encourage us to carry on (feeling more motivated and appreciated after a promotion). Negative emotions make us stop and re-evaluate (feeling ready to look for another job after a rejection.)
For decades psychologists have been studying the role regret and disappointment have on consumer behaviour.
You feel regret when you realise that you could’ve made a smarter purchase decision. You feel shame and decide to course-correct.
But you feel disappointed when your experience of the products falls below what you were led to believe.
Both result in dissatisfaction, but the resulting behaviours can be very different.
Studies have shown that people who feel disappointed will actively engage in negative word of mouth.
And the ones left feeling regretful after making a purchase are more likely to defect.
Think about it.
It pisses you off just a bit less when your flight is delayed due to bad weather than if the airline mismanaged the schedule.
You’re gonna drop the ball. Here’s what to do when that happens.
First things, first. You’ve messed up.
The right thing to do is apologise.
You need to mean it, though. Do not try to justify messing up.
Then, understand how your customers must be feeling.
Researchers have found a correlation between controllability and stability.
People are less likely to complain when a brand can demonstrate that they’re taking practical actions to fix the situation (Controllability).
And brands can discourage people from churning by demonstrating a track record for putting their customers first (Stability).
Research from 1991 suggests that providing a reward can help lessen the sadness caused by a sense of loss.
Whereas providing customisation can reduce anxiety caused by feeling a lack of control.
🚀 You’ve probably heard of DARPA.
It’s kinda like the real-world S.H.I.E.L.D. from the MCU.
Everyday things that define modern life started as one of their research projects.
The internet, GPS, Virtual Assistants, GUI (Graphic User Interface), and even the BigDog from Boston Dynamics, were all developed or funded by DARPA.
DARPA operates on the principle that generating big rewards requires taking big risks.
So, naturally, they needed to ask the right questions for accessing the risk before going all-in on it. And that’s where the Heilmeier Catechism comes in.
It’s a set of questions developed by George Heilmeier to help researchers think through and evaluate proposed research programs.
And it can help you think through and present your big ideas more convincingly.
“Kid, haven’t you heard of Friendster? Move on. It’s over!”
This was the advice a senior partner at Bessemer Venture Partners gave to one of the founders of Facebook.
And this story isn’t an outlier either. Business books are full of many more amusing stories just like this one.
We can laugh at the misfortune of Bessemer Ventures, but would you do any better next time a seemingly crazy idea comes knocking at the door?
Hindsight being 20/20, and all that jazz.
A group of researchers studied global professional services firms to figure out how we can get better at separating duds from winning ideas.
And they discovered that we don’t see past our personal biases.
What you believe to be true is true for you.
We can’t turn off our biases, but we can manage them.
And this is where we can benefit from using the Heilmeier Catechism when developing our ideas, especially when presenting them to others:
What are you trying to do? (Articulate your objectives using absolutely no jargon.)
How is it done today, and what are the limits of current practice?
What is new in your approach, and why do you think it will be successful?
Who cares? If you are successful, what difference will it make?
What are the risks and the payoffs?
How much will it cost?
What are the midterm and final metrics to check for success?
🤖 What you need to know about Total Experience. [In 100 words or less]
Instead of building customer experience, user experience, employee experience and multi-experience separately, TX brings everything together.
Since the dawn of digital, we’ve been technology-driven - changing our habits and behaviours to fit the limitations of the technology available to us. People now expect technology to be people-driven.
Following the Total-experience (TX) approach, each touchpoint is designed to function on its own and seamlessly blend in to provide a hassle-free user experience. Think of how Disney operates its movies, theme parks, and resorts. Or how Apple+ is accessible on every Apple or connected device.
That’s TX.
Learn more:
What is Total Experience? Its history and importance in the modern marketplace.
💡Inspiring ideas & insights
🖖 Lead better:
How managers can build a culture of experimentation. /HBR
How healthy boundaries build trust in the workplace. /S+B
Where a firm’s value truly lies. /INSEAD
Creating good jobs. /MITSloanMR
Why outside perspectives are critical for innovation. /MITSloanMR
👩🔬 Think smarter:
Who are the B2B ‘early deciders’. /Forrester
Why managing finances is harder now than pre-pandemic? /MarketingCharts
Top virtual selling skills for customer engagement. /MarketingCharts
Unsure about the metaverse? Start here. /GWI
Impact of TikToks on the purchase journey. /TikTok
👷 Build stronger:
4 lessons from Levi’s digital transformation. /HBR
Dementia content on TikTok gets 100s of views. Whose story does it tell? /MIT
From IG to Klarna. The super-app strategy is gaining traction in the US. /ModernRetail
How online grocery stores are testing shoppable videos. /ModernRetail
How these five brands are winning over consumers with omnichannel. /Econsultancy
Stay curious!
Aliyar